These changes led to exceptional improvements in academic outcomes, as researcher Doug Harris has thoroughly . In the two decades since, however, no city has attempted such an ambitious structural reform.

Until now.

The Indiana General Assembly on Wednesday passed , a dramatic restructuring of public education within the boundaries of Indianapolis Public Schools. The bill was a direct result of recommendations made by the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, of local education and civic leaders. Chaired by Mayor Joe Hogsett, the alliance voted 8 to 1 in December to support a that proposed, among other things, revamping facility and transportation management for public schools within IPS boundaries.

Indiana legislators used these recommendations to craft HEA 1423, and The Mind Trust advocated for the bill because it presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a school system that serves all students well. The legislation establishes the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, which will have a nine-member board appointed by the mayor. Board members will include representatives from IPS and charter schools, as well as facilities and transportation experts with extensive knowledge of sound business practices. This new entity will be tasked with several key activities, among them:

• Creating a unified transportation plan to ensure that all public school students have access to safe, quality and efficient transportation.
• Developing a system-level facilities plan that would maintain, and potentially own, buildings for all schools that choose to opt in.
• Levying property taxes for both operating and capital costs so that all public schools within IPS boundaries benefit equally.
• Establishing a unified performance framework, including the default closure of persistently low-performing schools, that charter authorizers and IPS would be tasked with implementing.

The changes will effectively put charters and traditional public schools on the same footing — both in terms of the money spent per student and the consequences for poor performance.

All of this comes at a critical time for IPS. Today, a clear majority of public-school students within IPS boundaries attend charter schools, not IPS-managed schools. IPS has struggled to adjust to this new reality and, as a result, is running a $44 million structural deficit this school year, which is projected to grow significantly in the coming years. Without significant changes, the district will exhaust its rainy-day fund next year, risking insolvency and state takeover. 

Underutilized buildings and inefficient operations are key drivers to the district’s financial woes. An independently governed authority has the potential to both significantly downsize the district’s facility footprint and ensure the efficient provision of transportation. This structure also benefits charter schools by ensuring universal access to transportation and fully eliminating over time the funding disparity that currently leaves charter schools with about $8,000 less per student than traditional public schools.

While hard decisions remain for IPS, the legislation creates the opportunity for a reimagined school system, acknowledging that the status quo is no longer acceptable. The revolutionary component of the bill is simple but powerful: Separating the education of children from the management of operations. This approach allows educators to focus more time on what’s happening in the classroom. IPS will now become another school operator alongside charter schools, and district schools will compete on the same playing field and be held to the same accountability standards.

Critically, HEA 1423 allows for greater efficiency and coordination at the system level while safeguarding school autonomy and the ability to innovate at the school level. The new corporation’s role is well defined and limited to facilities, transportation and the creation of a new performance framework. Schools will be in charge of what happens inside classrooms and will even have the option to continue owning their buildings — and foregoing local debt service funds — if they feel the facilities plan does not meet their unique needs. A collaborative, multi-year planning process will ensure thoughtful implementation and the ability to identify future legislative tweaks.

Unlike New Orleans, where a hurricane forced leaders to quickly rebuild a school system, Indianapolis’ approach is a product of decades of methodical reforms and, more recently, a diverse group of local leaders coming together to reimagine what’s possible. And unlike more recent attempts at reform like Houston’s state takeover, this legislation activates a form of local mayoral control that has never before been tried: one that respects school autonomy while providing a single point of accountability for the financial and operational health of public education.

Indianapolis has been a national leader in education innovation since the 2001 passage of the state’s charter school law. Through three different mayors of both political parties, strong mayoral and civic leadership have been the cornerstone of that progress. A growing body of research shows that the growth of charter schools in Indianapolis has led students to significantly more academic progress, closed achievement gaps and helped usher in key system-level reforms.

This legislation is the culmination of 25 years of concerted effort. Now the hardest work begins, implementing this system in a way that significantly improves student achievement and forever breaks the connection between socioeconomic background, student success and long-term life outcomes.

As districts across the country struggle to deal with declining birthrates, universal school choice and lagging student achievement, Indianapolis provides a potential model for cities looking to create a modernized school system built for the future – not for a world that no longer exists. If this new structure is implemented well in Indianapolis, it won’t take another two decades for other major American cities to replicate that success. A little bit of courage today will go a long way toward securing a bright future for our children.

Indianapolis — flyover country to some — might just have the roadmap to get there.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation would not have the direct authority to close public schools, and charters could keep control of their school buildings, according to a bill amendment lawmakers approved Thursday.

Under the amendment to House Bill 1423, charter authorizers and Indianapolis Public Schools — not the proposed Indianapolis Public Education Corporation — would maintain the power to close schools. But if they fail to do so, the corporation could appeal to the state board of education to close the school. The state board would ultimately have to approve the school closure.

In addition, the — introduced by Rep. Bob Behning, the Republican chair of the House Education Committee — would allow charters within IPS boundaries to opt into or out of a facility management plan overseen by the new corporation.

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The proposed changes to how school closures work and who controls buildings is part of a broader plan to change key aspects of how public schools work in the city and shift some resources from IPS to charter schools.

The amended bill clarifies that both charter authorizers and IPS must agree on a universal performance framework that could be used to determine which schools must close. in recent years, while over the last few decades.

The revised bill says IPS would still be required to cede authority over their school buildings to the corporation, and also give up power over transportation and the ability to collect and levy property taxes, to the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, or IPEC. But Behning said during House discussions Thursday that he would commit to allowing IPS to opt out of the mandate to give up control over its buildings.

Such a move could further reduce the proposed corporation’s ability to unify oversight of key aspects of how the city’s public schools work.

Shortly after that comment from Behning, IPS released a blasting how the revised bill created a carve-out for charters. The district said it created “a glaring double standard” because it would grant “charter schools the power to opt out of management and control of school property by the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation Board while denying that very same flexibility to IPS.”

Before the House discussions, Behning said his amendment came in response to concern from charter schools that paid for their buildings with private dollars. Since charters have not historically had access to property tax funding for such expenses, they have relied on other funding resources to acquire facilities.

But there would be significant consequences for charter schools that choose not to participate in facilities management, like losing capital referendum and debt service funding, and the charter school facility grant once charter schools have access to more resources, Behning said during discussions with other House lawmakers.

“If I’m a charter … I would have to figure out how I’m going to do all my operations, pay for everything out of those operating dollars, which they have never had to do,” Behning said. “I don’t really think any of them are going to do it.”

Within district borders, over 20 charter schools owned their buildings in the 2024-25 school year, while another 19 leased space and 12 operated in IPS buildings as part of the school’s Innovation Network, according to a report from the Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation.

The amendment allows charters that lease or own their buildings to decide whether to give control of the facility to IPEC. But if charters do opt out, they would not receive property tax dollars for capital needs.

During Thursday’s House discussion of the bill, Behning said his amendment didn’t outline how charter schools with privately owned buildings, or even IPS with outstanding bonds, would participate in facilities management. That’s a task for IPEC to determine in its feasibility study before assuming control of buildings in 2028-29, he said. The bill directs the new corporation to .

“If I was a charter that had privately built a building with private dollars, not with public dollars, if I want to be part of this, that’s going to be something they’re going to have to figure out,” Behning said. “My guess is, you can’t just come in and take away a private asset.”

Charters that own their buildings but are then forced to close could dispose of the building as they see fit if they don’t opt in to the corporation’s facility management plan, according to Behning. The corporation would not assume control of the building.

In theory, the new corporation would ultimately own all district buildings, Behning said. But there could be legal challenges to transferring ownership of buildings with remaining debt attached to them.

HB 1423 is eligible for a final reading in the House on Monday. If passed, it would move on to the Senate.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

The proposal, recommended to the state legislature by a panel of leaders from around the city calls for creating a powerful new government agency, the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, handing charters a measure of control over citywide education decisions they have never had. 

The corporation — Indiana’s legal term for a school district — would oversee a unified transportation system for all schools; along with the ability to decide which schools are not serving students. The agency would also oversee a single enrollment system. 

The plan, which still needs approval by the state legislature, is a big win, in some ways, for charter schools that have grown rapidly in recent years and now educate more than half of Indianapolis’ students. 

Along with gaining transportation for students, charters will have representatives on the new board with equal standing to district officials for the first time in shaping Indianapolis school policy.

That power, though, is taken from the Indianapolis Public Schools district, whose schools could be closed by the corporation and which already saw the state legislature shift property taxes away from the district to charters earlier this year. 

Robert Enlow, CEO of the national charter advocacy group EdChoice, based in Indianapolis, called the recommendation “historic” in its support of charters.

“It is a bold and courageous direction that represents a groundbreaking pathway,” Enlow said after the vote on Wednesday.

But the proposal has tradeoffs for all sides, which have already sparked howls of opposition from voters and other charter advocates, as well as worry from the district about how the legislature could change the plan.��

That more power could go to charters has enraged some residents since leaders started discussing the new plan this summer. Right before the vote, Rev. Clyde Posley, president of the General Missionary Baptist State Convention of Indiana, spoke on behalf of several clergy calling the entire effort a “heavy-handed public overreach” in support of “private agendas.”

“(It) not only invites scavengers and investors to pillage off the plight of a broken school system,” Posley said. “It is not only wrong, it is vicious.”

Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Aleesia Johnson, who worked on the plan for several months, urged residents to keep fighting as the plan goes to the legislature, but said change is necessary.

“The proposal tonight is an imperfect solution for a challenging set of realities,” Johnson said before voting in favor of it..

Those realities include growing pains from the rapid rise of charters in a city with a stagnant population. Many charter schools don’t offer buses, forcing students to use public transport or be driven by parents who have pleaded for buses for their children.

The city also has about 50,000 school seats for 41,000 students, leaving 9,000 open, while the Indianapolis Public Schools faces a budget deficit that will require a tax increase from voters.

Whether the plan will pass as is by the Republican-dominated, pro-charter legislature is unclear. State Sen. Jeff Raatz, chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Career Development, had no immediate comment. 

Bob Behning, the chairman of the House Education Committee who wrote the bill forcing Indianapolis officials to work out a partnership, said he was “pleased with the decision.” He did not elaborate on details of the plan, some of which he has opposed. 

The new corporation would move toward mayoral control of schools, which cities across the U.S. have tried with varying success. It would have an executive director and a nine-member board  appointed by the mayor – three chosen from the Indianapolis Public Schools board, three charter school leaders and three others.

That proposal for a mostly-unelected board immediately drew protest from residents, many with the Central Indiana Democratic Socialists of America. After constant shouts of “Unelected!” and “This is a sham!” residents called for the city’s voters, not the legislature, to approve the new corporation. One climbed onto the platform where the panel was seated and was removed by security. And audience members chanted “Shame!” as the panel ended its meeting.

Charter schools are also raising opposition, including the recommendation that every charter must share money and participate in the new busing system, even as the overall recommendation would give them more power. 

One charter school advocacy group, the Indiana Charter Innovation Center, called that an “unfunded mandate.”

“The proposals put forward would place significant burdens on charter schools without providing funding, would reverse major legislative progress, and would create a structure that pulls decision-making farther from the schools and families most affected,” the center said in a social media post.

The center also objected to the recommendation to limit charter authorizers — organizations that oversee charters and decide which can open — just to the mayor’s office, the state charter board and, as a recent development, the Indianapolis Public Schools board. 

Andrew Neal, a member of the panel making the recommendation, said requiring all schools to be part of the plan is “a significant equity issue.”

“I know there are some individuals out there who fear how that will impact their schools, or how that will impact their systems,” Neal said just before the vote. “But I am telling you, this is an opportunity for students…the ones that because of a fragmented system, continue to fall through the cracks.”

Stand for Children, an education advocacy group that has led the push for busing, said parents will appreciate the new system.

One parent, Christa Salgado, has repeatedly asked state and local officials for help with transportation after driving her son to school every day took a toll on her and her son had to move to live with his father.

“I had to drive across the city about 30 minutes back and forth in the morning, and then in the afternoon to pick him up, as a single mother,” she told the panel just before Wednesday’s vote. “This was unsustainable, and unfortunately, I could only do this for a year.”

The district still isn’t sure, with the final result still up to the legislature, what impact it will have on its authority and budgets. But superintendent Johnson voted in favor of the recommendations, while urging residents to put pressure on the state legislature to make sure the district doesn’t lose too much to charters.

 “If we continue to have an elected board with just the same oversight as they do today…,” she conceded, “the challenges of incoherence and thinning resources will remain.”

But the state’s request before the U.S. Department of Education has raised concerns by advocates who worry needy students could “lose both dedicated attention and resources” in Indiana and other states.   

Indiana joined Iowa this fall in asking the U.S. Department of Education for permission to merge their federal “Title” education grants – such as Title I to combat poverty and Title III to help English Language Learners — into one block grant for states and schools.

A similar attempt by Oklahoma is on hold after state Superintendent Ryan Walters resigned in September, while several state school leaders have asked U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to work with Congress to ease restrictions.

“Our goals…include less red tape for our people,” state Education Secretary Katie Jenner told the state school board. “We’re shifting towards…the flexibility to put the resources where they’re needed the most.”

At the same time, advocacy groups are shouting warnings that removing guardrails on the $30 billion in Title grants, created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” could lead to the country’s most needy students being left out.

In Indiana, officials have asked the U.S. Department of Education to pool the more than $350 million it receives in Title grants in the name of efficiency — to save time and millions of dollars now spent documenting how each dollar is used for specific groups of students.

