Don't wait for Trump, Education Department to fix our schools. Start locally. | Opinion
With the future of the U.S. Department of Education uncertain, leaders should focus on sustained local efforts to improve schools in their communities.
President Donald Trump's recent order to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education has generated robust discussion about the role of federal and state governments in shaping education. These debates should remind us of what drives change in America’s public schools: coordinated, community-level efforts that are implemented over decades.
In the rare instances in which education reform has occurred at scale in the United States, the ingredients have been similar. State lawmakers passed policies to enable change, and local leaders collaborated over many years to seize the resulting opportunity. One success led to another, leading to a rebuilding of the local education system, brick by brick.
New Orleans, whose education ecosystem was refashioned after Hurricane Katrina, provides the best-known example of this. My home city of Indianapolis also offers a model that other cities can replicate without the impetus of a natural disaster.
As the city’s first charter schools director under former Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, a Democrat, and the founder of The Mind Trust, a local nonprofit designed to maximize education outcomes, I had a front-row seat to this change.
Charter school students in Indianapolis make faster gains
Indianapolis’ education landscape has been reshaped over nearly 25 years of work to provide parents with more high-quality school options, and students are achieving better outcomes as a result.
In Indianapolis’ center-city today, 3 in 5 students attend public charter schools, and studies show students attending those charters gain 116 days of additional learning in math and 64 additional days in reading relative to their peers in Indianapolis’ district-run schools.
Since 2021, Indianapolis charter schools have made larger proficiency improvements across all student groups, with larger gains than the city’s 11 school districts and the state as a whole. Charter school enrollment has grown by 21% since the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping stabilize the population of center-city schools.
How did Indianapolis’ transformation occur?
In 2001, Indiana legislators passed a law enabling the creation of public charter schools. While the law applied statewide, Indianapolis was the only city to take advantage of it at scale because local leaders developed a plan for implementation.
Peterson launched the first mayor-sponsored charter authorizing office in the country to oversee public charter schools. A few years later, he and I started The Mind Trust to attract talented education leaders and preeminent teacher pipeline organizations, such as Teach For America, to the city.
Our goal was to make Indianapolis a destination for education talent and innovation, setting the stage to launch and scale high-quality charter schools.
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Charter schools and traditional school districts can work together
In 2011, The Mind Trust also issued a report calling for district schools to gain the same autonomy as charter schools. The report inspired then-Mayor Greg Ballard, a Republican, to push the Indiana legislature to pass a law in 2014 creating Innovation Network Schools, which operate with charter-like freedoms while getting access to district facilities and transportation.
In 2014, The Mind Trust and Indianapolis Public Schools formed a partnership to incubate these new schools.
Indianapolis Public Schools has been the lone school district in Indiana to take significant advantage of this unique law, and it’s done so because over decades, local leaders built the conditions and infrastructure required to grow high-quality charter schools in Indianapolis.
That infrastructure has included philanthropic funding to launch new schools; technical support for schools provided by The Mind Trust and the partners it enticed to the city; a mayor’s office committed to quality and accountability; a school board and district eager to make innovative schools a central focus; and continued state policies backing charter and Innovation Network schools.
Indianapolis’ lessons learned from more than two decades of local implementation efforts can be applied nationally. They also should remind communities that at a time of federal education change, locals should still seize the opportunity to develop their own agendas for education, pursue state policies to achieve their goals and build the infrastructure that’s necessary to drive real and lasting results for students and families.
The process will at times be difficult and tedious, and it will take sustained effort. It’s critical to have a local backbone organization – similar to The Mind Trust in Indianapolis and New Schools for New Orleans in the Crescent City − to marshal resources, incubate high-quality schools and coordinate policy and implementation efforts.
Amid the uncertainty in the federal policy landscape, leaders should focus on making a difference for students and families. That ultimately happens when locals take action.
David Harris is president and CEO of Christel House International.