By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – The two sides in Indiana’s huge education war have at least one thing in common.

Each side believes that it is completely in the right and that the mess that is Indiana’s education leadership is entirely the other side’s fault.

The debacle began last year when Democrat Glenda Ritz won a surprise victory over the controversial Republican incumbent Tony Bennett, the education reform poster boy, in the state superintendent of public instruction’s race.

Republicans reacted with fury to Ritz’s victory, saying it didn’t mean anything and pretty much vowing to thwart her at every step. Ritz, Democrats and the teachers unions responded in kind by slow-walking many education reform measures implemented by the state legislature and signed into law by Republican governors.

The skirmishing broke into open warfare when members of the Indiana Board of Education, chaired by Ritz but composed otherwise of members appointed by Republican governors, sent a letter to state legislative leaders asking them to play a greater role in running Ritz’s education department. Ritz responded by suing the education board for violating the state’s open records law.

A court tossed that suit – at least temporarily – but then a state board of education meeting descended into a free-for-all with Ritz walking out and the Republican-appointed education board members blasting her as an autocrat.

Ritz’s defenders see her as a courageous victim standing up to bullies – primarily Gov. Mike Pence. And Ritz’s detractors see her as a dithering obstructionist whose sole agenda is stopping anyone else from doing anything.

With faint hope that anyone involved in this silly and destructive battle still is capable of listening to reason, I’m going to point out the fallacies in both sides’ positions.

Let’s deal with Ritz and her amen corner first.

Their argument is that Ritz should be allowed to dictate the state’s education policy because she won the election as state superintendent. But that argument also applied to Tony Bennett four years ago and that didn’t stop most of the folks lined up with Ritz from opposing him with everything they had.

If the Ritz crowd reserves the right to serve as the loyal opposition when doing so suits them, they can’t complain because their opponents do the same.

Five years ago, Bennett’s election didn’t put an end to debates about education policy in Indiana. It just started a fresh round of fighting.

Ditto for Ritz’s election.

Ritz’s folks will say that their opposition to Bennett was justified because he stood for things they don’t like – vouchers, a flawed school grading system and pointless round robins of student testing.

The fact that I tend to agree with them – most studies the education reformers point to as evidence their innovations work are every bit as baked as the average Grateful Dead concertgoer – is beside the point.

The folks who oppose Ritz do so from conviction and concern about this state’s children. Telling them that they can’t exercise a right of opposition that Ritz supporters resorted to themselves is an exercise in hypocrisy – particularly since the educational reform crowd scored wins (governor, super majorities in the House and Senate) in last year’s election, too.

Now, let’s deal with Gov. Pence and his Republican education chest-thumpers.

Their argument for most education reform measures is that they will empower parents. But how does ignoring the votes cast by parents against Bennett and his “reform” measures empower those parents?

The verdict that the voters delivered last fall was a mixed one that can be read several ways, but at the least it signaled the voters either were unsure about Bennett’s policies or didn’t understand them.

Instead of taking time to explain those measures to the state’s parents, the governor and his crew have acted as if Bennett had been restored to office in a landslide and resorted to pure power politics. Like the Vietnam War general who proclaimed it was necessary to destroy a village in order to save it, they have denied parents’ choice and educational accountability in order to preserve them.

This last bit of advice is for both sides.

Any idiot can escalate a fight. It takes leadership and maturity to resolve a conflict and bring people together.

And becoming the mirror image of that which you oppose – or even despise – isn’t a victory.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 FM Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.