Instead, the state wants the freedom to use the money for its main statewide education priorities — literacy, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) proficiency and reshaping high school education.

It’s also seeking freedom to spend federal School Improvement Grants — money now targeted at improving failing schools — to go instead toward state school choice goals.

Indiana would create an “innovation fund” with that money to help other schools nearby that students could choose instead. Such a fund would “better support a growing ecosystem of effective, innovative school models,” according to Indiana’s application.

“Students and families cannot wait — sometimes for years — for a chronically underperforming school to improve in order to receive access to high-quality instruction,” the application adds..

Both Iowa and Indiana’s request to the Education Department — with rulings expected early next year — “are expected to set a precedent for the scope of future waivers granted to other states,” the American School Superintendents Association

Indiana’s request, however, is raising concerns from several education advocacy groups — including The Education Trust, All4Ed, UnidosUS and the National Parents Union — that removing restrictions on the money will mean that students that most need extra help won’t get it.

“This approach fundamentally misunderstands — and threatens to undermine — the purpose of these targeted federal programs, which were created to address specific, documented gaps in support for vulnerable student populations,” the groups said in a . “When Indiana lists numerous state priorities without any specific commitments to individual student groups, it signals that these populations would lose both dedicated attention and resources under the proposed consolidation.”

Indiana’s request to the U.S. Department of Education to waive restrictions on the money goes beyond Iowa’s, said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, Assistant Director of P12 Policy at The Education Trust. Indiana is seeking leeway from restrictions both for the state and for individual schools and districts, while Iowa is asking for an exemption just for the state, he said.

“In its current form, Indiana’s is much more dramatic and wide-ranging in its scope and potential impact,” Munyan-Penney said.

Within Indiana, the Indiana State Teachers Association is also raising concerns.

“ISTA believes flexibility can be beneficial when paired with transparency, collaboration and a clear focus on student success,” the association . “However, we remain concerned about provisions in the waiver that could reduce input from educators and parents and divert critical resources from schools working to close opportunity gaps.”

The union also has concerns about shifting the School Improvement Grant money.

“The proposed waiver could redirect these funds to schools or programs that are not identified as low-performing, potentially diluting the impact on historically underserved students,” the union said.

And residents of Gary, a high-poverty city, also worry that the neediest students will be left out if guardrails are removed.

“When I hear…this waiver is about ‘cutting red tape,’ I don’t buy it,” Natalie Ammons, grandmother of three students in the Gary school district, testified last week in a webcast to Congressional staff. “It may be cutting something, but it’s not red tape — it’s cutting away the few protections families like mine have left.”

Asked for school officials who are seeking the waivers, the Indiana Department of Education did not suggest any. The 74 also requested a copy of feedback the department sought from residents and officials on the waiver, but the department did not provide it.

The goal of combining Title grants, which total about $30 billion a year nationally, have been a growing priority of Republican officials after a version of it was proposed in Project 25. Oklahoma and Iowa proposed merging them this spring, but concerns arose about what the U.S. Department of Education could legally allow.

Trump also put a hold on disbursing several Title grants to states this year before backing down.

In July, McMahon encouraging them “to seek creative and effective waivers for improving student academic achievement and maximizing the impact of Federal funds” and spelling out a waiver process.

Title I, which accounts for more than half of that money, is awarded to states and schools according to poverty levels and enrollment. All4Ed, estimates that more than two thirds of school districts receive some Title I money, though sometimes in low amounts if poverty is low.

Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, are scheduled to receive $15.7 million in Title I money next school year, while several smaller districts receive well under $100,000.

A panel ordered by the state legislature is hurrying to recommend by the end of December how the Indianapolis Public Schools and charter schools could work together to make busing and unused school space open to charters.

It’s the latest battleground in the decades-long fight between charter schools and school districts nationally over who has control of schools and the tax money that supports them. In Indiana, where state leaders strongly support school choice, power has shifted more and more to charters, which now educate more than half of Indianapolis students.

The panel won’t make its final recommendations until Dec. 17, but is leaning toward creating a new governing body to oversee sharing of schools and buses. Last week the panel narrowed its debate to two approaches, both of which give more power to charters and take it from the district’s elected school board.

The first would create a “collaborative compact advisory board” of appointees from the district, mayor and charter schools. The second would create an Indianapolis Education Authority with a mayor-appointed board and new city secretary of education.

The panel’s vote to focus on these two options, rather than letting the district take the lead, drew boos from residents who want an elected board to make decisions, not an appointed one.

Despite the boos, there’s strong support for expanded busing for charter school students in the city, where charters are not required to pay for buses, and usually don’t, to save money for teachers and books. The panel, however, has already rejected offering buses to every student to attend any school, anywhere in the district they want, as too expensive, so there will be limits.

How many students will be affected also depends on another key issue to be resolved — whether all Indianapolis charters would have to opt into the new collective plan. Some of the proposals require participation and others don’t, which looms as a potential fight as the plan is finalized. The Indianapolis Local Education Alliance will make final recommendations Dec. 17. 

Any new plan will likely need approval from a heavily Republican and pro-charter state legislature, whose leanings are a backdrop to the debate.

But though some shift of assets to charters is now all but certain, gains for those schools won’t come without strings. District schools and charter schools will have to give up some autonomy in return for a piece of the collective pie.

Scott Bess, founder of the successful Purdue Polytechnic charter high schools and of the Charter Innovation Center advocacy group, called that tradeoff a “grand bargain.”

“You’re going to have to have some standardization,” said Bess, who’s watching the panel closely. “That’s the bargain.”

Charter schools’ will likely have to adjust their daily schedules and yearly calendars to fit a broader busing plan that aligns vacation days and school opening and closing times so buses can take more than one load of students to school each day.

And charters that have built their own schools or leased them for years may have to turn those buildings and leases over to the new body, which could then decide to close a school and give the building to another operator.

There’s also debate whether charter schools in the city should even have a choice to be part of a collective plan. Early indications are that the state legislature would not back requiring charter schools to join.

Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Aleesia Johnson told the panel last month that if the goal is to make sure all students have transportation, then schools shouldn’t be allowed to opt out.

“If schools are given the option not to participate, and enough schools don’t, then you don’t have a system anymore,” she said.

Angela Smith-Jones, Indiana University’s associate vice president for state relations and a member of the panel, also called for mandatory participation for all charter schools.

“Then it’s really solving the problem,” Smith-Jones said at the same meeting. “All schools are actually getting the exact same thing. Seems fair and equitable.”

Bess,who’s also a member of the Indiana state school board and of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, wants the panel and state to give schools a choice. He said school leaders are weighing, even as the plans are being developed, whether giving up control for more resources makes sense for them.

“The devil is clearly in the details,” said Bess. With school buildings, Bess said, schools have to weigh their own budgets, building debt and repair needs against giving an asset to an outside authority that could delay building upgrades or even shut a school down.

“Local property taxes (could pay) for all those improvements and maintenance and all the things that go with it,” Bess said. “But with that comes this grand bargain that we have to perform academically to a standard that is accepted across the city.”

“As I talk to a lot of charter school leaders, they’re looking at this saying, ‘Man, I don’t know that. I want to give up my full autonomy,'” he said.

Schools are also weighing whether a central, but more standardized busing schedule for all schools might mean giving up early dismissal days or other schedule differences.

“Some schools that I’ve talked to said ‘That’s not worth it to me,’ like ‘I’ll walk away from the money, because my schedule and my autonomy on how I operate is really important to me’,” Bess said. “Other schools said, ‘Oh, wow, you mean I could actually provide more transportation for more kids, and all I’ve got to do is give up a little bit of my quirky schedule.’”

Tommy Reddicks, CEO of the successful Paramount charter school chain, has opposed any changes to charter school autonomy, including demands from some residents that the state block new charters. He told the panel last week he also opposes forcing charters to be part of a transportation authority.

“Requiring districts or agents to control charter transportation in any mandated form, strips operational independence,” said Reddicks, whose schools do not provide buses to save money. “Mandates that limit charter autonomy violate the very reason the (panel) was created.”

But there’s a big financial incentive to join – a share of tax dollars the state legislature has already voted to give charters. The legislature voted this spring to give charter schools a share of local property taxes that have traditionally gone to districts starting in 2028, but some state officials have slated that money to go to the new collective busing and building effort — not to individual schools in addition to it.

That legislation, Senate Bill 1, would give charter schools $2,050 per student in local property taxes in 2028, rising to $3,750 per student by 2031.

“In Indianapolis, instead of having (property tax) transfers from IPS (the district) to the charters, that transfer is going to happen through the authority,” said Indiana House Education Committee Chairman Robert Behning.

“(If) you want to have access to that funding, then you need to participate in the authority,” he added.

Behning said one limit the school district and some other advocacy groups have sought — limiting the number of authorizers that can approve new charter schools in the city — is unlikely to win support from the legislature.

Behning said he would never want only the city mayor’s office to authorize new schools because that would make the ability of new schools to open dependent on who wins the latest mayoral election. 

“Whatever happens, we have to make sure that it can’t be changed by the next election,” he said.

Indianapolis Public Schools will put one closed school building up for lease or sale to charter schools for $1 and will sell another to a local nonprofit, the district announced Friday.

The transfer of the buildings that used to house Raymond Brandes School 65 and Francis Bellamy School 102 stems from an in a lengthy battle over the state’s so-called $1 law, which requires districts to transfer unused school buildings to charter schools for the sale or lease price of $1. The court ruled in May that IPS must sell School 65.

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The announcement also comes as the , which continues to lose students in its traditional schools every year, and charters, which frequently .

The district said in a statement that , a school for students with developmental and behavioral challenges in Decatur Township, had reached out to IPS to express interest in School 65 — which is located on the southeast side of IPS. The district does not have the power to pick which charter school it will sell a building to — if more than one charter school is interested, state law requires a committee to decide.

On Monday, Damar confirmed to Chalkbeat that it is interested in School 65.

In the statement, the district said it would prefer to “move forward with disposition” of School 65 through a collaborative community process.

“But, we respect the court’s decision and will proceed in full compliance with that order,” IPS Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said. “If the building is claimed by a charter school, we think Damar has a strong record of serving some of the most vulnerable and underserved students in our city and I have confidence that acquiring Raymond Brandes will allow them to expand their operations to serve even more students.”

Meanwhile, the district will sell School 102 to Voices, a nonprofit that works with youth, for $550,000. The district had already leased the school on the Far Eastside to Voices, which also shares the .

“Indianapolis Public Schools is committed to continuing to engage with our community on thoughtful re-use of our facilities and to being good stewards of our public assets,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are excited to move forward with our planned sale of the Francis Bellamy 102 building to VOICES and to see their impact in serving our community continue for many years into the future.”

This was originally published on Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Indianapolis Public Schools is considering a policy on artificial intelligence that would guide the district as it experiments with AI tools for teachers and staff.

The policy — which the school board could vote on later this month — follows a yearlong pilot program in which 20 staff members used a district-approved AI tool to better understand its uses and challenges. Although the policy does not address specific acceptable student uses, it lists general guiding points for staff to ensure AI tools are appropriately used for teaching and learning.

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“There’s still a lot to learn from a broader group of adult users before we’re putting students in an environment that maybe doesn’t match curriculum or what teachers are learning at the same time,” Ashley Cowger, the district’s chief systems officer, said. “We want to make sure that staff feel well equipped to determine what the boundaries are for use of AI in a classroom.”

The basic guidelines are one step into a that IPS and other districts now navigate. While districts could use and Google Gemini to cut down on time-consuming, administrative tasks, they must also balance concerns over .

Plus, IPS will launch a second phase of its pilot AI program this upcoming school year in which even more staff will use a generative AI tool — the chatbot Google Gemini. However, the district is not yet adopting a districtwide tool for staff.

“We are focused on playing the long game so that we’re not finding ourselves in a situation where we’re procuring a bunch of different systems and then those systems don’t meet our needs in a year or two,” Cowger told the school board in May.

The district did not respond to questions from Chalkbeat Indiana about the second phase of the pilot program and future rules for student use of AI tools by deadline.

AI could support lesson plans, create reports

The draft policy states that AI must be used to produce equitable outcomes while also adhering to applicable federal laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which mandates the privacy of student records.

Staff must only use AI tools approved by the district, which would license the appropriate AI products, according to the draft policy. An “AI Advisory Committee” of administrators, teachers, and technology and legal experts would also provide input on the districtwide use of AI.

It’s unclear when the advisory committee would be created.

Acceptable uses of AI listed in the draft policy include using it to:

• Draft communications such as emails and newsletters
• Create data summaries or reports
• Support lesson planning
• Automate “repetitive, low-risk tasks”

The acceptable uses were shaped by this past school year’s pilot, which concluded that using AI helps staff do more complex analytical tasks with less human brainpower and capacity, Cowger told the board.

“It also allowed us to simplify administrative tasks,” she said. “Our schools send out newsletters every week. We also do district communication regularly. We have tools like a generative AI tool that can help us at least craft a first draft that doesn’t require 100% of human brainpower all the time.”

The first phase of the pilot included teachers, administrators, and central office staff.

Google Gemini will cost $177 per user in the second phase of the pilot program for 2025-26, Cowger said. The second, broader phase could help the district figure out how far it would like to stretch its use of AI going into the 2026-27 school year.

