By relentlessly pursuing innovative change, The Mind Trust has transformed a city’s education system.
This is the first blog in The Mind Trust’s series celebrating our 20th anniversary! For the next 20 months, we will be sharing 20 blogs featuring people who have helped shape The Mind Trust at all stages of our organization. We are beginning this series with our co-founder and first CEO, David Harris.
When David Harris launched The Mind Trust in 2006, having a bit of naivete about the endeavor wasn’t a liability. Rather, it was an asset.
At the time, public charter schools had existed in Indianapolis for less than five years, and Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) held a near monopoly on the delivery of public education within the center-city’s boundaries.
The results boded poorly for Indianapolis students: only 34% of IPS students graduated high school, and less than half met state standards in English and math. The Mind Trust set out to restructure public education so that all kids within IPS, regardless of their family income or neighborhood, could access high-quality education options.
Looking back, Harris recognizes the boldness of that vision and the courage it took early champions of The Mind Trust to pursue it.
“We benefited from being naive about how hard it would be,” Harris said.
Yet, as The Mind Trust approaches its 20-year anniversary in 2026, the vision Harris set forth alongside then-Mayor Bart Peterson has, over time, come to fruition.
Within IPS boundaries, more than 60% of students now attend a school run by nonprofit operators with contractual autonomy from the district – a key condition, Harris says, for schools to succeed. And students are achieving substantially better outcomes as a result.
A 2022 study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students in Indianapolis public charter schools gain an additional 64 days of learning in English and 116 days in math relative to their peers in direct-run IPS schools. Notably, Black students in Indianapolis charter schools gained an additional 86 days of learning in English and 144 days of learning in math compared to their peers in direct-run IPS schools.
The change in 20 years has been so robust that even Harris marvels at its scope.
“The vision was always to try to transform education in Indianapolis,” Harris said. “But obviously, if someone said 60% of the kids in the district would be in nonprofit schools by 2025, and some of those (autonomous) schools would be part of the district…we never would have imagined that.”
Talent at the Center
Achieving the current state took years of dedication, persistence, and hard work – with multiple strategies that evolved to drive success. The Mind Trust’s first step was to make Indianapolis a destination for talented people who wanted to work in education. To that end, the organization provided a unique fellowship program for those seeking to transform the delivery of education to start their early-stage social ventures in Indianapolis.
The rationale was simple. In the private sector, entrepreneurs have ample opportunity to seek investment for break-the-mold ideas, yet at the time, little capital existed for innovations designed to promote the public good.
“Through charter authorizing, we saw the power of education entrepreneurs to create new schools and also saw how difficult it was for someone to have the time and resources to build something new,” Harris said. “If we could create an opportunity to provide seed funding for education entrepreneurs to launch new projects, we could empower local leaders to launch new education ventures and attract top talent from around the United States to come to Indianapolis as well.”
Among the examples of this strategy bearing fruit is Boston native and Harvard Law School alumnus Earl Martin Phalen, who was among The Mind Trust’s first fellows. He started the summer reading initiative Summer Advantage, which is still thriving today, and went on to launch several successful charter schools in Indianapolis.
Alongside early-stage ventures, The Mind Trust also saw a need to bring national organizations such as Teach For America and TNTP to Indianapolis. Both groups were instrumental in making Indianapolis a destination for not only teaching talent, but also for leaders who would launch and run schools and other education nonprofits.
In the Arena
With the key foundation of talent in place, The Mind Trust expanded its focus to providing catalytic grants for public charter schools. Through its competitive incubator program, the group awarded $1 million to help promising networks expand or launch in Indianapolis.
While this work helped grow the reach of high-quality schools, it also reinforced a reality that Harris and others had known since the beginning: Without access to more public resources, high quality schools’ ability to serve students would always be constrained.
After years of discussion among local civic leaders, careful research, and study of educational models in cities such as New Orleans, The Mind Trust prepared its 155-page Creating Opportunity Schools report. The groundbreaking document called for changes such as shifting resources from the IPS central office to the school level; providing contractual autonomy for IPS schools with strong leaders and plans; holding these schools accountable for results; and incubating new, autonomous schools to replace poor-performing schools that didn’t meet students’ needs. At the time, this framework was highly controversial – so much so that Mayor Peterson met with Harris privately before the report’s release to ensure he was clear-eyed about the potential implications.
“He said, do you really want to do this?” Harris recalled of the meeting. “Because it’s going to be difficult, and you’re going to get huge pushback.”
The report generated a massive response, from a continuous drumbeat of media coverage (94 media mentions in the year following its release) to the kind of pushback from interest groups that Peterson predicted. It also spurred substantive change, most notably, the creation of Innovation Network Schools, which operate with the same contractual autonomy from district mandates and collective bargaining agreements as public charters but receive a set amount of per-pupil funding allocated by IPS. Their enrollment and test scores also counted toward IPS’ figures.
The path to achieving that groundbreaking change in 2014 came together through a series of unforeseen events, from the leadership of then Mayor Greg Ballard, who advocated for the law at the Statehouse, to the turnover of the incumbent IPS board and the quiet courage of their newly-selected superintendent, Dr. Lewis Ferebee, who embraced the changes despite strong opposition.
“So many things that seemed impossible came together,” Harris said. “I kept praying, whatever happens, may it be good for kids.”
The 2025 legislative session brought additional changes that advanced the vision laid out in the Opportunity Schools report – including the sharing of facilities, transportation resources, and equitable funding among charter and district-run schools.
Harris, who left The Mind Trust seven years ago, credits the current landscape to The Mind Trust’s work and the leaders inside and outside of the organization that have helped advance its vision.
“It’s been by far the biggest driver of change in the district,” Harris said of the organization. “It’s both set the agenda, and it’s done more to have an impact on what’s happening in the district because of the Innovation Network Schools that have been launched and the failing schools that have been closed. It’s hard to imagine a nonprofit having a bigger impact on the IPS geography.”