SUMMARY:
In this Back to School special, host Scott Aaron Rogers convenes a five-person panel to dig into the multi-pronged attack on Indiana’s public education system: Mitch Reynolds, a Gary classroom teacher running for Duneland School Board; Dr. Michael Shaffer, a 30-year school administrator now in his 12th year as an associate professor of educational leadership at Ball State, who has trained roughly 2,400 principals; Devon Wellington, an education policy expert running for Indiana House District 29 in Hamilton County; Zachary Parrish, co-founder of the Secular Education Association based in Fort Wayne; and Lindsey Cornett, an Indianapolis Public Schools parent and IPS board candidate currently fighting a ballot challenge over her party affiliation. The conversation covers two forces converging on public education — anti-tax libertarianism and Christian nationalism — and traces their impact through SEA 1’s (2025) property tax cuts and the resulting wave of school referendums, the expansion of vouchers to all Indiana households, the total absence of oversight or due process rights at voucher-accepting private schools, LifeWise Academy’s release-time religious instruction and its money trail, the Ten Commandments case headed to the Supreme Court, and Indianapolis’s loss of democratic control over its own school district through the state-created IPEC board. It closes with each panelist’s account of why they do this work and where to find the candidates’ campaigns.
Progressive Indiana Network: https://progressiveindiana.net
HoosLeft: https://hoosleft.us
Mitch Reynolds: https://votereynolds.us/
Dr. Michael Shaffer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmichaelbryanshaffer/
Devon Wellington: https://www.votedevon.com/
Zachary Parrish: https://seculareducationassociation.org/
Lindsey Cornett: https://www.lindseycornett.com/
WHAT’S INSIDE:
00:00:22 Introduction: Back to School Special
- Scott frames tonight’s episode around the multi-pronged attack on Indiana’s public schools: property tax defunding, vouchers and charter sharing, Christian nationalist influence, the disempowering of school boards, and — time permitting — higher education.
- HoosLeft and Progressive Indiana Network don’t paywall content or charge candidates — support at progressiveindiana.net ($5/month or $50/year) sustains the project. Social handles: @hoosleft.us on Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads; @HoosLeft on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube; PIN is @pinindiana on Bluesky and TikTok.
00:02:40 Meet the Panel: Mitch Reynolds, Dr. Michael Shaffer, Devon Wellington, and Zachary Parrish
- Mitch Reynolds returns to the show: Duneland School Board candidate and classroom teacher.
- Dr. Michael Shaffer: roughly 30 years as a school administrator, now 12 years into a faculty position at Ball State in educational leadership, having trained about 2,400 principals.
- Devon Wellington: education policy expert and House District 29 candidate (Fishers/Noblesville area), previously featured on PIN’s MadVoters Inside the Indiana Statehouse series.
- Zachary Parrish: first-time guest, co-founder of the Fort Wayne–based Secular Education Association. Scott notes Lindsey Cornett — IPS board candidate — will join once she’s able.
00:06:18 Scott’s Thesis: Two Worldviews Attacking Public Education
- Scott lays out his framing: an anti-state libertarian “taxation is theft” camp that wants every service privatized, and a Christian nationalist camp that believes public schools indoctrinate kids and education should be church-run. He asks Dr. Shaffer whether this reading holds up.
- Dr. Shaffer agrees, tracing it back at least to 2002’s No Child Left Behind, authored in part by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a group with significant Indiana legislative membership that is both anti-public-school and anti-teachers-union.
00:08:28 The Segregation Roots of the Anti-Public School Movement
- Scott traces the attacks further back to the 1950s backlash against Brown v. Board of Education, when entire Southern school districts chose to shut down rather than integrate — arguing today’s attacks pursue similar ends through subtler, ostensibly race-neutral means.
- Zach agrees the two camps (libertarian and Christian nationalist) are more intertwined than commonly understood — separate in stated purpose (one wants privatized profit centers, the other different ends) but consistently willing to work together toward dismantling public education.
00:10:28 Hamilton County and Indiana’s Rankings: 31st in Quality, 38th in Teacher Pay
- Scott asks Devon, from affluent Hamilton County, whether attacks on public schools threaten the very asset (strong schools) that makes her county desirable. Devon agrees: school quality is a proxy for how a community invests across the board, and education spending yields a two-to-tenfold return on investment that’s often mischaracterized as a pure expense.
