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 Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress Plus: It has become the be-all and end-all of a Hoosier education. Student achievement…

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 family eventually splits up as they moved from relative to relative in a desperate attempt to survive. The father dies…

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 and, with a push-start, drove into the future. “The little buggy ran eastward, carrying three passengers about one-and-one-half miles,” Haynes…

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 cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.” That mood was captured in a weekend article by…

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 pay in taxes and produce on average the fewest new jobs over time. They also are the same players who…

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 hopes will pay dividends long term.” “Pacers’ spokesman Bill Benner emphasized that ‘the team does not receive any funding from…

“To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.” — Calvin Coolidge THE PUBLIC OPINION POLLS TELL US that next week’s local elections will advance those candidates with the most governmental-political experience. That makes sense, right? We want officials, Republican or Democrat, experienced at governing. But there’s more to it than that. The common wisdom since at least the 1940s has been that we want…

by John Pickerill Since being elected chairman of a county Republican Party two years ago, I’ve heard a lot of people claim how they’ve been a “registered Republican” for a number of years. That always puzzles me. According to Indiana state law, there’s no such thing as a registered Republican (or Democrat or any other party for that matter). When you register to vote, you aren’t asked to which political party you belong. Nor is…

by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. The Wall Street Journal recently polled Republicans and Democratic voters on their ideological identifications. In 1990, the newspaper commissioned a more or less identical poll. The differences between then and now are revealing and explain much about the state of contemporary political discourse. In 1990, 21 percent of all Democrats identified as somewhat or very conservative. In 2015 the number had dropped to 10 percent. In 1990, 14 percent of all…

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Robert D. Putnam. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015 (386 pages). by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. If you suspect that the quality of American life for least-advantaged youths has become pernicious, and you are among those lamenting the disappearance of a national civic culture, “Our Kids” offers confirmation but little solace. Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, wrote the widely acclaimed best-seller…