Cowger said the district’s “responsible use agreements” for district-issued technology, such as laptops, will also need to be updated to “encompass the world of AI.”

And although the district negotiated a cheaper cost per user for Gemini in the second phase of the pilot, Cowger said officials will have to think about the future potential cost if AI use grows districtwide.

Using free versions of AI tools comes with the risk of sharing sensitive student information — such as a student’s personalized education plan — on the internet, Cowger said.

The district has also outlined a “roadmap” for professional learning for staff that will be used in the upcoming school year.

“From hearing feedback from the pilot group over the course of this year we heard a lot of what people want to know. People want to know how the tools actually work. They understand it’s not magic, but they also don’t need to know all of the science behind it,” Cowger said. “Something in the middle that they need to understand.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Legislators in a state considered a leader in promoting charter schools, earlier this month also passed a law mandating the Indianapolis school district, the state’s largest and where 60% of students attend charters, work with the mayor and charter officials on a plan to share busing and school buildings. 

The two laws share a common theme: Both continue Indiana’s steady march toward treating charters – public schools that operate outside the purview of traditional school districts — as equal parts of the state’s education system. And in different ways, the bills chip away at districts’ longstanding and exclusive control of local taxes, school buildings and busing, giving charters a greater claim to assets they have long coveted. 

The laws’ impact could extend even further, with national charter advocates saying other states could use Indiana as a legislative model to provide charters across the country with more resources.

Few states have created as “robust” a structure for sharing property taxes with charters as Indiana, according to Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president of the National Alliance For Public Charter Schools.

“It’s a big step forward for charter school funding equity there,” said Ziebarth.  “It serves as a pretty powerful example to other states about what states should do for charter school students.”

“I think there’s a philosophical difference that people have…,” Ziebarth said. “Districts think ‘this belongs to us,’ whereas other folks think [it] belongs to the community. It’s been a philosophical split that’s been tough to break in a lot of places… and Indiana has done it.”

But school district officials say the state has only widened the gap between the district and charter families. Some Indiana residents have called the bills part of a plan to privatize education, pointing out that many public charters are run by private organizations.

“Many of our lawmakers, their top priority was not our children, but dividing our community,” Indianapolis school board member Allissa Impink said at the board’s meeting Thursday. 

Teachers unions and districts fought bitterly over the tax-sharing bill and a separate statewide tax cut that will cost districts millions more. So many in protest on April 14 that Indianapolis Public Schools and three other districts .

But Indiana charter advocates have praised the tax-sharing bill for closing what they see as an unfair gap in funding between charter and district schools, which one study estimates at , with districts spending $18,500 and charters $10,600. The difference in per pupil spending is mostly because, while district and charter schools receive state and federal aid, only school districts can raise money through property taxes. 

The new tax-sharing law would require that eligible charter schools receive a portion of local property taxes, funds that used to go entirely to districts for daily operations such as teachers’ salaries, books, hiring bus drivers and extracurriculars.

How much money each charter would receive would be based on the percentage of students living in the district who attend charter schools. The change could give charter schools nearly $4,000 more per student when fully phased in by 2031, advocates said. 

The new law affects an estimated 30 districts, including Indianapolis. 

Indiana isn’t the first to offer charter schools local tax dollars, but advocates say the state goes further than the limited ways other states do. Sometimes local property taxes are built into state school funding formulas, for example, or only charters created by the city or school district receive local revenue. 

The second law, aimed just at Indianapolis where charter students often have no transportation to school, would require city and school district officials to work with charters on a plan outlining how bus services and school buildings can be shared. 

“We’re really trying to share a significant number of assets that have never been shared before with charters and families,” said State Rep. Robert Behning, chair of the Indiana House education committee and author of the bus and facilities plan

Opponents of the plan say that gap could be addressed by giving charters more state money instead of splitting up local property tax funds.

“I want kids in all of our public schools to succeed, no matter the school type,” State Senator Andrea Hunley, an Indianapolis Democrat, said during the  debate on the bill. “But taking money from one of our systems that’s underfunded and giving it to another system that’s underfunded isn’t the way to do it, and it’s never going to be.”

The two laws come out of a state legislative session filled with conflict between districts and charter schools. Lines were drawn early, when legislators filed a bill that would wipe out the Indianapolis district and four others where charter schools educate the majority of students.

That bill never received a hearing, but drew an angry backlash from teachers, parents and district officials, particularly in Indianapolis, where charter schools draw increasing numbers of students away from district schools.

The tax-sharing bill followed soon after, with the Indianapolis Public Schools predicting the bill would force the district to close 20 schools, cut busing for students and likely hurt its partnership with some charter schools known as Innovation Schools.

The bill was scaled back before passing — delaying tax-sharing until 2028, phasing it in over four years and dropping a requirement that districts share property taxes passed specifically for building or updating school buildings.

It kept, however, the mandate that local property taxes for operations would have to be shared with charters. 

How much money would eventually be shared and the number of charters affected is unclear, which drew objections from Democrats as Republicans passed the bill. The state has estimated that $5.4 million would be shared in 2028.

The Indianapolis Public Schools has not shared its estimates of what the new laws would cost the district. 

Behning said his plan for the school district and charters to share and coordinate use of old school buildings and bus routes will also help the district pass tax increases. Charter school parents, the majority in the city, are more likely to vote for property tax increases if they will help their children’s schools. 

“There’s no way they could get a referendum approved right now if they did not voluntarily come together and try to do this alliance and try to figure out how to share,” Behning said.

Behning’s plan creates the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance which will review busing plans for district and charter students; along with sharing other resources such as available school buildings.The alliance will report its findings by Dec. 1. Recommendations are not binding.

Teachers are the in-school factor in student success, and higher is linked to lower test scores. Given this, districts and schools should do all they can to ensure that their educators feel empowered, supported and fulfilled in their jobs so they can drive the best outcomes for students. 

One of the best ways to make teachers feel more satisfied may be quite simple: Ask them what they think needs to change about their work, and partner with them to implement solutions.

That’s what Teach Indy, a nonprofit seeking to elevate the teaching profession in Indianapolis and beyond, sought to do by its Reimagining the Teacher Role Cohort (RTR Cohort) a year ago. This program brings together educators from across the city to collaborate with school administrators and experts in problem-solving to develop ways to improve the workplace so more educators stay in the classroom. 

The cohort was born of a desire to put teachers in charge of solving the challenge of educator retention. Rather than imposing top-down solutions, the program empowers educators — who best know the highs and lows of the profession — to come up with ideas for change and implement them. 

To start, Teach Indy partnered with an Indianapolis school district to pilot the program, and that district selected four schools to participate. Leaders at those schools were asked to identify classroom teachers who showed a desire to take on additional leadership responsibility. The 14 participating teachers — working together in teams of three or four from each school— met monthly with the outside experts to identify challenges in the teaching profession and brainstorm solutions. At the end of the program, the teachers put their ideas into practice at their schools with support from their administrators. 

One team created a teacher community called the Grow Gang Club that meets monthly to participate in team-building activities, complete professional development and foster personal relationships among educators, with the goal of strengthening their school’s culture of collaboration. The group also encourages shared learning through peer-to-peer mentorship and a podcast discussion group. They will measure success based on teachers’ participation, their satisfaction with professional development and engagement in shared projects. 

Another group aimed to support teacher morale and mental health by offering twice-monthly sessions that incorporate team-building and learning about topics such as student mental health. This group also assigned teachers to work on interdepartmental teams for a semester to encourage more idea-sharing on instructional practices, and it improved communication among teachers by launching a weekly print newsletter. To improve school culture and reinforce connections to students, the group created incentives for teachers to attend extracurricular activities and events. 

Two teams established mechanisms in their schools to help teachers reset and manage emotional stress. They created dedicated spaces that are designed to be relaxing, and if teachers need to visit the rooms to take a mental health break, there is a system to provide classroom coverage. The spaces also offer video recordings of lessons on strategies to cope with stress, with the goal of imparting coping strategies and decreasing use of the rooms over time.

Anecdotal feedback suggests these innovations have made a difference in the schools. But putting these ideas into practice does not seem to be the most powerful part of the experience.

What we learned is that the solutions themselves are not the most powerful aspect of this experience. Rather, what makes the biggest difference is the sheer act of giving teachers the opportunity, freedom and authority to lead outside the classroom. 

When we surveyed participants, 100% of respondents reported that the experience strengthened their professional skills, 86% said they’re more likely to stay in the profession in the near term because of the cohort and 71% said they’re more likely to stay over the long term because of it. 

Why? By collaborating with colleagues, developing new skills and being entrusted with developing ideas, teachers gained confidence.

“I have really appreciated the opportunity to use my ‘teacher brain’ in a different capacity, which has led me to see how I can problem solve in a bigger way,” one participant said in survey feedback. 

“It helped build up my faith in myself and to know that I have the support to do things (beyond the classroom),” another reported.

These insights provide school and district leaders with ways to approach changing school conditions to keep talent in the field. By empowering teachers to be leaders in their schools and beyond, schools help develop their leadership skills and provide them with a sense of purpose in making the profession better. 

Just as important, giving teachers opportunities to work with — and learn from — their peers helps them form a much-needed sense of community. And encouraging teachers to build relationships with fellow teaching professionals makes the field more attractive, because adult relationships are critically important.

Teachers are the engine that drives education forward. A key step to elevating their satisfaction and retention is asking for their input, as well as giving them the opportunity to drive change in their profession. The RTR Cohort offers one model for doing this. Scaling up these kinds of efforts can ensure they feel heard and respected as the community leaders they are.

There’s just one big drawback for Tyson in this city, where more than half of students attend charters  — transportation.

Tyson usually drops her son, who is 9, off with an aunt early each morning. The aunt then brings him and other kids to Paramount. “It’s a major issue,” said Tyson. “Parents like me have to reach out to other parents to get help.”

Like most other states, Indiana doesn’t require or pay for buses to bring charter students to classes, which advocates are pushing for as Indiana continues its aggressive support of charter and private schools. 

Republican legislators, who want an overhaul of school transportation, are considering two bills that would help charter and private schools with transportation.

One bill would combine busing for district, charter and private school students into a single system in Indianapolis and four other cities. The other bill gives charters more money, which could then be used for busing.

The lack of busing is such a hot-button issue that one Indiana charter network advertises on billboards that they offer students transportation. And one Indianapolis charter school director called the lack of busing “an equity issue.”

Some charter schools in Indianapolis — the city most affected by the bills — dig into their budgets to pay as much as $1 million a year for buses. Most, like Paramount, don’t want to sacrifice academics for transportation. That leaves parents like Tyson to fend for themselves, often making logistically complicated arrangements, such as carpooling with other families or relatives. It also means long lines of cars jamming streets around schools as parents line up to drop students off and pick them up.

Tyson and her aunt have developed “a system” to get their kids to school. “Some days I’m off work and I do the pickup, but it gets hard,” she said.

Transportation has long been a pressure point in Indiana and nationally for charter and voucher schools, with backers arguing students have to be able to get to a school for it to be a real choice. 

School districts often balk at paying to take students to schools they view as competition. Practically, district and charter school schedules don’t always align, creating conflicts around drop off and pickup times.

The education pro-charter advocacy group ExcelInEd rates Indiana as one of 20 states with “limited” transportation for charter and private school students. Neighboring states such as Illinois and Ohio, are rated as “fair” to charter students by offering similar busing as district students.

The busing bill has been put on hold, however, while the state is embroiled in a battle over the broader issue of how it pays for charter schools. Senate Bill 518, would shift some local property taxes from school districts to charters. It passed the Senate last month after heated debate.

The Indianapolis school board has pushed back, calling for a moratorium on adding new charter schools and maintaining local control. Board members and residents object to state plans to take money from the district and give it to charters, saying it would force them to close 20 schools.

Backers say sharing taxes is needed to close a funding gap between districts and charter schools — a gap of $8,000 in Indianapolis with the district spending $18,500 and charters $10,600. Critics say districts will have to close schools and cut programs if they lose money.

If passed, the tax-sharing bill could give charters enough money to afford buses for students. That’s one reason parents like Ada Remus, whose son attends Edison School of the Arts, an unusual independent school in Indianapolis, supports the tax-sharing, even as the Indianapolis Public Schools district opposes it.

“Even when great schools exist, they often lack transportation, leaving families like mine on the far east side without access,” Remus told the Indianapolis Public Schools board last week. “If funding were more equitable, more families, including mine, would have access to better schools without worrying about how to get there.” 

Other Indianapolis parents and teachers blasted state officials for threatening to take money away from the district and raised concerns over what might be cut.

“Everyone in this room, commissioners or not, must realize that for the foreseeable future, the state will be run by rural and suburban Republicans with neither interest in nor affection for the city of Indianapolis,” city resident Guthrie Beyer told the board.

Alecia Ostler, executive director of the Invent Learning Hub charter school, said she decided to pay for buses when the school launched six years ago to make sure transportation didn’t prevent families from enrolling. She now pays nearly $200,000 a year for three buses that transport 60 percent of her students. 

“This is inner-city, so quite honestly, there are just some situations where families are like, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with my child having to walk there,’” Ostler said. “But then we have some families that don’t have transportation, so they really lean on that bus. They’re not going to be able to get them here without that.”

“Transportation is an equity issue,” she added. “There needs to be consideration given to the needs of families.”

A small group of charter or independent schools avoid those expenses by partnering with the Indianapolis Public Schools as part of its unique Innovation Schools network — in which the district shares a mix of busing, school buildings and technology support with 30 schools that would typically be shunned as competitors.