- Mitch cites the numbers: Indiana ranks 31st nationally in education quality, 38th in teacher pay, and 37th in per-student spending (~$13,000/student) — bottom-20% territory nationally.
00:13:20 Senate Bill 1’s Property Tax Reform, the 38 Referendums, and the Homestead Exemption Trap
- Scott walks through Governor Braun’s signature 2025 property tax reform: modest relief for homeowners, major breaks for large property owners and businesses, and a resulting funding hole for public schools (which rely on local property taxes) — 38 districts are on November ballots seeking referendum money to fill the gap, with an estimated $744 million lost over the next three years and a $336 million gap projected in 2028 alone. Hamilton Southeastern, for example, faces a $45 million gap between 2026 and 2031. Referendums are now also restricted to even-numbered election years going forward.
- Devon confirms the mechanism gets worse over time: the homestead exemption grows as home values rise, so schools don’t actually see increased funding as valuations increase. She also flags that any referendum passed after this year must share proceeds with charter and private schools, and that public schools — unlike private organizations — can’t simply pivot their spending to absorb this pressure, creating what she calls a death spiral as families who can leave, do. She adds that public schools carry extensive state and federal accountability requirements that private alternatives don’t — and that private-sector executive pay dwarfs anything public school administrators or teachers make.
00:19:56 Mitch Daniels, Circuit Breakers, and How Duneland Passed Its Referendum
- Dr. Shaffer traces the root further back to the Mitch Daniels administration’s circuit breaker tax caps (1%, 2%, 3%), sold as making Indiana “open for business” — a policy he says predictably pushed districts toward the referendum cliff we’re at now, with some referendums succeeding and others (including in his own district) failing outright, forcing cuts to essential services.
- Scott invokes the Eric Andre meme — defund the schools, then blame them for failing — and Mitch describes how Duneland’s teachers union, led by co-president Bob DeRuntz, organized a fast, door-knocking campaign that passed their referendum with 62% support on just 18% turnout, with even opponents largely accepting the outcome once it passed.
00:24:10 Is Property Tax the Right Way to Fund Schools? Dr. Shaffer Makes the Case
- Scott raises the equity question directly: is tying school funding to local property values inherently regressive, funneling more resources to already-affluent communities? He also flags a proposal from State Rep. J.D. Prescott to eliminate property tax entirely in favor of expanded sales tax — which Scott notes is itself a regressive shift.
- Dr. Shaffer argues property tax remains preferable to a flat regressive tax that hits low earners hardest, and traces the current crisis partly to a 2011–2012 fix for high Marion County property taxes that was applied statewide. He argues nobody questions paying for libraries, fire, or police the same way they question school funding, and describes working in a 1924-built school kept in excellent condition through consistent investment versus a nearby district’s building with no air conditioning — arguing the students with the greatest need too often attend the worst-maintained facilities, and that hundreds of billions in national investment are overdue.
00:30:20 A Tax-Weed-for-Schools Compromise
- Zach argues the fundamental need is prioritization regardless of funding mechanism. Mitch proposes a specific trade: he’d accept a shift toward sales tax if the state legalized and taxed marijuana (following Michigan’s model) to fund public education, while still insisting the core ask is more funding, higher teacher pay, and stronger union support.
- Lindsey Cornett joins at this point and is warmly welcomed in.
00:32:14 Devon on the State Funding Formula and the Death Spiral
- Devon explains how the state centralized school funding into a single formula that varies by student, replacing a mostly local model — leaving districts like Noblesville, ranked near the bottom of state funding, dependent on local referendums the state is now restricting. She argues the underlying Republican logic — that government doesn’t work, so it shouldn’t take your money — echoes a much older (if misattributed) sentiment that public schools exist to produce workers rather than thinkers, and that distrust of public education was baked into the institution from the start.
00:35:20 How Vouchers Started as Targeted Aid and Became Universal
- Scott traces Indiana’s Choice Scholarship program from its 2011 origin — income-capped, targeted at students in underperforming schools — through this year’s shift to fully universal vouchers with no income cap at all. He notes the practical limits of “choice” in areas without real private school options, and the particular strain on rural districts that pay into the voucher pool without meaningful alternatives to send students to.
