Bill Taft: Don’t stifle charter schools’ ability to innovate

I would like to add a cautionary point to debates occurring as the Indiana Legislature considers the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance bill that would create an overarching public education administrative structure for urban Indianapolis.

Without diving into the specifics of this bill, I am concerned that administrative centralization could crush the spirit of innovation that charter schools have often demonstrated. Pushing charter schools into a single system that controls their buildings, transportation, recruitment and evaluation might smother their roles as innovators in the challenging world of urban public education.

I became interested in charter schools in 2000 when Fountain Square’s community development planning conversations surfaced the long-standing failure of public education to meet the needs of residents increasingly required to have strong reading and math skills to earn a living wage. We discovered that the majority of adult residents had not graduated from high school and that the dropout rate at that time was continuing this trend.

In response, we began talking with IPS leaders about how to improve the performance of our neighborhood schools but soon discovered that its leaders were unable to point to successful examples of turnarounds in other urban school systems. After going door-to-door talking to parents about their educational aspirations and securing seed support from a foundation, we became one of the first applicants for a charter under Mayor Bart Peterson’s pioneering charter review process. This effort created Southeast Neighborhood School of Excellence, a K-8 school that for more than 20 years has been providing a solid, basic education for kids who often become the first in their family to graduate from high school.

The adaptability of a charter school to fit specific community challenges is illustrated in a very different way by Herron High School, which was formed as a rigorous and diverse classical college-prep school that provides an education option that keeps families in the city and achieves test scores that put it in the top ranks of Indiana schools.

Matchbook Education is an IPS innovation charter school that turned the failing Wendell Phillips school in Haughville into a booming K-8 school. Matchbook parents clamored for a better high school alternative, and two years ago the Match was launched by the same board but under a different authorizer as a career tech high school at the 16 Tech Innovation District. The school assembled $23 million in funding to creatively convert a dilapidated industrial building into a cutting-edge high school offering training partnerships that launch students into living-wage careers in construction, health care, media communications and advanced manufacturing.

These three schools show how the decentralized nature of charter schools frees them to address a wide variety of contexts and students through dramatically different educational approaches. While Indy’s charter schools show evidence of academically outperforming traditional IPS schools, it is charters’ ability to demonstrate innovative approaches to educating a range of students that has attracted a growing number of families and demonstrated feasible pathways for reviving urban public education.

It’s too early to tell how the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance administrative structure would impact Indy’s charter schools, but I hope legislators (and future board members) will ensure that its structure doesn’t stifle the innovation and adaptability that charter schools demonstrate.

Let’s find ways to address the common logistical challenges of urban schools while leaving educational innovators at charters the freedom to creatively develop the minds, characters and bodies of the students they serve.•

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Taft is director of Interurban at Indianapolis-based Sagamore Institute. Send comments to [email protected].

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