District officials estimate they spend about $12 million a year to provide transportation for 17 of the 30 Innovation Schools. Those include KIPP Indy charter schools that boast of having “Transportation Available” on billboards promoting them.

“It’s core and essential to our model,” said Andy Seibert, KIPP Indy’s executive director.

Advocates are still holding out hope for a common transportation system that would drastically change school busing in the city. State Rep. Bob Behning, chairman of the House education committee, has proposed creating a central authority to oversee transportation for students of district, charter and private schools. 

Indianapolis Public Schools officials object to how Behning’s proposal would put busing under a new panel mostly appointed by state officials. District officials oppose the state’s Republican supermajority picking a panel overseeing the city’s largely minority and Democratic residents.

“The question really needs to be debated by the community instead of as a piece of legislation that comes down the pipeline,” said IPS Deputy Superintendent Andrew Strope. “It kind of takes away the power of the people through an elected board.”

The battle is playing out around three bills before the Indiana state legislature as it grapples with the rapid growth of charter schools, especially in Indianapolis. 

More than 60% of Indianapolis public school students attend charter schools, making the city a national leader to school choice advocates.

One of the three bills would have eliminated the Indianapolis Public Schools and four other districts, but failed to pass out of committee earlier this week. Instead, the bill that has gained the most traction would shift $80 million in local annual property taxes from school districts to charters. The move is aimed at closing a funding gap between district and charter schools which one study estimates at , with districts spending $18,500 and charters $10,600.

The state Senate passed that bill Wednesday after agreeing to delay some of the tax sharing until 2028. It now heads to the Indiana House.

State Sen. Linda Rogers, author of the bill, said local property taxes should “follow the student” to any school they choose, as state aid already does. 

“Local funding today… remains with the district, even though the student living in the district may not be receiving their education there,” Rogers said in a committee hearing on the bill last week that drew impassioned testimony from more than 50 supporters and critics.

“If you have thousands of students that you’re getting paid for, that you’re not educating, is that fair?” she added.

Kim Reier, vice president of strategy for the Indiana Charter School Alliance, said the state must stop “prioritizing institutions” like districts instead of individual schools.

“Families who choose charter schools still pay the same property taxes, yet those dollars remain locked in the districts that they no longer attend,” Reier testified.

But at the same hearing, Indianapolis Public Schools officials said the bill would devastate the district. Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said the bill would force the district to close 20 schools, cut busing for students and likely hurt its partnership with some charter schools known as Innovation Schools.

She also joined critics of charter school growth who say it has led to an “oversaturation” of schools in the city for the number of students.

“Because there are currently no limitations of the number of new charter schools that can be opened in our boundary, the dollars will continue to be more and more splintered until every school gets something, but no school gets enough,” Johnson said. 

The most extreme of the three bills — one that would wipe out the Indianapolis school district and turn all 50 of its schools over to charters — did not win enough support to even have a hearing. But it both loomed as a threat in case no funding changes pass and as a rallying cry for the district, which called on residents to fight to save its schools.

A third bill aimed at providing charters and private schools with two crucial needs — school buildings and busing — also awaits a hearing in the House Education Committee. That bill would appoint facilities and student transportation boards in Indianapolis and four other cities to take control of all district, charter and private school buses and buildings. Boards would include two appointees by the mayor, one by city council and two by state house and senate leaders.

The boards would then award buildings to school operators, district, charter and private, deemed most promising and coordinate busing for students of all schools in the city.

The bill calls for those panels to launch in the 2026-27 school year and take control of buildings over time, but legislators are considering delaying them to study how they would work. 

Rogers’ tax sharing bill drew support from charter schools, including the KIPP Indy and Adelante charter school operators, who run so-called Innovation Schools that have support of the school district and each have agreements to use varying combinations of school district buildings, buses and internet service.

Other prominent charter school operators, like the Paramount Schools of Excellence, which has four schools in Indianapolis, an online school and schools in Lafayette and South Bend, are not taking any public position.

Leaders of the Mind Trust and Stand For Children, nonprofit advocates of school choice, also testified in support of Rogers’ bill, praising it for trying to close a funding gap they say is unfair to charter students.

Both organizations, along with Rise Indy, another nonprofit, have been criticized in recent weeks by some Indianapolis Public Schools board members and residents for promoting charter schools using money from outside the state. 

Mind Trust CEO Brandon Brown said he is willing to “be a punching bag” if it leads to changes that help charter schools and students.

“I am happy to take any slings and arrows if it means that we’re going to be one step closer to a system that treats all kids fairly and with the respect that they deserve,” he said.

But teachers opposed the bill, as did parents of children in Indianapolis Public Schools.

Sally Sloan, executive director of the American Federation of Teachers of Indiana, said sharing tax money with charters would make school districts need more money and seek higher property taxes from voters.

And parents said they voted for property taxes to help the school district, not other schools.

“I just don’t think it should be the policy of the state to tell people how to spend their property tax revenue,” said Chris Kozak, parent of a student at the district’s Eleanor Skillen Montessori elementary school. “We voted for an additional levy for the Indianapolis public schools. I don’t think I would have voted for it if I had known this was going to come.”

Others called it “taxation without representation” since charter schools don’t have elected school boards.

“I think it’s another handout, an unearned handout, to charter schools, of which one in three will fail, most likely due to mismanagement, not because of outcomes,” said Mark Latta, father of a student at the Theodore Potter Spanish language elementary school. “Schools without public oversight are not public schools.”

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

A state bill introduced earlier this month comes as elected officials tackle an issue facing cities across the country: how to share state and property tax dollars between public schools that are losing students and charter schools that are gaining them.

The bill targets districts where so many students have left for charter and private schools that fewer than half remain in district schools.

It would shut all five districts, including the Gary Community School Corporation near Chicago, by 2028. Schools would then be turned over to charter schools that would be overseen by new panels appointed by the governor, Indiana charter school boards and local officials. 

If passed, experts say it would be an unprecedented action against a city school district, reaching far beyond temporary state takeovers — and even the reshaping of New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“It is sending a message to several school districts that things have to change,” said 

State Rep. Robert Behning, chair of the house education committee where the bill will have its first hearings. “Status quo is not okay.”

Behning said the bill goes too far for his comfort, but it is forcing a discussion about how to better support charter and voucher schools that are popular in the state.

“It’s actually encouraging some districts to come up with strategies that could improve academic success for all students,” Behning said.

“I authored this legislation… to find solutions in districts where the current governance is failing its students,” said bill author Jake Teshka, a Republican from the South Bend area.

In Indianapolis, less than 40 percent of students attend schools run by the district. Enrollment fell by more than 900 students in the last year to about 20,000. 

Nearly 27,000 other Indianapolis students attend charter schools or Innovation Schools, an the district helped create. 

The funding difference between traditional districts and charter schools is also driving the bill. A 2023 study found Indianapolis Public Schools spent $18,500 per student with the help of local property taxes, while charters spent roughly $10,600.

Bill author Jake Teshka, a Republican from the South Bend area, said it is unfair for parents that send children to charter schools to pay property taxes to the school district where charters receive little property tax money or transportation for students.

“Their property taxes are funding a school system they don’t attend,” he said in a written statement to The 74. “This is an important conversation to have.”

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EDChoice, a national organization promoting charter schools and vouchers, praised the bill for calling attention to the “monopoly” districts have on property taxes even as their enrollments fall and charters grow.

“They’re only educating 30 percent of the kids, and they’re getting 100 percent of the dollars,” Enlow said. “There’s a dramatic and systemic problem with districts who can’t even attract one out of two of their students.” 

The proposal drew immediate protest from the Indianapolis school board, which said the bill “threatens local authority and community control of public schools.”

The Indiana State Teachers Association also opposes the bill.

“Rather than supporting schools and addressing critical issues like poverty and underfunding, House Bill 1136 would unfairly target districts based on student transfers,” union president Keith Gambill wrote. 

The bill also has notable critics in the national charter community, who would prefer a more moderate way of providing charter and voucher schools more resources.

“It’s a bad idea, for several reasons,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which backs school choice. Petrilli said districts serving only about half of the students still serve a lot of them and a change can’t happen quickly.

He also said the bill could also bring an unintended backlash.

“Proposals like these give ammunition to opponents who argue that charters are out to destroy traditional public education,” he said. “That’s not what the vast majority of charter leaders and educators are trying to do. We want the public schools to respond to competition and get better.”

He added, however, “If policymakers wanted to force IPS and similar districts to close some of its under enrolled schools, that I would support.”

The National Association of Public Charter Schools directed questions to Scott Bess, a member of both the Association’s board and of the Indiana State Board of Education. Bess is also founder of the new Indiana Charter Innovation Center, which is

Bess wants to find more ways to share property tax revenue, busing and school buildings with charter schools. He’d like to expand on two bills the state legislature passed in 2023 that – gains from both increased property values and from passing new taxes – with charters based on the percentage of students they serve.

“If a charter school has 10% of the students who live in that district, then they would get 10% of the proceeds,” Bess said.

He also wants the state to create a regional board as a pilot program to treat all charter, private and district schools in a region as common property, then allocate buildings and busing to operators as best serves students.. Such a plan would be similar to states that have countywide school districts that share all resources with charter schools, he said, 

For such a board to work, districts and charters alike would have to  give up control of buildings and money to the board. That could be a sticking point, Bess said.

“This is where everything gets complicated,” Bess said. “This is why no one has solved this issue across the country, because it’s really complicated.”

Several other local officials, including two former Indianapolis mayors, have joined the call to send more resources – cash, busing or buildings – to charters. In a letter to the Indianapolis Public Schools, they in the city.

“We call on IPS and legislative leaders to ensure all public school students within IPS boundaries are served by a system that uses its resources fairly and efficiently,” said the letter from former mayors Bart Peterson and Greg Ballard joined by four other current or former city and school officials.

Maggie Lewis, majority leader of the Indianapolis City-County Council and a signer of the letter, said she opposes the bill to close the district. She wants the school board to be part of a local plan to help charters, not one forced by the state. She also said that penalizing the district because it lost students to Innovation Schools it helped create sends the wrong message.

“For over two decades, Indianapolis has been known as a hotbed for education innovation,” the letter states. “Now it is time for Indianapolis leaders to ensure we sustain this progress through needed structural changes.”

Indianapolis Public Schools enrollment has dropped by roughly 3.7% in schools it manages directly since last school year.

The decline of roughly 800 students was driven almost entirely by falling middle school enrollment. IPS enrollment in the district’s non-charter schools now stands at 21,055, according to state data released last month. In grades 6-8, the decline was 778 students.

Enrollment in charter schools that are part of the district’s grew by 717 students, shoring up the district’s total enrollment across all school types. Yet total enrollment including Innovation charters still dropped slightly, from 32,212 to 32,126.

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The enrollment loss turns up the pressure on IPS in several ways. It means less per-pupil state funding for a district already facing a challenging future. IPS already grapples with a robust school choice environment that is only growing. It once additional property taxes from the 2018 operating referendum expire in 2026. The decline could draw more scrutiny of the district’s that relies heavily on .

And as the state’s legislative session begins, charter advocates and lawmakers are calling for changes that could wreck the district financially — or even , as one bill calls for. The school board, meanwhile, has been meeting regularly in executive session to discuss school consolidation since November.

Still, the district said in a statement that it believes middle school enrollment will rebound, just as high school enrollment has increased to a higher figure than before the .

And while the district said it expected a decrease in the number of middle school students due to the creation of standalone middle schools, it said middle school enrollment has been trending upward since the statewide count day in October. The data released last month comes from data from count day, the day when schools must record enrollment under state law.

“We’re going to be working very hard to make sure our families continue to see the value of what those middle schools are offering,” said Deputy Superintendent Andrew Strope.

IPS hopes to examine middle schooler departures

Even before the pandemic that exacerbated , IPS steadily lost students annually at rates of around 3% to 4% from 2016 to 2020.

The district’s Rebuilding Stronger plan adopted in 2022 represents an attempt to right-size the district and amid enrollment declines. It includes breaking up K-6 and K-8 schools to once again create standard middle schools for grades 6-8.

But the reconfiguration , particularly from parents of the district’s choice magnet schools who favored the K-8 model. The middle school configuration had a rocky rollout this year — most notably at Broad Ripple Middle School, where after parents complained of an unsafe environment, a lack of communication, and general disorganization.

Still, officials consider Rebuilding Stronger’s a positive change.

“It is difficult that we lost that many students,” said Patrick Herrell, the district’s director of enrollment. “But in my mind, it is much more important that now all students get this opportunity, and we can build on that success and start growing our numbers.”

At district-run schools, there was a net gain of six students at the elementary school level from last year, in part due to growth in . IPS lost 24 students at the high school level.

The district also considers enrollment at its Innovation Network charter schools as a positive. The district counts the enrollment and test scores at these schools as part of its own, although the Indiana Department of Education separates the two.

IPS said in its statement that schools are increasing recruitment and retention efforts for rising middle school students, including field trips to potential schools for fifth graders.

“Middle school principals have been meeting with families at 5th grade feeder schools, and the district is following up with all middle school families who left the district to better understand their experiences and ensure the improvements we make address families’ needs and concerns as we try to bring families back into IPS,” the district said.