00:38:25 Lindsey Explains Charter Schools: Public Funding, No Real Standards
- Lindsey lays out the charter/voucher landscape: charter schools are technically public because they receive per-pupil public dollars, but Indiana’s private schools now also receive public funding despite arguably not being public schools by any reasonable definition. She cites 31 private schools within the IPS boundary alone that accept vouchers, roughly 80%+ of voucher-accepting private schools being religious institutions (raising direct church-state questions), and confirms that most voucher recipients were already paying for private school before the program existed — they’re not predominantly low-income families being rescued from failing schools.
00:41:03 The Big Lie: Vouchers Were Never About Failing Schools
- Dr. Shaffer confirms that in states with vouchers, private school tuition rises faster than in states without them — another way money siphons out of public institutions toward families who don’t need the assistance. He recounts Betsy DeVos’s role as an early Indiana voucher lobbyist and, drawing on his own tenure in public schools, describes large families for whom even income-capped vouchers were financially out of reach once uncovered per-child costs, transportation, and sports fees are factored in — vouchers, he argues, were never designed to rescue poor kids from failing schools; they’re a subsidy for families already choosing private education.
00:43:27 The Coverage Gap and the Racial Data Nobody Talks About
- Scott cites a Chalkbeat analysis showing a roughly $1,694 median gap between voucher value and actual private tuition inside IPS boundaries — a built-in filter for families who can afford to cover the difference. Lindsey adds a starker data point: Black students made up 26% of voucher recipients in the program’s first year and just 8% this past year, a shift she and Dr. Shaffer characterize not as universally intentional racism at every voucher school, but as evidence that some Indiana voucher schools function as de facto segregationist academies.
00:45:20 No Curriculum Standards, No Oversight, No Due Process Rights
- Zach confirms voucher-accepting religious schools face no curriculum, transparency, or admissions standards. Dr. Shaffer adds that the state’s Choice Scholarship report only ever displays three years of data at a time — obscuring longer-term trends in racial and special-needs enrollment — and that his own research going teacher-by-teacher through voucher school staff listings found only about 15% of self-described special education staff actually held a special ed license. Critically, families who choose a voucher school forfeit their child’s due process rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — the formal mechanism that lets parents compel a public school to meet a child’s needs simply doesn’t exist once a family opts into the voucher system.
00:49:16 Devon: Dismantling the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office
- Devon connects the dots to federal policy: the current Department of Education is dismantling its Office of Special Education Programs and Office of Civil Rights — historically the backstop when a state failed to take a family’s case seriously — stripping away accountability metrics entirely. She notes the deficit-model framing of special education ignores that roughly 50% of Fortune 500 CEOs are neurodivergent, and predicts a coming legislative push to route special-needs students into specialized private schools as a step toward re-institutionalization.
- Scott connects this to the broader dismantling of the Department of Education (created during the Carter administration specifically to address educational equity), the shift of civil rights functions to DOJ and special ed to HHS — now under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., previously discussed on the show as a eugenicist. Devon and Dr. Shaffer confirm the Carter-era origin and purpose; Devon notes states were failing to educate all kids, which prompted the department’s creation in the first place. Dr. Shaffer adds that Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s new state waiver program lets states redirect federal Title I, special ed, and English-language-learner funding with zero tracking or accountability — and that Indiana was among the first states to apply.
00:53:43 Mitch: What This Looks Like Inside a Gary Classroom
- Mitch describes the daily reality: aging textbooks reused year after year, soliciting donations for basic supplies, and personally covering classroom costs (including decoration, which he argues genuinely affects student comfort and willingness to learn) — a burden he says nearly every teacher he knows has shouldered out of pocket.
00:55:30 House Bill 1447: Making Criminals Out of Teachers Over Books
- Dr. Shaffer describes House Bill 1447, tacked onto the end of the legislative session, which threatens criminal liability for teachers over classroom books deemed objectionable — prompting wildly varied teacher responses, from removing all books to individually vetting every title. He’s personally and firmly opposed to book bans but notes, pointedly, that not a single teacher has actually been prosecuted under the law — meaning its real function is intimidation, not enforcement. Scott and Mitch agree: the fear itself is the point, and it conveniently distracts constituents from the underlying defunding.
- Lindsey adds that treating education like a business — where efficiency and profit maximization are the goal — is fundamentally incompatible with how children, especially those with special needs like her own seventh grader, actually learn.
