Editorial: Legislature should eliminate final election of superintendent

After the midterm elections, both major political parties will turn their attention to 2020. The race for the presidency will grab most of the headlines, but Republicans and Democrats across the country will spend time, energy and billions of dollars on thousands of smaller contests. In Indiana, partisans shouldn’t waste a dime on one of those races—the election of the state’s superintendent of public instruction.

Voters have filled the position since the Indiana Constitution was adopted in 1851, but after 44 such contests, legislators decided in 2017 that the 45th election would be the last. Following decades of debate about whether the position should be appointed by the governor, lawmakers approved and Gov. Eric Holcomb signed legislation making the superintendent’s job a political appointment beginning in 2025.

The original legislation would have made it an appointed position effective in 2021, but Republicans wanted to give the sitting superintendent, Republican Jennifer McCormick, the chance to run for re-election. So the date was pushed back to make the bill palatable to McCormick supporters.

As we learned Oct. 1, that rationale no longer exists. McCormick announced she won’t seek another term in 2020. She cited the state’s convoluted mechanics of setting and carrying out education policy as the reason she’ll step aside. “Now that I’ve learned the governance structure, things are very complicated in Indiana,” she said.

Republicans and Democrats couldn’t come together on education policy in recent years, but they should be able to agree that there’s no good reason to hold an election just for old time’s sake.

The idea of elected superintendents has been under fire for years, and most states have moved away from it. Indiana is one of just 13 states where voters elect someone to lead state education policy.

But that overstates the role of Indiana’s superintendent, which was diminished during the divisive governorship of Mike Pence.

Pence and Democratic Superintendent Glenda Ritz clashed over school vouchers, the school rating system and state takeover of poorly performing schools. In 2013, Pence moved to eliminate some of Ritz’s authority. At his urging, the Legislature shifted more duties to the State Board of Education, which sets education policy, and away from the Indiana Department of Education, which is overseen by the superintendent and implements policy. The superintendent had also chaired the state board, until the Legislature decided the board should pick its chair. The recent board initially picked McCormick but she is relinquishing that role, too.

Despite being a Republican, McCormick hasn’t always fallen in line with the GOP on vouchers, charter schools and arming classroom teachers.

It was surprising McCormick announced her decision a full two years before she would have been up for re-election, but it says something about how divisive education policy has become when even a superintendent from the party in power can’t navigate the policy-making structure.

Indiana governors and superintendents imanaged to bridge political differences for more than 150 years, but the system unraveled five years ago and there’s no reason to think it can be restored.

Legislators should use the 2019 session to make the superintendent’s job appointed beginning in 2021. One more election won’t serve anyone’s interests.•

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