Charter school enrollment is stagnant

Enrollment at charter schools not affiliated with IPS changed minimally, dropping by 46 students from 2023-24. The figure includes charters in IPS borders or those outside of the district that still enroll a majority of IPS students. It excludes adult high schools and blended or virtual schools.

The demographics between charter schools and traditional IPS schools continue to differ slightly. IPS educates a lower percentage of Black students and students receiving free or reduced-price meals than the charter sector, but has a higher rate of students with disabilities.

Upcoming legislative session could pose threat to IPS

Several proposals in the state legislature could compound the district’s problems.

A bill from Republican Rep. Jake Teshka of North Liberty would require districts in which more than half of students living within the district boundaries enroll in a school not operated by the district to dissolve. It would also require those districts’ schools to transition into charter schools. The bill, HB 1136, would in practice dissolve IPS and four other districts statewide, according to its .

And a new charter advocacy group, the Indiana Charter Innovation Center, will push for charters to receive the same amount of funding from property taxes as traditional district schools receive. IPS is already required to share a portion of property tax revenue with charters — a cost previously estimated at $4 million for this school year — but the proposal would reduce the district’s operating revenue even further.

School board members to dissolve the district, saying in a statement on Tuesday that it would destabilize the district’s financial foundation and jeopardize the education of tens of thousands of students.

Teshka’s bill “threatens to cause massive disruption to our public school system, diverting attention and resources away from the vital education and support our students need to succeed,” Board President Angelia Moore said at the meeting.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

That’s not the weighty middle-aged regret of lost dreams. It’s the lament of an Indianapolis high school senior who waited until late into his sophomore year – Gasp! – to take advantage of the college classes Indiana offers high schoolers for free or little cost.

Indiana is one of the few states where starting college as a high school sophomore makes you a late bloomer. The state ranks just behind Idaho in leading an early college credit movement, as states increasingly encourage high school students to take college classes, most often at community colleges.

In Idaho and Indiana, high school students make up more than half the students in community college classes, according to a. Iowa and Montana follow, with high schoolers representing more than 40% of community college enrollment, and eight other states comprising more than 30% of enrollment. 

On the other end, states such as Rhode Island and Connecticut haven’t joined the push, with high schoolers making up just 6% and 10% of community college students, respectively.

High school students have long been able to get a head start on college credits, traditionally by taking accelerated Advanced Placement classes and accompanying national Advanced Placement tests that started in the 1950s. Colleges then decide which credits to award based on the test scores. The College Board still offers 39 AP course guidelines and tests each year.

But earning early college credit has become more urgent the last few decades, as college costs have exploded and employers increasingly require study beyond high school. So states have seen dramatic increases in “early college,” “dual enrollment” or “dual credit” where high school students take classes on college campuses or high school teachers offer college classes.

Those approaches have allowed the number of high school students earning college credit to more than double since 2011 to 1.5 million a year, according to the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. About 75% are enrolled in community colleges and the rest in four-year schools. Columbia researchers also estimate that more than a third of high schoolers take at least one college class before graduating.

“The pitch to communities and families and students is…get your first year of college out of the way in high school, or get it done in high school,” said researcher John Fink. “That’s a very compelling affordability pitch to students and families and obviously that’s an important issue on everybody’s mind.”

In a state as aggressive as Indiana, it’s normal for students like Torres, a student at l Believe Circle City High School, to be taking quantitative reasoning at Ivy Tech Community College this fall after taking psychology and introduction to criminology as a junior.

“I was kind of just in trouble all the time,” Torres said of himself as a freshman. “I didn’t really care about school stuff. It wasn’t until last year where I started actually doing my work and decided to take dual enrollment seriously.”

“Now I’m kind of trying to rush things,” said Torres, who wants to earn a degree before starting a career as a police officer. “I kind of wish I started early when they had given me the opportunity.”

Fink and other Columbia researchers reported in October that students taking college classes early are in college right after high school and are more likely to earn technical certificates, associates and bachelors degrees.

Taking classes directly through a college allows students to receive credits automatically, which is often more attractive to students than AP classes that rely on test scores to turn into credits, said Julie Edmunds, director of the Early College Resource Center at the University of North Carolina -Greensboro. 

“When all the college credit relies on passing a single exam on a single day, there are students who aren’t going to be successful in that kind of environment, and the proportion of AP takers that actually receive credit is much lower,” Edmunds said.

Other factors make taking college classes attractive to some students, including letting students intimidated by college test it out or colleges offering classes like advanced physics or foreign languages that their high schools can’t provide.

Still, though almost all states allow high schoolers to take college classes, there’s no consensus on how much to encourage and how to pay for it. A found a wide variation in the training teachers need to teach college classes, which students can take them and who pays for them.

Twenty-six states required high school students to meet a college’s entrance requirements first, the study found, while others do not. Nineteen states required students to have a recommendation from a school official, while others require students to pass tests or just let students decide on their own.

States also differ on which community college classes automatically count toward four-year degrees.

And states are divided on who pays for early credits, the study found, with states like Alabama and South Carolina requiring high school students to pay full tuition rates and states like Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Washington, D.C. covering the entire cost of the classes.

The Idaho State Board of Education attributes its high rate of community college enrollment on the state’s Advanced Opportunities program, which gives students up to $4,625 to pay for college classes.

And there are big differences too between students who just enroll in some college classes and those in so-called “early college high schools,” where college credit is prioritized and schools offer more specialized counseling and specific courses to help students succeed.

“If you’re expanding access to college,you can’t just throw everybody in college courses without giving them some level of support,” Edmunds said. 

In Indiana, where officials boast of being a national leader in early credits, having one single community college, Ivy Tech, with 45 campuses around the state under one umbrella, makes coordinating between schools easier.

The state also made course credits more valuable starting in 2013 by creating the , a collection of 30 college credits – some math, some English, some science, some social studies – guaranteed to transfer to any public institution in the state. That lets students know classes they take in high school will count at any public, and some private, school they choose.

The state also encourages high schools to offer classes in that core to students, so that some will complete it by graduation. 

Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Chris Lowery said high schools slowly started making these classes available, with 84 of about 500 offering it three years ago. He said he and state education superintendent Katie Jenner, have pressed other schools to add it, growing that number to 275. 

That often means having teachers like Brooklyn Raines, an English teacher at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, teach Ivy Tech classes at the school. Though an employee of Indianapolis Public Schools, Raines had to apply to Ivy Tech as an instructor, attend early college training over the summer and have her curriculum for Introduction to Creative Writing approved by the community college’s English department.

She now teaches that class at Crispus Attucks three days a week on behalf of Ivy Tech. Though there can be worries that college level work is too much for high school students who are younger and haven’t learned as much as older students, Raines said her students are capable.

“Despite the stigma that they aren’t traditional college students, so they can’t retain the information, or they can’t keep up with the information, they prove time and time and again that they can,” Raines said.

Other times, students take Ivy Tech classes online. That’s how Layla Kpotufe, a fellow senior at the same high school as Torres, took a world politics class last year that has her debating whether to continue on a political science path or follow a previous interest in neuroscience.

Kpotufe, who has already earned an associates degree in general studies, said the Ivy Tech classes could cut her costs for her bachelors degree nearly in half.

“It would definitely take a lot of money off,” she said. “That’s why I think Ivy Tech is a really good opportunity for people, especially if you want to stay in state.”

“What do I actually need from the customer?” Besler asks the second year apprentices, all 17 or 18 years old at the wirtschaftsschule — business school. 

“It’s really important that you know why these documents are being requested,” he tells them in German as part of their kreditprozess — credit process — class. “A few are simple and obvious, such as a standard ID card … And of course I also want to see how much he earns.”

Created in 2003 by Switzerland’s five largest banks, the CYP banking school is unlike any in the United States. With 30 partnering banks, it’s a school where apprentices — many of them teenagers who would still be in high school in the U.S. — learn banking skills letting them work in any bank in the country.

Now, the Indiana Bankers Association wants to create a version of CYP in Indianapolis as part of the state’s push to reinvent high schools and offer more meaningful work opportunities for students.

The association plans to start a statewide banking apprenticeship by the fall of 2025 where high school juniors and seniors are paid to work and train at banks as often as three days a week, and attend high school the other two.

Though common in Europe, Indiana’s new apprenticeship program would be one of the first large-scale white-collar apprentice programs in the U.S. Traditionally, building trades apprenticeships have dominated here.

Apprentices would rotate between bank departments for two years, sometimes directly working with customers and handling accounts, with the possibility of doing a third year while also attending college.

Students will also receive extra training in banking skills at a new state Financial Services Academy based on CYP. The association will host at its 75-seat training center it already uses for adults. Students would likely take classes there once a month, as Swiss apprentices do at CYP, either in person or live online if they are in other parts of the state.

The Academy could later expand to include other financial industries such as insurance.

The new banking apprenticeships, along with a similar effort with hospitals, will be the first steps in Indiana’s goal of better serving the 60% of high school students in the state who never attend college and earn any degree.

Indiana Fifth Third Bank regional president Michael Ash visited CYP and member banks in Switzerland twice over the last two years as Indiana leaders crafted a plan unveiled this month to create thousands more apprenticeships. Those visits taught him the state could adapt and create opportunities for high school students that also would help banks.

“It’ll give the student a lot more experience and…it will give the employer an opportunity to have an employee doing real work,” Ash told The 74. “I think it’s a win-win for the student and for the company.” 

Though some U.S. banks and insurance companies have hired apprentices, including J.P. Morgan Chase and Zurich insurance, the new academy is likely the first in the U.S. where multiple banks jointly train apprentices of competitors, as well as of their own company. 

The American Bankers Association and several youth apprenticeship experts were unable to identify any other school like it.

Cooperation and agreement between banks on the key skills they all want employees to have, then to consistently teach those to apprentices, is a key part of the European apprentice model. 

“It hasn’t been in an organized fashion (in the U.S.) before where the trade association is involved and also educating the students, which is a big piece of this,” said Amber Van Til, president of the Indiana association. “It’s going to give the banks the confidence that they (students) have also had the educational training that they need to be workforce ready.”

The state legislature and department of education are reworking state diploma requirements to give students more course credit, and flexibility of class schedules, when students pursue work experience and training while still in school.

At the same time, teams of leaders from the manufacturing, medical and financial service industries have visited Switzerland to learn from a country where about two thirds of students use apprenticeships to learn a career or launch into further study.

Those trips have included stops to the CYP campus in Zurich, one of 12 in the country, that train about 6,000 apprentices a year combined.

In classrooms carved out of a rehabilitated former foundry, apprentices take classes starting at age 16 or 17 that progress from the basics of retail banking — working with customers at the front desk — to how banks operate, how stock markets work, how to handle mortgage or construction loans and later investment banking by their third and final year.

Altogether, CYP teaches apprentices 87 specific skills over the three years, such as this one:

1.7.4.1 Describing the range of accounts: I can list the various products within my bank‘s range of accounts and name the segment specific offers (e.g. youth savings account), their characteristics and particularities

(e.g. handling children‘s assets)

Simon Stadler, CEO of the 12-campus CYP system, said Swiss parents often prefer their children go to universities instead of doing apprenticeships, just like in the U.S. But the Swiss still regard apprenticeships highly and there are real practical advantages to learning a job through them.

“Afterwards, you’re able to do it,” Stadler said. “You’re able to work from the first day in the bank, because you already know it. You have the experience and you also know how it works in real life.”

Being able to learn the different departments of a bank drew Chantal Rupff to become a banking apprentice.

“You get many opportunities during your apprenticeship,” said Rupff, 17 when this reporter visited CYP in 2022. “We get to see a lot of different departments — we change departments every half a year — so it’s really cool.”

Apprentice Nuzla Issadeen had a chance to go to university at 16, which the Swiss system allows, but chose to be a banking apprentice instead.

“I think that’s way too young to just go to school and study all the time,” she said at 18. “I’ve been in school since the age of five, I guess, so it wasn’t for me. I wanted to try something new. I wanted to earn money. “

Apprentice Noemi Cattolico also preferred having the hands—on experience of her apprenticeship, instead of the pure academics of students who go to university.

“They might be much more intelligent in what concerns studying, but if we’re talking about experience in life, and such things, and actually understanding others and understanding how the world works, they have absolutely no knowledge,” said Cattolico, 18 at the time.

CYP has shared its curriculum and overall banking apprenticeship plan with Indiana, which plans to adapt it slightly for the new academy.

“We’re going to probably stick pretty close to the Swiss model,” said Van Til. “It’s very well developed…the tracks that they have, the rotations that they have, the education CYP is providing is pretty much in line.”

Van Til said that though students will learn basic interaction with customers, they won’t be limited to just being traditional tellers, whose role she said has expanded over the years. They won’t be funneled into high—stakes investment banking either.

“Just because you come in the bank and you want to be an investment banker doesn’t mean that’s where you’re going to end up,” she said. “We’re going to assess the student while they’re there, see where we think their skill set is and try and direct them to where we think would best be a fit.”

“Are they good at writing?” she asked. “Are they good at communication? Do they like marketing? Do they like working with customers? Are they better behind the desk? Maybe loan processing. (We’re) seeing what their skill sets are, and then matching them up upon graduation.”

How much demand Indiana high school students will have for banking apprenticeships isn’t clear. Students who have test — driven banking through internships at a bank branch located at Zionsville Community High School northwest of Indianapolis were intrigued.

Mann Patel, now a sophomore majoring in finance at Indiana University, interned at the branch of Star Bank as a senior in 2023. That internship, just an hour a day for a semester, taught him enough about banking that he decided to continue pursuing the field, possibly focusing on wealth management.

