The Indiana Policy Review

Category: Indiana Writers Group

  • NEAL: ISTA ‘Crying Wolf’ Over Education Reform

    by ANDREA NEAL In Chicago, teachers are poised to go on strike over a pay metric they think is unfair, longer school days they’d rather not work, and class sizes they consider unreasonable. The Florida Education Association is challenging a proposal that ties teacher evaluations to student test scores, one of several factors used to…

  • The GOP Agenda Meets the Pareto Principle

    The Pareto Principle — after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, observing that 20 percent of the pea pods in his garden contained 80 percent of the peas. As Hoosiers prepare to elect a new governor and perhaps make changes in the Senate and House leadership we would be wise to measure the effect of envy on…

  • BOHANON: Proud of ‘Liberal’ Indiana

    by CECIL BOHANON, Ph.D. In May 1988, Professor James McGill Buchanan, the 1986 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, told the graduating class at Ball State University that he “had never been attracted to the romantic nonsense that government or politicians know what is best . . .” He encouraged the students to “nurture…

  • Book Review

    Dave Bego. The Devil at Our Doorstep. CreateSpace, North Charleston, S.C., 2012. $14.95 The difficult thing about fighting for free markets is that our successes are invisible or are projected beyond the political horizon — and, maddeningly, so are the failed promises of our statist opponents. That, however, is lessened with publication of Dave Bego’s…

  • KEATING: Restoring Professionalism to Education

    by MARYANN O. KEATING, Ph.D. Steve Jobs, the computer pioneer, warned Barack Obama that there can be no effective educational reform unless teachers are treated as professionals, not like workers in an assembly line (“Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson). James Buchanan, the Nobel Laureate in Economics, noted that education is a unique activity: Those who…

  • The Rabbit Is Eating the Eco-Devo Hat

    by CRAIG LADWIG Many years ago a big-name manufacturer in my town shocked a heavily unionized labor force by announcing it was pulling up stakes for more productive pastures. Our mayor, a master politician, announced what was then an innovative policy — subsidies and tax abatements. In private, the mayor conceded to the editors of…

  • NEAL: Colleges Failing Students in the Liberal Arts

    (For release May 16 and thereafter) by ANDREA NEAL Congratulations and best of luck to the Class of 2012. Even with a degree in hand, they’ll need it. A college diploma just doesn’t mean what it used to. Consider the following: At 85 percent of colleges, students can graduate without taking an intermediate level foreign…

  • Half Past the Month: Indiana’s Elizabethan EcoDevo

    by CRAIG LADWIG Earlier this month a newspaper in my hometown ran one of those predictably boosterish “we can do it” articles on the local economy. This one, though, was so wrong-headed on such an important subject at such a critical moment that it requires a challenge. The news was that economic help was on its…

  • KEATING: A Reluctance to Punch that Time Clock

    by MARYANN O. KEATING, PH.D. To paraphrase champion prize fighter emeritus, Mohammed Ali, workers in U.S. labor markets tend to be mobile, agile and hostile. Gone are the days when a family’s primary wage earner grits his or her teeth and endures whatever it takes to bring home the bacon. The Indiana Business Research Center…

  • The Outstater: The IndyStar Fell with Dick Lugar

    by  CRAIG LADWIG Dick Lugar wasn’t the only political legend to fall tonight. The Indianapolis Star, once the guardian of the state political discussion, went supine, flopped right over on its back. The newspaper’s featured article three days before the election was “Sen. Richard Lugar Issues Urgent Call for Help in Election.” The editors in…