The Unbearable Randomness of Policy

Per the AFT blog, the Indianapolis Star reports that policymakers in Indiana are once again talking about funding full-day kindergarten for all Hoosier students. Considering that many states have done this for decades and are now concentrating on giving all students access to pre-kindergarten, this is welcome, if belated, news.

It also reminds me of one the formative "A-Ha!" lessons I've learned : education policy, and public policy generally, is often a lot more random than you'd ever want to believe.

In 1999, I worked as a fiscal analyst for the Democratic caucus of the Indiana Senate. I've had jobs with better titles and more responsibility, but never one that was as much fun--it was basically a front-row seat for politics and democracy in all their messy, fascinating glory.

Indiana was writing a new, two-year state budget in 1999. Tax revenues had swelled due the stock market run-up and long economic expansion, and the state had accumulated a huge budget surplus. Most of it would be gone within a few years as Indiana would be hit particularly hard by the 2001 recession. But we didn't know that then, so the session was dominated by one big question: "How the heck are we going to spend all this money?"

Republicans, being Republicans, wanted to cut taxes. But they only controlled the Senate; Democrats had the House of Representatives and the governor's office, which was occupied by the late Frank O'Bannon. He was a popular governor with a genuine committment to education, and his announced number one budget priority for 1999 was full-day kindergarten.

Officially, the Indiana budget process starts in the December prior to the budget year with the submission of the governor's proposed budget. The legislature convenes in January and over the next four or five months each chamber holds lengthy hearing and debates considering that proposal before passing their own versions of a budget bill.

In reality, that's all prelude to the start of the real budget-writing process, which begins about 48 hours before the session is scheduled to end, and continues for two straight sleepless days and nights of non-stop negotiating and wrangling. Sweaty lobbyists lurk behind the Indiana Statehouse's huge granite pillars trading gossip and looking for last-minute chances to put a word in for their clients while staff members run marked-up budget bills and spreadsheet printouts back and forth from one chamber to the other across the top, fourth floor of the building, as well as up and down to the governor's office two floors below. The whole thing runs on adrenaline, caffeine, and--when things start to get really tense--the occasional bottle of rejuvinating spirits strategically located in the bottom of legislative desk drawers.

The 1999 negotiations wore on into the second night, until eventually nearly everyone involved was crammed into a back room in the fourth floor office of the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was an old-school Democrat from South Bend form a political family who would eventually go on to to become Speaker of the House. While it was late and the governor had already left for the night, his representatives were in the room and insisted on full-day kindergarten. But the price tag was high--at least $100 million in year one and upward from there--and despite projections of robust future revenues (which would turn out to be wildly incorrect) there were problems getting all the budget numbers to add up.

And then--and I've never quite been able to figure out exactly how this happened--some process of missed, botched, or willfully ignored communication led the chairman to leave the room for a final, one-on-one, no-staff-present deal-making session with his equally crusty, old-school Republican Senate counterpart, thinking that full-day kindergarten was off the table. A few hours later the deal was done.

The governor was woken and notified, at which time he came back to the building for an emergency 3AM staff meeting where he reportedly used language that to this day I can't fully believe given that he was, both in public and in person, one of the most decent, genial, down-to-earth people I've ever met in my life. But it was too late; 5-year old Hoosiers were stuck with substandard education policy for what turned out to be seven years and counting.

The point being that it all could just as easily gone the other way. Everyone was tired, emotional, frustrated, honestly not thinking particularly straight or well. The policymaking process in extremis is like an billiard ball with dozens of cues pushing on it from different directions all at once. It sits static under all that countervailing pressure until the slightest shift sends it flying off in a direction that not one of the cue-holders can completely predict or control.

That doesn't mean that organized efforts can't do a great deal to position the ball and increase the odds for students. But as in all things there are moments where circumstances shift unpredicatably for good or--unfortunately in this case--ill, and it can take a long time to get those moments back.