But committing to that path in 11th grade would have been too much for him, even if more hands-on work than what the internship offered would have been tempting.

“Probably senior year I would have definitely considered it,” Patel said. “Going into college? Yeah. But junior year, if it’s two or three days full time, I probably would not have.”

Akshara Amuhadin, a junior interning at that branch now, also hopes to find a career in finance. She said she likes hands-on learning and would likely try the new apprenticeship.

“If you know for sure that this is the career that you want to go into, that’d be a really great way to get some real world experience about banking,” she said.

Fifth Third’s Ash said he believes both banks and students will take advantage of apprenticeships that are long overdue.

“When you see CYP and you see the students this seems so obvious,” he said. “You kind of kick yourself, like, why haven’t we done this sooner? Because it makes so much sense. But you know, we’re starting now, right? So we’ll get there.”

This article was published with the support of the Spencer education reporting fellowship at Columbia University.

But in recent years, my home state of Indiana has shown that a better approach is possible by tracking and life-outcome metrics such as income and employment five years after high school graduation. 

Indiana Secretary of Education Dr. Katie Jenner should be commended for these efforts, and more states should emulate this approach. That would nudge schools to tailor their work towards helping students build the skills and mindsets to succeed in life, better meeting the interests of families and community. 

How can schools do this effectively at scale?

One model lies in Christel House International, which for years has been measuring success based on our ability to help students from under-resourced backgrounds achieve economic mobility. Our global network includes no-fee private schools in India, Jamaica, Mexico, and South Africa, and in the U.S., both public charters and schools operated in partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools.

A major component of the Christel House model is our College & Careers program. Every Christel House student is paired with a coach starting in high school to help provide mentorship, guidance, and personalized support in preparing for post-high school education and the workforce. Students also gain valuable career exposure and process those experiences with their coaches, helping them better understand their interests and strengths. 

Critically, the coaches remain with students for five years after graduation so they can help troubleshoot the challenges that come with navigating postsecondary education or the working world. And students are guaranteed access to financial support for five years post-graduation to help address unanticipated life events that can derail progress.

Data on our graduates’ outcomes affirms that our approach is working. In our home base of Indianapolis, for example, the Indiana Department of Education reported that across our first four graduating cohorts, Christel House Indianapolis alumni are the second highest income-earners on average among public school graduates in the city five years after high school graduation, and they’re the top income earners among Indianapolis public schools serving a high percentage of students from low-income backgrounds. Globally, 95% of recent Christel House graduates are employed or in school, and 72% of graduates demonstrate upward economic mobility at age 23. 

We arrived at this approach based on our longstanding mission – established by our founder, entrepreneur Christel DeHaan – that schools’ role should be elevating the life outcomes of students, especially those who are experiencing poverty. Decades ago, our inaugural high school graduates performed well academically, but some of them struggled to successfully transition to life beyond high school. We knew we needed to revise our approach to better support their success, and we have been refining our model ever since. 

We still have room to grow. For example, while our U.S. students’ average annual incomes of approximately $37,000 five years after graduation help them achieve livable wages relative to median income in Indiana, we aim to elevate that average so that students who graduate from our schools feel financially secure sooner. A 2023 survey revealed that 76% of Christel House Indianapolis graduates feel comfortable paying their bills each month, but only 43% have savings to cover a large, unexpected expense. 

In efforts to improve education, it’s critical not to lose sight of our original goal: helping students build a good, successful, and productive life. That’s why Christel House expanded its College & Careers program into four schools outside of our network for the first time this year, with $1.5 million in public and private funding. More states should put funding behind this outcomes-oriented approach, which would yield a great return on a modest public investment. 

The more we look at data that measures life outcomes, the more we can design interventions that put students’ long-term success at the center. That will produce an immense positive outcome for our education system – and the students who most need our support.

Ten years ago, Camden Prep became one of the first schools in New Jersey’s to attempt to resuscitate a chronically poor-performing elementary school.

That same year, Maurquay Moody started fourth grade at Camden Prep, in a classroom dubbed “The College of New Jersey.” Uncommon Schools, the nonprofit charter operator tasked with turning around Maurquay’s neighborhood school, names each classroom after a college in an effort to raise postsecondary expectations.

The state had recently taken control of K-12 schools in Camden, a city then-Gov. Chris Christie had called “a human catastrophe.” Barely 20% of students could read at grade level, and fewer than half graduated high school. Twenty-three of the city’s 26 schools were among the lowest-achieving in the state. 

Over the next few years, like many other urban districts beset by plummeting property values and spiking rates of poverty and crime, Camden welcomed several new public charter schools and turned over its most chronically failing schools to education nonprofits, which rebranded them as renaissance schools. 

Today, Camden is considered one of the country’s most innovative districts. More than two-thirds of students attend public charter or renaissance schools, enrollment is climbing and the city is steadily, if incrementally, closing performance gaps among low-income kids.

To be sure, the school system has a long way to go: The majority of students still don’t read on grade level, chronic absenteeism is on the rise and budget constraints present a serious challenge. 

But shows that low-income kids in Camden boosted their proficiency on state standardized exams by 21 points between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years. And in doing so, they closed a longstanding performance gap with peers statewide by 42%. 

Maurquay was among those who benefited from this evolution. And in a full-circle testament to just how far the city has come, in August he stepped onto The College of New Jersey’s real-life campus as a freshman – a first-generation college student with a full scholarship. 

Camden isn’t the only low-income city where students in charter or renaissance-like schools are closing learning gaps with their more affluent peers. 

A from the Progressive Policy Institute finds that over the last decade, low-income students in large districts that aggressively expanded public school choices have started to catch up to their peers statewide — and performance levels are rising in both charter and district-led schools. In fact, in the 10 districts with the highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, low-income students citywide closed the gap with statewide test score averages by 25% to 40%. (The analysis doesn’t include New Orleans, where 100% of district students attend charter schools.)

“We just wanted to … see if the impact was spilling over,” says Tressa Pankovits, co-director of PPI’s Reinventing Public Schools project. “We were really surprised by the amount of gap closure between students citywide and the statewide averages. It wasn’t just single digits. It was well into double digits.” 

The analysis examined data from cities across the country where a majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and where at least a third of kids attend a public charter or charter-like school. The researchers used average standardized test scores from third through eighth grade. 

The researchers underscored that the one-third proportion is not a guaranteed or proven tipping point, but that in nearly every case where those schools reached or exceeded that enrollment level, academic growth rose across the city for all low-income students.

“There has been slow but steady progress in Camden,”says Giana Campbell, executive director of the Camden Education Fund. “Sure, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but when we look at where the city was 10 years ago, we’re really, really encouraged by the progress that we’re seeing across the city.”

“We knew a time in Camden where we didn’t have this diversity of school types and progress wasn’t what it is today. The proficiency scores in Camden in 2010 were just criminal. There wasn’t much lower we could go,” she says. “And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that being one of the most innovative school systems, with all these different school types, that we’ve been able to see the progress that we have today.”

New Jersey is home to another standout in PPI’s report: Newark, where 35% of students are enrolled in public charter schools and the performance gap closed by 45% across the same 12-year period.

Missouri boasts two school systems making similar progress. In Kansas City, where 46% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all students closed by 31% between the 2010-11 school year and 2022-23. And in St. Louis, where 39% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap closed by 30%.

Hannah Lofthus, founder and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, says the report’s findings reflect what she has experienced over the last 15 years in Kansas City, which offers enrollment in neighborhood schools; charter schools; “signature” schools, which focus on college preparation; and career and technical schools. Kauffman consists of two charter middle schools and a charter high school.

“We said, ‘How can we figure out what works for kids and then replicate that,’” she explains. The daughter of two public school teachers, she says collaboration among the various types of schools in the city has been key to the big gains posted by low-income students. “We have kids coming to us in fifth grade 15% proficient in reading and math, and they leave somewhere around 70% proficient.”

Pankovits cautions that the analysis shows correlation, not causation. And while the increases demonstrate significant academic growth, proficiency is still low for the majority of students in these districts. 

But Pankovits also says the report refutes that charters drain district schools of the best students and resources, to the detriment of those left behind. Instead, she argues, the increasing enrollment in charter schools creates “a positive competitive dynamic,” and that the report’s findings should bolster policymakers’ confidence in the potential for fixing underperforming schools for all students in low-income communities. 

Effectively, a rising tide lifts all boats: When looking only at traditional district schools in Camden, for example, low-income students closed 35% of the proficiency gap during the same decade-long window, versus 42% for the district overall.

Like Camden, Indianapolis has traditional district schools, charters and so-called innovation schools that it uses to drive its academic turnaround. The report found that in the city, where 58% of students are enrolled in public charter schools or innovation schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all kids statewide closed by 23% between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years.

“The report confirms what we’ve seen in Indianapolis for a long time,” says Brandon Brown, CEO of the , a nonprofit that supports the city’s charter and innovation schools. “And a lot of the evidence shows that the growth of high-quality charter schools does not come at the expense of the school district. It really tends to lift many of the outcomes for schools of all types.”

“I think we’ve shown in Indianapolis that it’s hard and it’s not a straight line and we don’t always agree, but when these systems work together, the chances that kids are going to benefit will go way up,” he says. “And I think we’ve seen that here very clearly.”

The report comes as America’s schools are still trying to chart a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which set students back academically and decreased enrollment. A from National Alliance for Public Charter Schools finds that over the past five years, charter schools gained nearly 400,000 students, while district schools lost 1.75 million. Hispanic and Black families are increasingly choosing charters, the report shows, with Hispanic enrollment growing 18 times faster in charters than in district schools. 

In Indianapolis, enrollment is on the rise, and at the highest point in more than a decade — a fact Brown credits to the public school choices that families have. For the first time, he says, parents from adjacent school districts are opting into the city system. 

“Large urban districts across the country that are facing massive enrollment declines should look at Indianapolis and see the collaboration to create high-quality options for families, and see it as a way to mitigate negative impacts on enrollment,” Brown says. “When system leaders can work together, it tends to grow enrollment, and that stands in stark contrast to a lot of school districts across the country.”

Correction: The former Camden Prep student’s name is Maurquay Moody.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, for most places in the world, it isn’t. That’s because most countries fund a wide variety of schools and hold them all accountable for academic results. This approach is called educational pluralism, and it animates school systems from Europe to Asia, from Canada to Australia and across southern Africa. The Netherlands funds 36 kinds of schools equally; the government of Indonesia supports secular and religious schools alike; the Australian federal government is the top funder of independent schools in the country because of their ability to close achievement gaps for low-income students. In fact, tracked by UNESCO rely on public-private partnerships, the volunteer sector and community organizations to deliver education for all.

In U.S. terms, educational pluralism means school choice and accountability by design. It acknowledges that schools that reflect distinctive norms and values often bring real benefits to students — so these governments fund a variety of school types. It also assumes that education is not merely a private good, but also a common project whose outcomes affect society as a whole; therefore, public concern and oversight of academic content is appropriate. 

Educational pluralism is not perfect, but if implemented with care, it can function as an escape valve against constant conflict; while it deliberately honors families’ diverse values, it also builds social cohesion by insisting that everyone share a broad base of knowledge, such as capital cities of the world, 20th century poetry, the history and impact of the American Revolution or the tenets of major religions. This common content would include, as a matter of course, exposure to a variety of viewpoints and beliefs without indoctrinating students as to their merits. For instance, the English government has funded religious schools since 1834 and secular schools since 1870, but all students in all schools learn about diverse religions and philosophies.

Here are three practical steps toward the pluralist ideal that elected officials and candidates alike in the U.S. could get behind.

The first step: Find a cross-partisan message that invites rather than condemns. This means putting down rhetorical weapons and eschewing charged terms such as “educational marketplace” (on the right) or “privatization” (on the left).

Second, focus on initiatives that welcome all schools. High-quality curriculum and instruction is a good place to start. Teachers in every school need access to rigorous materials that challenge students’ minds and enliven their hearts. They also need time to learn what the materials require in the classroom. This is exactly what a state department of education can provide across the board, and many — including — already do, though only for those who work in district schools. Why not teachers in any type of school?

Third, build the infrastructure to support both choice and quality. A great example is Indianapolis’s , a nonprofit that, since 2006, has recruited teachers into the state, launched four dozen charter schools and partnered with the city’s public school district to design schools that by design meet their communities’ specific needs. They don’t pit schools against each other; rather, they help all schools in Indianapolis grow stronger. Since 2021, the organization has partnered with the Indiana General Assembly and the state Department of Education to accelerate students’ academic recovery, in two ways. Indiana Learns gives eligible students access to math and reading tutoring, and Summer Learning Labs offer a rigorous, five-week, free or low-cost summer academic and enrichment program. The nation needs more of such thoughtful approaches that champion instead of demeaning teachers and set a high bar for academic success.

Policies that fund a variety of schools with distinctive world views, while incentivizing the use of curricula that build robust knowledge across the major subjects, would constitute an unfamiliar “both/and” to an American audience. This approach asks a lot of teachers, parents and young people. But if Belgium, South Africa and many Canadian provinces can lean into productive pluralism, so can the United States.

“She’s going to be an astronaut,” boasted David Haggard as she started kindergarten at Indianapolis’ new . 

Amelia, just 5 and already wearing a Girls IN STEM shirt, smiled and bashfully buried her face in her shoulder. “She’s just big into science,” Haggard explained.

