Earlier this month, Indiana governor-elect Mike Braun released his “Freedom and Opportunity For Every Hoosier” 2025 policy agenda. It offers five priority areas that I’ll broadly define as tax relief, government efficiency, education, healthcare, and overall quality of life. This is an education blog, after all, so for now I’m going to unpack just the education section.

Braun’s Education Agenda Writ Large

Might I draw your attention to page 17 in the policy agenda linked above? Not that you have to turn there, but just so you can follow up on anything for yourself as needed. Braun’s education plans break out into a few areas: universal school choice, teacher pay and retention, school safety, academic improvement, post-high school success, and parental rights. I look at each below.

Universal School Choice

The headline here is surely that Braun intends to make Indiana’s private school voucher program universal. The legislature last year expanded it by raising the income cap considerably. In turn, we did not see an influx of new students to private schools (though enrollment ticked up a bit). But we did see an influx of families already enrolled in private schools taking advantage of the government handout. The move was expensive and Braun is set to deepen the expense in a way that I don’t think is helpful to our wider education landscape. 

Under that headline are other details, such as Braun indicating he’d like to expand open enrollment across public schools and increase the Education Scholarship Account program, the Private School/Homeschool Deduction, and the tax-credit scholarship program. On the Education Scholarship Account in particular, he’s indicated wanting to double it, with leftover funds being made available to support children in foster care and active-duty military families. 

Teacher Pay and Retention

On teacher pay and benefits, Braun wants to:

1. Increase teacher base pay (though he gives no indication by how much), boost pay for teachers in high-need content areas, and institute performance-based pay to reward teachers who achieve the best academic results.
2. Ensure every teacher receives new parent leave and can access a state-funded liability insurance plan.
3. Allow teachers to select the State employee health plan instead of their local employer plan (which, I surmise, would mean better and more affordable health coverage for a large number of teachers around the state).

Those are all, to me, positive moves even if the devil/angel may be in the details to come in the 2025 legislative session.

What about retention? He wants to expand teacher prep programs, divert more resources to recruit teachers in high-need areas, and “reform lagging programs” focused on educator preparation to grow Indiana’s teacher pipeline.

School Safety

Here, Braun wants to create an entirely new government office: the Indiana Office of School Safety, which would “streamline and enhance existing authorities at the Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, and Indiana State Police.” He also intends to increase the pool of money allotted to the Secured School Safety Grant Program to aid schools in purchasing safety equipment and hiring safety personnel, such as school resource officers.

The last item in this section of his agenda focuses on cyber security training for students related to “online safety, financial scams and phishing attempts, secure passwords, and the responsible use of online platforms.”

Academic Improvement

There are a few rote entries in this category that are the kind of statements I hear so often from leaders that they’ve become almost meaningless, even in such a pared back setting as this. For instance, Braun hopes to “increase supply of high-quality school options in communities with low-performing schools,” “implement high-quality, evidence-based instructional materials,” and “drive more funding into the classroom.” Those could all indicate meaningful, positive developments. But it’s too generic to do anything but wait and see.

Elsewhere in this section of the agenda, Braun notes an intention to amplify SEA 185 (which banned cell phone use during instructional time) by working to “limit cell phone use on school campuses.” I’ll be curious to see if the end result is something like a full ban on student cell phones in K-12 settings during the entire day.

Meanwhile, the section also charts distinctly ideological territory in two spots:

1. He wants to “develop institutional safeguards against divisive, non-curricular materials.” Basically, Braun means to root out critical race theory and discussions of gender identity in schools. I believe Braun is smart enough to know that critical race theory doesn’t exist in Indiana classrooms and never has. What I think he’s really signaling here is that he intends to make schools less inclusive and less safe for students of color and LGBTQ students. He’s simply masking it with the language of the prevailing culture wars.
2. He also intends to have the Department of Education “study the long-term learning loss and mental health impact of school lockdowns and mask mandates.” We already know, both nationally and in Indiana, about the impact in these areas. It was devastating. There’s no denying that. Academic outcomes fell. Student mental health issues rose. But I do not believe this is some good-faith effort to determine how we might better navigate the next pandemic or even more fully recover from the recent one. Instead, I see it as an effort to discredit the importance of certain public health efforts (e.g. closing schools and using masks to stop the spread of an incredibly virulent and oftentimes deadly disease). Were mistakes made during the pandemic from the perspective of public health guidance and implementation? No doubt. But if we had never closed schools and never asked students and teachers to mask up, there would likely be thousands more Hoosiers dead. I’m all for balancing the public health concerns against academic and mental wellbeing concerns for students. But that’s not this. This is just a means of railroading public health guidance the next time we need to mobilize society to avoid mass death.

Post-High School Success

I don’t find the action plan here objectionable by any means. But it sends signals to me that we as a state are moving in a direction of simply aiming to prepare students for the workforce, rather than for a life of opportunity and choice. For example, the bullet about helping students explore interests through extracurricular activities gives examples of robotics and the Innovate WithIN entrepreneurship competition and… nothing else. Of course, Braun isn’t proposing that those are the only extracurriculars that will exist. But there’s certainly a theme regarding which opportunities they seem intent on providing for students and which will be allowed to fall by the wayside (art, music, etc.).

Parental Rights

And then we come to the final section: parental rights. This concluding section of the education plan notes, “The rights of Hoosier parents to participate in their children’s education, safeguard their wellbeing, and protect them from divisive ideologies should never be in doubt.”

The upshot hidden among the bullet points that follow that sentence? Braun wants to give parents increased visibility into curriculum and assigned reading materials, require that schools notify parents if a child “requests to use a name or pronouns that are inconsistent with biological sex,” and ban transgender students from competing in girls’ sports. Let’s examine each briefly.

1. I agree parents should be able to know what’s in their school’s curriculum and what their kids are reading. But they already can know. It’s not exactly classified information, even if it involves a step or two to access that kind of information from a school or teacher. But “knowing” as a means of informing parents isn’t really the goal here, from my perspective. It’s “knowing” in order to cause a ruckus if a parent finds something objectionable (i.e. a book that showcases diversity or features a gay main character, perhaps). I think it becomes more likely in future years that the specter of increased parental review creates a chilling effect as schools remove books from their curriculum proactively because they fear parents calling foul.
2. In practice, the second one means schools are required to “out” students. There are very good reasons why a student might tell someone at school about their gender identity but not a parent. It’s not like I believe everything a kid says at school has some sort of “attorney-client” privilege. For instance, as a teacher I was required to report if a student disclosed abuse. But that’s quite different from a student feeling safe enough to be themselves by asking people at school to uphold their dignity. In the name of parental rights, Braun means to trample over students’ rights.
3. And on banning transgender students from girls’ sports? Well, Indiana already did that in 2022 (a needless and cruel move, in my opinion). To me, it’s pretty clear transgender students hadn’t ruined the sanctity of girls’ sports back then, they haven’t now, and they will never in the future. Nor are transgender students the reason girls so often face sexual harassment and abuse during their educational journeys. If we really want to protect women and girls in school, then we need to look elsewhere. But Braun is smart enough to know that because.