The conversation Indianapolis and our African-American community has avoided for 40 years has now been thrust upon us by The Mind Trust, the Indianapolis-based educational reform and advocacy organization.
In a plan unveiled this week, The Mind Trust advocates a massive restructuring of the school district serving a quarter of students in the consolidated City of Indianapolis/Marion County.
Their 200-plus page document advocates turning IPS into a system that’ll nurture, incubate and create “Opportunity Schools;” which in the Trust’s view, would finally break the back of educational ineptitude that epitomizes today’s IPS.
Mind Trust acknowledges the social and economic barriers within the IPS area. Of families with children in IPS, 59.8 percent are single parent families; 44.7 percent of them are in poverty. Some 76.3 percent of IPS students have family incomes low enough to receive free lunches.
The plan acknowledges IPS’ recent progress. Since 2005, ISTEP language arts scores rose from 47 percent to 56 percent; while math scores climbed 47 percent to 58 percent. Graduation rates up from 51 percent to 58 percent. But despite the progress, IPS still lags behind school districts within the city/county and the state.
A damning chart showed the academic performance of each of IPS’ 59 schools. Only five exceeded the state’s ISTEP benchmark. Twenty-nine schools were ahead of IPS’ own average ISTEP performance; while 30 schools fell below it.
The Mind Trust recommendations are bold and controversial.
They’d create “Opportunity Schools” that would have the freedom to operate without central administration micromanaging their every move. Opportunity Schools would, to start, include the current top performing IPS schools and could include other top performing public schools, including existing charters.
There would additional monies to hire great teachers and, most critically, great school leaders. The Mind Trust and I strongly agree that the biggest factor in a school’s success is the quality of that school’s leader.
The plan would offer quality pre-kindergarten schools to every IPS 4-year-old. This early childhood education would help prepare kids to be successful in kindergarten and the early grades.
Parents would have the choice to have their kids attend any school within IPS. This sounds great, but it reminded me of IPS’ Select Schools program 20 years ago (1992) which had great intentions, but was a transportation logistical nightmare.
Regarding the plan’s idea of empowering individual schools, a current IPS board member, briefed by the Mind Trust, claimed IPS tried this several years ago but “schools started cutting out music, art and phys ed so we had to intervene”.
The plan’s recommendations to improve academics, decentralize control, gut the central bureaucracy and create pre-K classes should get most of the attention in the coming debate.
But, the section of the plan that’ll generate the most heat, especially in our African-American community, is the recommendation to abolish the elected school board in favor of a board selected by the mayor and City-County Council.
I strongly oppose mayoral control of IPS. Not because of the current mayor, but because mayoral control of one city district while other city districts retain voters’ control raises serious issues of equity; issues that may violate the Indiana and U.S. constitutions.
Advocates of mayoral control failed to or refused to understand Indianapolis’ peculiar unified form of government.
Many forget that Indianapolis’ failure to include schools when the city/county consolidated in 1970 brought about the bitter fruit of one way busing. There’s ample evidence suggesting that busing and failure to merge school districts directly led to the deterioration of IPS enrollment from 107,713 (1970) to an estimated 31,709 today.
But, while I oppose mayoral control, I recognize that we must have a change in how IPS is governed. The current School Board shows no leadership and in many ways has become a fossil of ossified, hidebound, unimaginative thinking.
Our community has allowed IPS to become a separate and unequal school system where high performing magnet schools with waiting lists operate next to woefully underperforming schools.
Why the IPS board, superintendent and those overpaid central administrators still refuse to take steps to radically restructure a school system where students in half the schools can’t pass Indiana’s basic competency tests astounds me.
Indianapolis’ power structure is pushing The Mind Trust plan, which involves the education of students living in a third of our city; an area that contains Indianapolis’ poorest and distressed neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with problems the city’s power brokers steadfastly refuse to deal with.
Indy’s powerbrokers and The Mind Trust don’t have juice among those living within IPS. And their plan fails to acknowledge Indianapolis’ unique complexity.
The Mind Trust plan refuses to acknowledge that IPS is not the school system of the City of Indianapolis. That myth ended with UniGov.
Just 32.8 percent of Indianapolis’ population lives within IPS’ boundaries. A minority (47.8 percent) of the city/county’s African-Americans live within IPS; 38.4 percent of Hispanics and a paltry 25.5 percent of non-Hispanic whites.
Just 32.8 percent of Black public school students in Indianapolis attend IPS; 30.9 percent of Hispanics, 13.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 23 percent of the overall total.
This plan is for A Indianapolis school district. Not THE Indianapolis school district.
It’s time for a serious discussion of educating the children in Indy’s poorest neighborhoods. The question is whether those from outside the community who created their plan without community input, will seriously listen to those living in the community they want to impact and help. We’ll see.
Merry Christmas and Happy Kwanzaa. See ‘ya next week.
You can email comments to Amos Brown at acbrown@aol.com.