Parents of the 65 girls who have enrolled in the all-girls elementary charter school told similar stories at its opening on Aug. 1. Their daughters, still too young for serious career plans, but with a spark for one or more of the elements of STEM — science, technology, engineering or math — needed a school to nurture that interest.

Created from a partnership between two highly successful charter school chains — the Paramount and Purdue Polytechnic schools — along with the Girl Scouts of Central Indiana, the school aims to give girls a head start in STEM fields traditionally dominated by men.

Girls IN STEM, with the IN a nod to Indiana’s postal abbreviation, is one of a handful of schools nationwide with such a focused mission. Though STEM schools have been growing nationally, there are few enrolling only girls. The U.S. Department of Education and the International Coalition of Girls Schools could point to only three other girls elementary schools with a dedicated STEM focus — Innova Girls Academy in New York, Rise STEM Academy for Girls in Kentucky and Solar Preparatory School for Girls in Texas.

With women making up just a third of the STEM workforce and about the same majoring in STEM fields in college, according to the and , experts see a need to start encouraging girls early in a STEM focus. In addition, some experts believe .

A — ages 13 to 27 — found many more men than women, 85% to 63% had interest in STEM fields.

There are also racial disparities in STEM nationally, another barrier Girls IN STEM is breaking: 80% of the students in the first academic year are Black, Hispanic and multi-racial, with the remaining 20% of the students white. 

The school is small now, serving just kindergarten through sixth grade, though it aims to add grades seven and eight in the next two years and grow to nearly 300 students.

Principal Chrystal Westerhaus said the school “symbolizes a new chapter in the pursuit of empowerment and opportunity for young women.”

“You may be aware of the alarming data for girls in this very community,” she told parents at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the school. “The data concerns you and the data concerns us. We know that our girls are limitless … Here there’s a network of support where girls can inspire one another, share ideas, lead unapologetically and build lasting relationships.”

Along with the regular science classes other Paramount charter schools offer, Girls IN STEM students will also have an extra STEM class every other day, alternating with physical education, to offer more hands-on experiments and instruction.

“We want to make science fun,” said STEM teacher Renee Barlow.

Lead STEM teacher Carolyn Caver said classes would be “very hands-on …They will touch and see and have chances to ask questions on every experiment and every section that they will be doing with us.”

Those lessons will likely include robotics, DNA, the absorbency of polymers used in diapers and other products and the science behind the first flights.

Barlow and Caver have taught at other all-girls programs before, including the, a summer program run by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Students from the highly-regarded Purdue Polytechnic High Schools will mentor the younger students, with the high school hoping Girls IN STEM students will become a pipeline, eventually boosting the female attendance there, as well as at colleges.

The Girl Scouts, who have pushed for a girls STEM school in Indianapolis for years, will take students to STEM lessons at its camp nearby. Girls IN STEM teachers will become troop leaders and the STEM classes at the school will eventually line up with Girl Scout badges in STEM topics like cybersecurity, robotics, engineering and coding, allowing students to earn badges through class.

The school will also designate a character issue the Girl Scouts highlight as its theme for each month, starting with sisterhood in August and entrepreneurship, leadership and service coming soon. 

Elizabeth Knight said her daughter Victoria, 9, wavers between chemistry and her current career interest of becoming a veterinarian. That makes the school worth the 30-minute bus ride from Plainfield, a suburb 15 miles west.

“Victoria is highly interested in science,” said Knight. “She considers herself a scientist and likes doing experiments. And she also is interested in the all-girl environment. She thinks that it’d be a better fit for her in terms of the ability to learn.”

Though Girls IN STEM leaders have high aims, there’s still a lot of work to do. The school in a Hebrew school just north of the city while it converts the former Witherspoon Presbyterian Church into its permanent home. The school faced delays winning zoning approval for that site after . And, there have been complaints the Girl Scouts

Those challenges have the school looking different from other Paramount schools. Typically, the school walls would be lined with prints of fine art as a way of teaching students art of many cultures. Since Paramount can’t drill hundreds of holes in the wall of a temporary home, that will have to wait until art and Girl Scout materials can go up at the permanent school.

In addition, teachers still need training as troop leaders and in the Girl Scout science curriculum, which will come after the school settles into the year.

As a former Girl Scout and her daughter currently a Brownie, Knight said she was “thrilled” to see the school partnering with the Scouts. 

“I would have picked it without Girl Scouts,” said Knight, “but it added to its prestige.”

That bothered Jacqueline Kronk, CEO of the clubs in St. Joseph County, so she leapt at a chance to add students this summer as part of statewide expansion of a promising Indianapolis effort.

Started in 2021 to help students catch up after the pandemic, the Indy Summer Learning Labs will receive more than $5 million from Indiana to expand into the Gary and South Bend areas, along with more rural Salem and Wabash. The five-week mix of academic work and fun activities for first through ninth graders has grown each year and is credited by the state with giving students strong gains in both math and English. 

The “Expanding What Works” grants let Kronk grow her program from 1,500 students last year to 2,500 in five counties around South Bend. She has also hired more teachers from local schools and upgraded the program’s curriculum.

“We’d be foolish to not address the fact that COVID and the implications of that are still here and rampant amongst our young students…and their ability to learn and thrive,” Kronk said. “We should be really, really scared about that reality and realize that we need to be throwing all but the kitchen sink at this issue.”

The nonprofit The Mind Trust and the United Way of Central Indiana created the Indy Learning Labs in 2021 for 3,000 students at 35 sites around the city, allowing students a chance to catch up on lost school time. The labs also offer field trips and other activities students in more affluent students can afford.

The labs have grown each year and The Mind Trust expects to have up to 5,500 students at 49 sites in the city — schools, churches, youth centers, or nonprofits — this summer. Though there are no income limits, nearly 90 percent of children qualify for free or reduced school lunches, a common measure of low family income, allowing the labs to reach families eight times less likely to enroll in summer programs than affluent ones.

Summer programs like the labs have been a widespread strategy for cities and school districts to catch students up after the pandemic. A found more than 70 percent of school districts have added or expanded summer programs since the pandemic, making them the most common use of federal COVID relief dollars.

Results are usually low on math and reading gains, but a new study this week found large gains last year from the Summer Boost program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies in eight cities, including Indianapolis.

Researchers have found the small reading and math improvements in summer programs are often because programs don’t offer enough academic work.

Results from both the Bloomberg study and last summer’s Learning Labs are more promising because the programs offered more academic work — about three hours a day devoted to math and English instruction.

Bloomberg based Boost on the Indy Summer Learning Labs and sponsored the labs last summer. The study did not include any lab programs.

The Bloomberg study found 22 days of summer learning helped students make, on average, three to four weeks of reading gains and about four to five weeks in math gains.

That let students make up 22 percent of COVID losses in reading and 31 percent of math, researchers estimated.

The Learning Labs had previously released data from tests given to students at the start and end of the program. Last year, those tests showed proficiency rates in both math and English increased more than 20 percent during the program.

Organizers credit time spent on learning, hiring teachers from local schools to teach some of the sessions and using a curriculum carefully chosen to align with state learning standards for the gains.

Those results, along with the ability to add more students and upgrade the curriculum were all appealing in South Bend, Kronk said.

“The impact that we saw that it had down in Indianapolis for the last several years and for us to be able to scale and replicate that and bring that to counties that we’re serving up here…that really excited us,” she said.

Indianapolis parent Chavana Oliver said the labs were a huge help last year for her son Leanno, 7, who was about to enter first grade but has issues with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and needed extra help.

“He saw a lot of improvement,” Oliver said. She signed him up again this year, as well as her older son Kaden, 8. “ Now he’s very excited, because it will help even more for the second grade.”

Deborah Hendricks Black, a former teacher who helped the Urban League and others apply for the state grant to bring the labs to Gary, said the test score gains and reports from parents in Indianapolis like Oliver caught her eye. The grants will allow 750 students from high-poverty Gary and surrounding communities including East Chicago to avoid summer learning loss and catch up when behind.

“Now we’ll have a chance to at least affect a small amount of students,” she said. “But we know they will be supported effectively with a proven curriculum that provides gains in a short amount of time and we’re looking forward to that.”

Cassandra Summers-Corp, executive director of the Creating Avenues for Student Transformation (CAST) nonprofit in Salem said her rural area about 100 miles south of Indianapolis has a lack of tutors to help students who have fallen behind. Her organization has offered summer programs focused on reading lessons to about 40 students in surrounding counties the last few years. The new grant will let her add math classes and grow to 75 students, along with increasing from three days a week to five.

“We really wanted a partner to help us to expand,” Summers said. “Even though a lot of COVID learning loss money is sunsetting, we know that the crisis of COVID learning loss is not over.”

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

Butler University is adding a bachelor’s degree in nursing, the university announced May 20, in an effort to address Indiana’s nursing shortage.

According to the , Indiana would need to graduate 1,300 additional nurses annually until 2030 to meet demand. 

“All of this evolved from rising to the need of a huge shortage, but also realizing that Butler was in a unique position to offer a quality education to students in a traditional four-year degree,” said  Butler’s inaugural nursing program director.

Several other Indianapolis colleges and universities offer nursing programs, including , ,  and . 

Carey said Butler plans to differentiate itself by giving clinical experience to nursing students in their first year. If students are working in clinics and hospitals early, Carey said, they’ll be more set up to get health care internships during school or nursing jobs after they graduate — ideally in-state. 

“We’re hoping to keep students in Indiana or in the Indianapolis area, giving back to that community who’s given to them during our education,” he said. 

Butler nursing students will be exposed to a variety of nursing specialties, including OB-GYN, pediatrics and behavioral health. As a graduation requirement, students in the Butler nursing program also will have to complete a short-term apprenticeship, called a preceptorship, under a fully qualified nurse. 

How to apply

The program will welcome its first class of nursing students in fall 2025, and the application will open Aug. 1. The school has been approved to start 48 students in the first class, Carey said. 

Students interested in the program should apply to Butler through the . You’ll select your choice of major as nursing, where you’ll be directed to answer a few additional questions. 

Spending at least four hours every week at the pet hospital, Sylvia’s internship is an ideal example of how the charter school’s mandatory award-winning Firehawks Internship and Real-World Experience (FIRE) program can work.

Along with about 110 other juniors and seniors — who helped with office jobs in insurance, child care, construction or social services — Sylvia did more than just clean cages and feed animals at Keystone Pet Hospital. She quickly learned how to meet with families and give dogs and cats basic physical exams and shots.

“It was incredible,” said Sylvia, who is interning with the pet hospital again as a senior and hopes to work there full time after attending Purdue University. “I got to put myself into the vet’s shoes.”

Victory’s program is a leader in Indiana in connecting high school students to workplace experiences, even for a state that’s made work-based learning a priority in recent years and hopes to transform high school by making it a centerpiece of student’s high school experience. The Indiana Department of Education gave Victory and the program one of three Excellence in Student Pathways awards last fall.

Now in its fifth year, the program places students each spring with three dozen businesses and nonprofits as part of their regular school week, busing them to workplaces when needed.

“What sets us apart here is this is compulsory for 11th, and 12th graders,” said Andrew Hayenga, the school’s chief development officer. “It’s not reserved for the top 10% of kids. It’s not reserved for the kids who may want to go into a trade. We’re trying to open the possibilities up to every student in 11th and 12th grade.”

Rahul Jyoti, the school’s readiness director, said many schools might balk at giving up class time for 11 Fridays out of a 40-week school year to career exposure, often out of worry that students’ test scores in math and English might suffer.

But Victory considers it a crucial part of students’ education, particularly those who are low-income; and whose parents don’t have connections in high-paying fields. Jyoti said many students were graduating without knowing what careers they could seek or chose majors in college that weren’t leading to good fits for them, so the school needed to step in and help.

“We know the academics are important, but we realized that no matter how strong their academics are, if they don’t have that networking, professional experience and the soft skills, they are not able to be truly ready to go to college and truly ready to grow into a career,” Jyoti said. “Taking away those days throughout the year actually helps them to be more prepared on all the other school days.”

“We ended up having our juniors and seniors be the most professional students, being more successful in college, and being really engaged in presenting themselves after they graduate because they’ve had so many of these experiences,” he added.

Businesses and nonprofits have stepped up to take on student interns, with many participating in the program year after year.

Chad Miller, managing director of Miller Insurance Group, said his small business couldn’t take on a full-time intern, but Victory organizes the program, has students go to businesses for a reasonable amount of time and even gives employers a guide on how to help students.

“This is a commitment that I feel like I and my team can bite off and it’s sustainable for us and hopefully provides a value to them,” Miller said. 

Shamika Buchanan, owner of Intelligent Minds Child Development, said interns at her daycare center “have been amazing.” She tries to have students learn both about child care and how to run the business.

“They’ve learned a lot,” Buchanan told other businesses as the program launched for the year in the fall, “We’ve grown together. I’ve even employed some over the summer to come and work for my childcare.”

The pet hospital has also asked Sylvia to fill in for absent employees outside of her internship.

“Our relationship has grown incredibly strong,” she said. “They always rely on me for multiple things, so I’m excited to be part of their group.”

Victory can’t always find such perfect matches for students, Jyoti admits, since there are a limited number of employers volunteering for the program. So the school tries to find close or related matches, and stresses that time in any workplace develops skills students can use anywhere.