00:58:35 LifeWise Academy and Release Time Religious Instruction
- Scott introduces the topic of organizations pulling students out of public school instructional time, asking Zach — who’s “tussled with” LifeWise Academy directly — to explain how state law not only permits this but requires schools to accommodate it.
01:00:41 RTRI Explained: Ice Cream, Pizza Parties, and Peer Pressure
- Zach defines RTRI (Release Time Religious Instruction): organizations pulling students off campus during the school day for religious education, technically optional but aggressively normalized through incentives — ice cream, pizza parties, a “big red bus” — and peer pressure among elementary-age kids that Zach says isn’t gentle. Because adults recruiting students directly would violate church-state separation, the programs rely on protected student-to-student speech to do the recruiting, and Zach frames it as being just as much about political indoctrination (a pipeline toward Turning Point USA in high school) as religious instruction.
01:03:09 The Ten Commandments Case and Kennedy v. Bremerton
- Scott notes Indiana’s own Ten Commandments-in-schools bill failed this year, but similar legislation is moving through courts in Louisiana and Texas, with the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a related case this coming October term.
- Dr. Shaffer traces the legal shift to Kennedy v. Bremerton — the “praying football coach” case — in which the Supreme Court ruled a coach’s on-field prayers were protected private religious practice, despite the coach being on the clock, in uniform, and the subject of documented coercive dynamics with players seeking playing time. Both Scott and Dr. Shaffer argue the ruling effectively gutted existing church-state separation precedent (built on the Lemon test from Lemon v. Kurtzman), opening the door to exactly the kind of school-sanctioned religious activity the Ten Commandments case may extend further.
01:07:21 Turning Point USA’s Pipeline Into Indiana High Schools
- Scott connects LifeWise’s elementary-age targeting to Turning Point USA’s (the late Charlie Kirk’s organization) high school and college-level recruitment, and notes that Indiana officials — Diego Morales, Todd Rokita, and Mike Braun — have publicly called for every Indiana high school to host its own Turning Point USA chapter.
01:08:25 Devon: The Right’s Branding Advantage and ‘Godless Nation’ Framing
- Devon argues the right has consistently superior messaging discipline across every one of these issues, framing nuanced policy debates as a battle over “godless nation” values rather than what’s actually being discussed — and that Democrats haven’t found an equally sticky counter-message to terms like “school choice.”
01:10:08 Follow the Money: LifeWise’s $17 Million and Who’s Funding It
- Dr. Shaffer, invoking his standard classroom rule to “follow the money,” describes LifeWise founder Joel Penton’s business model: get one or two parents to request a chapter through the school board, then deploy an organized fundraising operation targeting local businesses, wealthy donors, and small church congregants alike — netting roughly $17 million in profit last year, with funding also tracing to the Heritage Foundation, and ultimately feeding political campaigns for sympathetic candidates.
01:12:18 Micah Beckwith’s Valparaiso Career Day Controversy
- Scott asks Mitch whether Turning Point-style rhetoric is showing up among his own students, especially young men. Mitch says his own district is relatively insulated, but describes a controversy at nearby Valparaiso schools, where Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith used what was billed as a career-day appearance to make comments many understood as anti-gay and anti-trans. The superintendent publicly disavowed the remarks, and Beckwith responded by publicly attacking the district online as “woke” — a characterization Scott, who grew up nearby in Michigan City, flatly rejects.
01:14:37 Who Are the Guardians? Local Control Under State Attack
- Scott poses the structural question: if local school boards are supposed to be the democratic check on this kind of overreach, what happens when the state strips communities of local control entirely — as it has in Gary (state takeover) and, more recently, Indianapolis.
01:16:53 Lindsey Explains IPEC: How Indianapolis Lost Democratic Control
- Lindsey walks through the creation of the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation (IPEC): a state-mandated bill, facilitated by Indianapolis’s Democratic mayor, that created a nine-member board — three from the elected IPS board, three charter leaders, three “content experts” — where, in practice, all three “expert” appointees turned out to also be charter school leaders (one since hired by charter-advocacy group the Mind Trust), with no mechanism to remove any appointee. IPEC doesn’t control voucher money directly but does control IPS transportation, operations, and — critically — the rate and wording of the district’s referendum, which it now must also get voters to approve. Because any referendum passed after this year must split proceeds with charter schools, IPS stands to lose money even with a successful vote — $20 million in cuts if it passes, $50 million if it fails.
