Many of the other districts in Indianapolis also have distressingly low graduation rates and high student achievement gaps.

One of the chief impediments to school improvement in Indianapolis is the city’s outdated school governance structure. Indianapolis has 11 separate school districts, each with their own regionally elected school board members and separate central administrations. In addition, the mayor of Indianapolis oversees a small but growing number of schools throughout the city, through his authority as an authorizer of public charter schools. However, the mayor does not play a role in the governance of the traditional public schools or the larger public school system.

This decentralized governance system creates an enormous amount of waste, including the costs of running 11 separate district offices and the inevitable duplication of district services such as payroll, communications, specialized education services, and the like. Every dollar going to these duplicative activities is a dollar that is unavailable for investments that could drive improvements in student learning. Furthermore, with a diffuse governance structure that includes 11 separate school boards, there is little—if any— meaningful accountability at the highest levels of the system.

The Mind Trust, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit organization that supports education innovation and reform, is working to improve public education in Indianapolis. Its mission is to dramatically improve public education for underserved children by empowering education entrepreneurs to develop or expand transformative education initiatives. To achieve its mission, The Mind Trust has two strategies: (1) a nationally unique Education Entrepreneur Fellowship that serves as an incubator for transformative education ventures; and (2) a Venture Fund to recruit to Indianapolis the nation’s most successful entrepreneurial education initiatives. The Mind Trust has invested over $3 million from its Venture Fund to successfully attract Joyce grantees like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project as well as College Summit and Diploma Plus to Indianapolis. The Mind Trust has also recently begun to sponsor research aimed at illuminating the larger issues that contribute to Indianapolis’s educational challenges.

Through a recent Joyce grant, The Mind Trust is funding researchers at Brown University and the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington to undertake an evaluation of Indianapolis’s school governance structure and make recommendations for restructuring to improve student achievement, economic efficiency, and the climate for education entrepreneurship. The resulting report will be used to launch a community-wide discussion about how best to structure the city’s school system in the 21st century.

"Improving education for all Indianapolis students is our highest priority," said David Harris, president and CEO of The Mind Trust. "The only way to achieve our long-term goal is to transform the system to maximize achievement, efficiency, accountability, and the climate for innovation, and our school governance study will provide a framework for how to do so."

Find out more about the Joyce Foundation’s Education program by clicking here.