The South Wall: ‘The Trouble with ISTEP’
by Andrea Neal It’s time for Indiana lawmakers to scrap ISTEP. The test is nothing but trouble, and it’s taking valuable time away from classroom learning. During the two years I served on the State Board of Education, I developed a short list of what’s wrong with the state’s high-stakes exam, formally known as the Read the full article…
Bohanon: A Definition of Christian Charity
by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. Kwang Jin Kim was born to a middle-class family in North Korea. In his book “Under the Same Sky,” he gives a first-hand account of his family’s fall to destitution during the North Korean famine in the late 1990s. Forced to sell all it had to get enough to eat, the Read the full article…
Indiana at 200 (63): Elwood Haynes
by Andrea Neal The date was July 4, 1894. The location was Pumpkinvine Pike, three miles east of Kokomo. Elwood Haynes had hauled his newfangled carriage — a horseless one, no less — to the edge of the city for a test drive. He unhitched the horses that towed it there, mounted the driver’s seat Read the full article…
Backgrounder: Zoning
by Craig Ladwig The Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet, writing his political confessions for the Village Voice, famously argued this: In the abstract, we might envision an Olympian perfection in our courthouse, “but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to Read the full article…
Shreds and Snippets
Good Jobs First — An analysis of more than 4,200 economic-development incentive awards in 14 states including Indiana, finds that — holy crony capitalist! — big businesses were awarded 90 percent of the dollars. These are the same businesses that are least loyal to the local economy, most likely to demand more benefits than they Read the full article…
McCarthy: The IBJ Insults our Intelligence
AN INSULT TO THE INTELLIGENCE of the taxpayer, that’s the effect of parts of an Indianapolis Business Journal (IBJ) article, “Fiscally Fit,” about the Pacers’ financial outlook. I’ll give you three quotes: “And the stadium deal the Pacers struck with the city’s Capital Improvement Board (CIB) last year has freed the franchise to make investments it Read the full article…
