The Education Landscape in Indianapolis

The Need is great, but the Opportunity in Indianapolis is outstanding!

Students in Indianapolis schools are falling further behind. Across Indianapolis, students in low-income communities are too often receiving sub-standard education.  For example, in Indianapolis Public Schools, the city’s largest school district, 40% of all students drop out before graduating high school, and some schools have less than 25% of students at grade level.  In many cases, the situation is only getting worse, with the same schools producing consistently below average growth.  Despite this reality, we know that students from any background can excel when given a great school.  Charter schools like YES Prep in Houston, TX prove this every year.  In 2010, YES Prep’s dropout rate was just 1%, and for the past 10 years, 100% of YES Prep’s graduates were accepted to a four-year university.

We have a moral imperative to offer higher-quality options. In a city as community-focused as Indianapolis, these inequities create a moral imperative to address the quality of the city’s public schools.  Public charter schools have been a powerful lever for improving educational quality in Indianapolis as in many other cities across the country.  But the supply of charter schools in the city is currently insufficient to meet the demand, particularly among students enrolled in persistently low-performing district (i.e., traditional public) schools.  As many school districts and the state focus more attention on turning around failing schools, the need for new, high-quality charter schools will only accelerate due to the urgent need for dramatically better school models.  Indianapolis is faced with an urgent need to accelerate the growth of high quality public charter schools to better serve the educational needs of our city’s youth.