01:21:29 A Bipartisan Failure: Democrats Enabled This Too
- Scott presses Devon on the fact that IPEC, despite state Republican origins, was enabled locally by Indianapolis’s Democratic mayor — arguing the panel has spent the night criticizing the right but Democrats share real culpability here. Devon agrees, tracing the charter-school expansion logic back to well-intentioned but poorly executed 2002-era equity efforts, and notes the upcoming Indianapolis mayoral election will be a real test of IPEC’s future.
01:23:16 The Charter Count-Day Loophole and Special Ed Students Left Behind
- Lindsey and Devon detail a specific charter school abuse: schools receive per-student state funding based on October 1st enrollment counts, then some schools dismiss “problem” students shortly after that date, having already secured the year’s funding — with no corresponding funding following the student back to their public school. Lindsey cites an IPEC meeting where IPS’s head of special education reported that most IPS students newly receiving special ed services arrived after the October count date, strongly suggesting many were pushed out of charter schools once their funding was locked in.
01:26:55 Dr. Shaffer: Teachers, Radicalization, and 51 Editorials for the Journal Gazette
- Scott and Dr. Shaffer discuss the disconnect between “failing” public schools and the systemic defunding upstream. Dr. Shaffer argues that virtually every teacher and administrator enters the profession wanting to make a difference — that the people setting these policies, not the people implementing them, are the ones who benefit from an undereducated, easier-to-control public. At 67 and with nothing left to lose professionally, he tells his university students they need to be radicals, pointing them to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. He’s written 51 editorials for Fort Wayne’s Journal Gazette, and only once has the paper edited his language — softening “that’s a hell of a lot of money to go into church pews” to “a whole lot of money,” a substitution he found genuinely funny.
01:31:53 Lindsey’s Ballot Challenge: From Notice to Hearing to Write-In Backup Plan
- Lindsey recounts her ongoing ballot access fight: this is the first cycle Indiana has made school board races partisan, requiring candidates to have voted in their party’s last two primaries. She missed the 2024 primary and concedes the resulting challenge to her Democratic affiliation is technically legitimate — but her establishment-backed opponent also missed that primary, and the election board voted on August 10th to remove only her from the ballot while leaving her opponent’s affiliation intact. She’s filed for judicial review, arguing the board applied the statute unevenly and ignored discrepancies between the statute and the Secretary of State’s own guidance. Worst case, she’ll run as a write-in candidate; the court needs to rule before the September 11th ballot printing deadline.
01:38:47 Repealing Partisan School Board Races and Zach’s Closing Words
- Devon says she’d repeal the new partisan school board election law outright, calling it ridiculous, and flags the referendum ballot language itself as similarly convoluted and worth public scrutiny. She encourages Lindsey to keep fighting, framing the challenge against her as evidence she’s a real threat.
- Zach, closing the substantive discussion, argues everyone has a role to play in this fight suited to their own capacity — not everyone can be on the front lines — but stresses coordination is essential, since the opposition operates as a well-funded, deliberately coordinated movement rather than a series of accidents.
01:41:00 Closing Words: Mitch and His Campaign for Duneland School Board
- Mitch reaffirms his commitment to supporting teachers and students and pushing back against groups like Moms for Liberty that seek to capture school boards nationally for a far-right agenda.
01:42:00 Closing Words: Devon and Her Campaign for Statehouse District 29
- Devon’s campaign: VoteDevon.com (Devon spelled with an O). She frames her run around refusing to let her own children — or the broader community — inherit the current trajectory of Indiana education policy.
01:43:18 Closing Words: Lindsey and Her Campaign for IPS Board
- Lindsey’s campaign: lindseycornett.com. As a former public school teacher and mother of three IPS students, she’s seeking volunteers, canvassers, and financial support regardless of the outcome of her ballot challenge, and is happy to talk with any Indianapolis Public Schools voter outside her own District 4 about who’s on their ballot.
01:44:28 Dr. Shaffer’s Final Word and Sign-Off
- Dr. Shaffer’s closing line: Indiana no longer closes public schools outright — it just decreases the increase in funding until there’s nobody left inside. Scott closes the show, noting the conversation only scratched the surface of these issues and promising continued coverage, with standard show information and sign-off.
