Unless you’re Patrick Star (living under a rock), you probably know it’s an election year at both the state and national level. Glance at the Hoosier governor’s primary race and you’ll see quite the array of candidates vying for the position.

In a sign of where Indiana is politically, Fox 59 coaxed a wry smile from me when their comprehensive write-up on the race listed six Republican candidates and under “Other Parties” noted the one Democrat in the race and the Libertarian (there’s always one lurking, isn’t there?). I’m not under the illusion that the governorship has any chance of changing party. It’s just a matter of which Republican wins the primary, with my gut saying Mike Braun’s the frontrunner (his own polling agrees; there have yet to be any independent polls).

Usually, I wouldn’t think much about the governor’s race because of how partisan it usually is. Not my hat, not my cattle as the saying goes (I don’t actually know if this is a saying but it feels right so hang with me). But as of 2020, the governor is now endowed with the power to appoint a secretary of education (the position used to be elected). When Holcomb won the governorship in 2020, our state’s first-ever appointed Secretary of Education became Dr. Katie Jenner.

With Holcomb on the outs (of his own accord), there’s going to be a new sheriff in town (I don’t know where the Wild West references are coming from; forgive me). And that sheriff is going to appoint a new Secretary of Education. All ye who care about the quality of education in Indiana, need we be afraid?

The Benefits of an Appointed Secretary of Education

Around these parts (seriously, this must be a sign that I need to watch Blazing Saddles to get this out of my system or something), it used to be that getting the top education job in the state involved a serious bit of campaigning. That’s not inherently bad but it certainly does limit the pool of applicants. Not just anyone can put together a viable campaign to win statewide office, even something down ballot. You have to spend a lot of time fundraising and advertising and door knocking.

When Indiana made the shift in 2020, there were concerns floated that moving the post from elected to appointed was an antidemocratic move. I’m a big proponent of maximizing small-d democracy and empowering the average voter with meaningful decisions. But this argument doesn’t sway me much. Since the governor’s the one appointing the role, and since that remains popularly elected, if anything it puts an added layer of accountability on the governor.

Education is highly visible. You get that wrong or piss off enough people with your education policies, you can bet your stay in the governor’s mansion is going to be short. (Is it a mansion? This being Indiana, I picture a corn field; when you’re governor, you get to live in the best corn field around under a lean-to. Don’t tell me otherwise.)

Time for a research sidebar. Regarding how people carry out policy in an elected versus appointed capacity, I discovered a fascinating, if a bit esoteric, paper from The University of Chicago Press.This paper found that elected city treasury officials had “lower levels of performance in complex policy areas” compared to their appointed peers. This is probably comparing persimmons (treasury officials) to dragonfruit (secretaries of education). But hey, it was interesting.

To me, what really matters is the quality of the person. None of the current candidates for governor might qualify as my top pick in the draft (keep up, now we’ve shifted to NFL metaphors). But the same was true in 2020 when Holcomb was elected. So let’s look where that got us to see if we need to fear an early move from Indiana’s new head coach (this makes the secretary of education the offensive coordinator).

Dr. Jenner’s Performance

“Under Dr. Jenner’s leadership, Indiana is focused on three key pillars: student learning and opportunity; educator talent, quality, and value; and system-alignment and capacity.” I don’t usually quote a government official’s bio page but today’s your lucky day. I think it’s helpful to see both what Dr. Jenner laid out for her agenda and what’s not there. A quick run-down of her accomplishments that clearly tick the boxes of those three pillars include:

• Indiana’s biggest-ever financial investment in literacy (which, thankfully, was focused on the science of reading)
• A new teacher hiring platform to aid in recruitment, placement, and vacancy tracking
• The Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed dashboard, which greatly improves not only how the state measures school performance and student learning but how the public is able to interact with that data

These are all great, commonsense advancements that put our state on a better trajectory than it was before she became the first Secretary of Education. Notably, her time in the role has not been marked by the type of culture war nonsense bogging down a state like Florida. Certainly, our state is not immune to nonsense (looking at you Hamilton County and also at you State Legislature). But at least the education nonsense isn’t flowing directly from the governor and his Secretary of Education.

Is a New Appointee Cause for Concern?

I feel comfortable saying Holcomb’s appointment has gone as well as I could have hoped for. But our next governor will not be Holcomb. It could be someone I have a much stronger aversion to. So will they get the appointment right? Or, looked at from another angle, at least not blow things up?

Call it wishful thinking, but I tend to think so. Mike Braun is certainly the most extreme in his rhetoric around education and while that may work in firing up enough of the base to win the primary, I think he’s smart enough to know governing like a hard-right ideologue when it comes to education would be a misstep, even in red Indiana. (You know the thing about a broken clock being right twice a day? That’s more or less how I feel about Braun’s potential for appointing a quality secretary of education.)

And while I said at the top Braun feels like the front-runner, it might not even be him. A recent straw poll put Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch and Former Attorney General Curtis Hill in a close 1^st and 2^nd among primary candidates. Far from inconclusive, but it’s a data point.

The non-Braun candidates (let’s get that trending on X), including those two, are far more milquetoast on education. Look at the last four years and at their campaign websites and you more or less come away thinking, “More of the same.” In fact, Crouch doesn’t even mention education (her whole deal is “Axe the tax” and on Hill’s main “Issues” page education doesn’t come up until point five). Ron DeSantis, these people are not. This is not to say I don’t have wildly convergent views with candidates like them on more or less everything. But through the lens of what kind of appointment they might make for Secretary of Education, all is not lost.

Here’s the thing. Would I feel more optimistic were this position still elected rather than appointed? No. Probably not. And in a world where the past four years in society have been a real downer, knowing that our Secretary of Education being appointed was not part of that downer feels pretty good for where we go next.

Heck, maybe we’ll even get Season 2 of Dr. Jenner. In a state like Indiana, I’ll gladly sign on to that.