“I tell the students, you are not necessarily learning about the field you’re interested in, but it’s still a really valuable experience,” Jyoti said. “Being successful in any field requires skills in a professional way that you’re going to learn. And most of our partners are small business owners that have a lot of different areas and functions in their business. So students, even if they are not 100% sure of what they want to do, can find something to be engaged with at their site.”

Senior Devin Stewart, who will attend Purdue University to pursue a career in cybersecurity and information technology, is one of those students who did not have a direct match to his career plans. After interning with a public relations firm as a junior, he’s interning with a community development and affordable housing nonprofit as a senior.

But he doesn’t mind because he’s learning how businesses work.

“I think it’s gonna be valuable for me,” he said. “My mom has always had an idea for me to start a business on my own, so with business development, and things of that nature, it’ll help me have the skills that I need to potentially start a business if I want.”

The kids can hardly sit still. It’s “Green Eggs and Ham” day at the Martin Luther King Community Center’s after-school literacy lab.

Remnants of the afternoon activity — making green-dyed Rice Krispies Treats — decorate the kindergarten and first grade students’ fingers and faces. The lesson, paired with reading the Dr. Seuss classic, is meant to help students build connections with what they see in books.

“We use it as a life lesson and a learning lesson, and Dr. Seuss books are full of it,” said Jonna Lee, a youth worker with the MLK Center, after the early March exercise. “Today was learning to try new things.”

The MLK Center began its literacy lab eight years ago to support a school that staff noticed was struggling in the neighborhood.

James Whitcomb Riley School 43, about a block west of the MLK Center, has some of the highest needs in the Indianapolis Public Schools district. Last year, state records show only about a third of School 43 students passed Indiana’s third grade reading exam and 86% of students received free and reduced priced lunches, an indicator used to track school poverty.

Community leaders and alumni say they have watched for years as IPS budgets have tightened and staff have come and gone. Rather than stand by, they decided to help. An education committee formed, volunteers reopened the school library and the MLK Center launched its after-school literacy lab — a program that operates independently but collaborates with IPS to support students.

And now, with new grant funding and a growing partnership with Butler University, that collaboration is expected to grow. MLK Center staff say they’ll be able to expand their work with the kids who need it most.

“We try to make it fun and creative for them to see things in a different way,” Lee said of her students. “To understand that they are still learning, but we’re having fun doing it.”

MLK Center offers more than tutoring

As a school, James Whitcomb Riley has seen some recent wins with slightly more students passing the state’s third grade reading exam this year. But, the school still reports some of the lowest reading scores in IPS.

Just 35.3% of School 43 students passed the third grade reading exam last spring, state records show, falling more than 20 percentage points below the IPS district average of 60.6% and more than half that of the state average, 81.9%.

About a dozen staff serve more than 70 elementary students from School 43. Their five-days-a-week program incorporates literacy instruction on Tuesdays through Thursdays with one-on-one tutoring provided to students who are returning to the program for their second year.

More than 90% of students come to the literacy lab below reading level with little understanding of skills like shapes and letter sounds, said Lacrisha Hollins, the center’s youth programs director. When students stick with the program for at least two years, Hollins said, tutors are generally able to help students catch up to grade-level reading.

Youth workers like Lee do it by pairing play with literacy lessons. The goal is to get them learning without overwhelming them after a long day of school, Lee said. That means also incorporating activities into lessons, watching movies and taking time to go outside when the weather is nice.

Lee said she also tries to keep her plans flexible — something that might be challenging for a classroom teacher following a set curriculum schedule. If a student’s having a hard day at home or is struggling to learn a certain concept, Lee said she has the freedom to change her lessons as needed.

“They’re all experiencing different things, and we want it to be a safe place for them when they come here,” Lee said. “I’ve built a lot of relationships with the kids that I have and that opens up to them being trusting.”

MLK Center leadership said they see addressing the school’s literacy gaps as a matter of civil rights, and their work follows the Martin Luther King, Jr., philosophy of the , creating opportunities where no one is excluded.

That means the center takes all students, regardless of their family’s ability to pay for services, and provides extensive wraparound services, such as free snacks and meals. They also pick students up from school, bring them to the center for programming and drop them off at home at the end of the day.

During the summer and school breaks, the center offers extended hours with field trips and three meals daily. It also provides mental health resources — partnering with social work interns from local universities like IUPUI and Indiana Wesleyan University who work in the center during tutoring hours — and makes referrals to other community providers for more extensive support for families who need it.

“We don’t just provide tutoring,” Hollins said. “We provide health support for mom, dad, whoever’s in the household, free of charge. We provide for if they need shelter, if they need to pay their gas. We just provide any and everything for the whole family to be successful.”

Community partnership extends into School 43

The MLK Center’s partnership with School 43 extends beyond its after-school programs. Center staff and some of their volunteers — students from Butler University — also visit James Whitcomb Riley during the school day.

That means students who are in the MLK Center’s after-school program get reading support three times a day, Principal Crishell Sam said: once during class, again during volunteers’ visits and a third time after school.

Community volunteers were trained in IPS’ new reading curriculum, Sam said, so tutors and teachers know that they’re teaching students in similar ways.

It comes in tandem with community-led efforts to support the school, including a group of alumni and retired teachers who several years ago helped the school reopen its library with volunteers. Butler students and alumni now run it twice a week. The group meets monthly with the MLK Center team and school leaders as a part of a neighborhood education committee that seeks to compare efforts in literacy and family engagement.

The layers of community support come during a time of transition at School 43. James Whitcomb Riley will shift from a pre-K through eighth grade school to a pre-K through fifth grade elementary school next year under the district’s Rebuilding Stronger reorganization plan. 

Most middle schoolers will go to Broad Ripple or Northwest next year rather than School 43.

As a first-year principal, Sam has also brought in new employees and is working with them to introduce the new reading curriculum recently adopted across IPS. She also plans to hire a media assistant so that the library can be open five days a week next school year. The community partnerships will continue.

“I believe that everyone that’s been hired to be here, they can do the work,” Sam said.”But the work can’t be done in isolation.”

Plans for growth

The MLK Center, which built its program with a goal to turn no one away, now has a waitlist. 

It happened for the first time last year with more than 25 interested students, said Israel Shasanmi, deputy director of the MLK Center. That waitlist is at about 20 students, with more who have informally expressed interest in joining the program.

The center’s leaders are considering an expansion to support its child and adult programs. They’ve only begun the early stages of fundraising but renderings of a proposed expansion with a gymnasium and additional classrooms line the center’s lobby.

The literacy lab also received a major boost this year after its partners at Butler received from the Lilly Endowment to help School 43 adopt its new reading curriculum.

Butler officials say they’re still deciding how to spend the money. But Danielle Madrazo, with Butler’s College of Education, said they may use part of the funding to train Butler students and faculty who volunteer at the MLK Center and School 43’s library.

The grant will also support hiring two positions that will directly support the MLK Center. One will be a trained literacy specialist and the other will focus on relationship building with families.

“We have vision for supporting literacy in our community and our neighborhood,” Madrazo said of the partnership. “I’m excited for us to do big things for kids.”

Mary Dicken, the MLK Center’s advocacy and engagement director, said her team is always looking for volunteers, and the center accepts donations to support its literacy programs. The center also offers regular tours to allow the community to see tutoring in action.

More information about getting involved is available on . A tour of the center can be scheduled by emailing GetInvolved@MLKCenterIndy.org

This was originally published in .

This article was originally published by , and is republished through our partnership .

An Indianapolis nonprofit called  has launched a program to help Black educators buy their first homes. 

The idea sprung from conversations with educators who said low pay drove them away from teaching, CEO Blake Nathan said. While his organization, which is dedicated to building diversity among teaching staffs, can’t help educators earn higher salaries, it can provide financial support for other living expenses. 

Nathan said the organization’s long-term goal is to grow its support for Black educators in an effort to help build generational wealth within the community. If successful, Nathan said, those results could trickle down to students.

Studies have shown that having greater representation of Black teachers in classrooms can positively affect student performance, suspension frequency and graduation rates, Nathan said. In IPS, for example, Black educators make up 20% of the district’s teaching population while more than 40% of students are Black.

“We have to find ways to retain those Black teachers because we understand the importance of having Black teachers in our school systems,” Nathan said. “This is a true testament of philanthropy to circulate the dollar to get it directly into the hands of the beneficiary who needs it most.”

The program, called , will cover closing costs of up to $5,000 for homes in the Martindale Brightwood area. Educate ME is partnering with the Martindale Brightwood Community Development Corporation to offer educators early access to view the organization’s inventory of new homes before they’re listed on popular real estate websites like Zillow. Nathan said the neighborhood organization has more than a dozen new homes on track to be completed by the end of the year.

Educate ME also will sponsor down payments for existing homes in the neighborhood and is interested in partnering with other Indianapolis-area community development corporations in the future.

The Teacherville program funds Black educators — including teachers, counselors and school support staff — working in any Indianapolis school. To be eligible, educators must meet certain income and credit score requirements.

Educate ME also partners with the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership to connect teachers with resources for homebuyer education classes and support for credit building, regardless of their income levels.

“The homebuying process can be very overwhelming to anyone,” Nathan said. “What we want to do is think about, ‘How can we streamline this process? How can we make this process less intimidating for a teacher?’”

Nathan said Teacherville set an initial goal of supporting 25 educators and now has at least 10 others on a waitlist. The program, however, is still adding to its waitlist and Nathan encourages educators to apply through the .

The initiative is supported by a gift from the African American Legacy Fund of Indianapolis and the donor advised fund of the Indianapolis Foundation, which provided $100,000. Educate ME is now seeking community donations to fund down payment assistance for educators on the Teacherville waitlist.

Larry Smith, president and CEO of Indianapolis-based  said the program seeks not only to help recruit and retain teachers, but also to contribute to the resurgence of the Martindale Brightwood area.

He said he and other community leaders were drawn to helping Educate ME because of its plans to scale up support beyond Teacherville’s initial donations.

“We don’t have millions and millions of dollars,” Smith said. “But, in terms of helping to attract, recruit and retain teachers, we felt that we could have a real impact.”

Programs that add hours and support to the school day, are especially critical for low-income students who were set back the most during the pandemic, according to the report, “The Expanded Classroom.” Those students’ families can’t pay for tutoring, museum visits, and arts activities that more affluent families can.

“The classroom has been the primary venue for helping students learn, build relationships, and develop skills for the workforce,” according to the report. “But in the current era, such activities must transcend the classroom to help kids fully recover from learning loss, close longstanding achievement gaps, and prepare students for 21st-century careers.”

Only one quarter of Indiana students are able to attend these programs, the report found, but many more should be added, not reduced, as will happen if money runs out in the next two years. 

“Effort must be sustained over years—not months—to make up for the lost time of the pandemic and to begin to chip away at a decades-old gap in educational outcomes between high- and low-income students,” states the report, a joint project of the United Way of Central Indiana, the Boys and Girls Clubs serving South Bend and Indianapolis, and nonprofit education advocacy groups The Mind Trust and Indiana Afterschool Network.

Since the start of the pandemic, the state has devoted $35 million of federal COVID relief money to out-of-school learning, plus another $185 million in state money. The federal money runs out next fall and the state money runs out in the summer of 2025.

Mind Trust officials said they hope the report rallies support for out-of-school learning with legislators ahead of the 2025-2027 state budget debate. The report doesn’t ask for a specific amount of money or for money for any particular program, just for understanding the importance of learning outside of the school day.

“It’s really to make sure that our state leaders, legislators and others are thinking about the out-of-school time programs in Indiana as an important part of the ecosystem, and not as something that is just a time-limited program that’s about COVID recovery, and nothing else,” said Mind Trust chief strategy officer Kristin Grimme.

State Rep. Bob Behning, chairman of the House Education Committee, said there’s support for programs outside of the school day in the Legislature. But he cautioned there will be competition for money in the next budget.

“I would predict it’s going to be tight, tighter than we’ve had the last couple of budget cycles,” Behning said. “So you’re going to have to really define not just the need, but that there are gains. Once you can define the academic gains. I think that there would be more interest.”

Grimme agreed and said programs need to be evaluated and money should go to those that were the most successful. Some programs have evaluations pending while others have emerging data on their academic impact that should be reviewed next year.

Adding academic gains is extra important because Indiana’s recovery from the pandemic has “stalled,” the report contends. Though state test scores have improved since 2021, reading proficiency rates fell slightly between 2022 and 2023 while other gains were small.

 Indiana also saw college enrollment drop from 65 percent of graduating high school seniors before the pandemic to 53 percent in 2020–21.

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The report highlights the Indy Summer Learning Labs the Mind Trust and United Way have organized in Indianapolis using state money the last three years. That five-week program serving more than 5,000 students in 43 different sites around the city shows double-digit gains in proficiency rates in the tests students take at the start of the program and at the end.

Last summer, the labs saw 23 percentage point increases in students scoring at grade level or above in English and 22 percentage points in math.

The state will soon take applications from organizations around the state to expand that summer program to other cities, though money set aside for them ends in 2025.

Indiana Learns, another program that gives $1,000 grants to low-income parents to spend on tutoring or afterschool programs for their children, is being evaluated now to see if it needs changes. With more than 10,000 students using more than 100 different tutoring providers, Grimme said, it’s hard to know if Indiana Learns is reaching the right students and if they are getting what they need.

“I do think it’s something that we launched quickly to try to support students and families across the state,” Grimme said. “Is it the version of the program that the state should sustain in the future?”