The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed summary judgment in favor of Carmel Clay Schools and against Valor charter schools (also known as “Indiana Classical Schools.”) As we’ve discussed before, the “dollar law” is a law that requires local public schools to give buildings away to state charter schools, even if local taxpayers (rather than taxpayers statewide) funded construction of the public school building. This one is tough to read because the General Assembly has made such a rat’s nest out of the Dollar Law’s legislative history – amending it year after year. The Court dutifully went throug ..read more

I’ve been thinking about one of my step-brothers a fair amount in the past couple of days. He passed away several years ago. I can’t say we were especially close; certainly not when we were older. Mostly, I think he’s a proxy for me to think about myself when I was a specific age – probably 7 or 8 years old. The first instance had to do with a question about the first radio song you remembered. For me, it wasn’t the first, but when I was eight, he lived in a small town in western Colorado. He got a transistor radio, and it seemed like that thing only picked up one music station. And that stati ..read more

On our final full day in Paris, we started by navigating some home repair. Prior to our stay, there had been a leak in the roof. The owner gave us a discount if we didn’t mind letting the contractors in to fix the damage during our stay. We did not mind, but they showed up early, and I had to figure out how to tell them we’d be out by 9:30. I muddled through using Google Translate. That morning, we had tickets to the Louvre. Amy had discovered the “secret” entrance. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t the main entrance and it was certainly less crowded. Unlike Versailles where I hadn’t p ..read more

After our first day in Paris, we all slept really well – to the extent we were commenting about it. I guess travel and a lot of activity will do that to you. After sleeping in until 9, lazing about with some coffee, and getting ready, we started making our way to lunch. Paris 2024 The closest metro stop to our Airbnb was at the Hotel De Ville which has the Paris 2024 Olympic rings on display. After making a slight detour to see those, we picked up metro cards with 10 rides, and started getting ourselves familiar with the Paris metro system. In other places, we had generally obtained some kin ..read more

From the Comfort Hotel in Copenhagen, it was a short walk to the airport. All indoors. As we knew from last year’s trip, the Carlsberg Aviator’s lounge is quality. Carlsberg on tap, good coffee, bread, and cheese, among other things. So, we ate there. Harper and I recreated the breakfast beer picture Cole and I took last year. Breakfast beers at the Aviator Lounge. The flight to Paris was short and uneventful. Charles De Gaulle Airport has some crazy, avante garde walkways. They kind of snake up and down where you’d expect either escalators or maybe just a flat surface. It was fun, but a bit ..read more

There was a time, not so long ago, when I had not been to Europe. For most of my life, I had barely been out of the country: the Canadian side of Niagara, just across the Texas line into Matamoros, and a couple of Caribbean cruise ports of call. Lately, however, my family has been making up for lost time. In 2017, we went to Rome and Florence; in 2022, we went to Lisbon and Porto; and in 2023, we went to Berlin. This year’s destination was Paris. Taking these vacations is a privilege, but not so extravagant as I imagined before we started these travels. As a kid growing up in Indiana, European ..read more

Joy is part of the fabric of existence, and to avoid it is to diminish, if not imperil, oneself. That is the great truth evil cannot imagine or understand. I’m hardly the first to observe this, but social media and our current regular media environment is doing us harm. I read two pieces related to this idea this morning. Daniel Schultz (“Pastor Dan”) has a piece on “The Editorial Board” entitled, “Doom is a Virus: it saps the will when you need it most.” Teri Kanefield has a post on her blog entitled “the Outrage Machine Strikes Again” in reference to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on ..read more

Per reporting by Ethan Sandweiss, writing for Indiana Public Media, the Indiana University Board of Trustees voted to implement an accounting solution to comply with state law prohibiting state funds from going to the Kinsey Institute. Specifically, IC 21-20-6-2 provides, “State appropriations may not be used to pay for the administration, operation, or programs of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.” The accounting solution involves “preparing  a Kinsey income statement and balance sheet to account for all direct and indirect costs. For all expenses not su ..read more

#PSW24 My local school district posted the above image with a reminder that it’s Public Schools Week. On Facebook, I noted my gratitude for the public schools that educated me. I’ve honestly never felt outmatched by my private school counterparts. On the larger issue of our public school system generally, this is a repeat, but we owe our public schools in Indiana to Caleb Mills, and I’m reminded of a passage from his Second “One of the People” addresses, published in 1847 and addressed to the Indiana General Assembly. Professor Mills wrote: Awaken the public mind, and concentrate it on the ..read more

Sheila has a good post on bureaucracy in which she responds to a David Brooks column. Brooks asserts that “growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.” That can be true. But I’d also argue that they tend to bring order out of chaos, fight entropy, channel resources more effectively, and have other salutary aspects. Remember that meme about how much some of us think of the Romans? Here’s another one for you — for centuries, the Roman bureaucr ..read more