Can you be politically progressive and support school choice and charter schools? How much does it matter that a majority of Americans support school choice? Those were just some of the questions raised in watching the public comment portion of the ILEA’s most recent meeting. Continue reading Can You Be a Progressive and Support School Choice?
Rise Indy, Stand for Children, and the Indiana Charter Innovation Center have all lobbied the ILEA with a set of recommendations about the future of education in Indianapolis. Now it’s IPS’ turn, with the board submitting seven recommendations to the ILEA. Continue reading IPS Lays Out Its Vision to the ILEA
Will Indianapolis become an all-charter-school city? That question was at the heart of a recent feature article in Chalkbeat. And for good reason. Stand for Children’s “Together We Thrive” proposal calls for a fundamental reimagining of education in Indianapolis that would put us on a path to being the next New Orleans. Continue reading Is Indianapolis Destined to Become an All-Charter-School City?
Will IPS still exist in 20 or 25 years? Is the ILEA an existential threat to the district, or even public education as we know it? And is it possible to create a high-quality, pluralistic education landscape in Indianapolis? We dig into all that and more. Continue reading Is the Demise of IPS Inevitable?
The financial future of IPS depends on a new operating referendum in 2026. What will it look like? Will it find support? We unpack all that and go through a timeline of how we got to this point. Continue reading Without a 2026 Operating Referendum, IPS’ Finances Look Dire
Local advocacy groups are increasingly pressing the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance on how it should conduct its work and what kind of recommendations it should make. These forces reflect the wider debate around the future of education in Indianapolis. Are these competing visions reconcilable? Continue reading Are Competing Visions for Indianapolis’ Education Landscape Reconcilable?
ILEARN results for the 2024-25 school year just dropped. The top-line results for the state reading something like this. In reading? Stagnation. In math? Modest growth. We do a deep dive into this year’s results and offer four takeaways for the broader landscape in Indianapolis and statewide. Continue reading 2025 ILEARN Deep Dive, Analysis, and Takeaways
What’s our priority as education professionals, leaders, and advocates? Is it supporting students? Or supporting systems? And are those always mutually-exclusive? Those were a few of the questions on my mind after reading about IPS’ rejection of Cold Spring’s bid to operate as both an Innovation Network School and a charter school. I unpack them here. Continue reading The Curious Case of Cold Spring and IPS: Supporting Students or Supporting Systems?
Part 2 of our “Fully funded, fully public” thought experiment, wherein I unpack what would make Indianapolis’ education ecosystem fully public. And address concerns traditional public school advocates tend to raise about charter schools and why they feel they aren’t actually public schools. Continue reading What Does Fully Funded, Fully Public Mean? A Thought Experiment, Part 2.
Collaboration between schools that on paper might be seen as competitors? You’d be hard-pressed to find quality examples. But ACE Prep Academy and Circle City Prep just joined forces, offering our local education ecosystem a compelling template for what inter-school collaboration can look like. Continue reading How ACE Prep and Circle City Prep Created a Collaborative Template for the Future
