Not many schools have the word “love” in their mission, and it’s a hard thing to quantify on a school report card. But Global Prep Academy — whose motto is “unlocking the world through language, expeditionary learning, and love” — is one of a dozen schools in Indianapolis doing things differently, including a dual-language immersion program beginning in kindergarten for its native Spanish and English speakers that aims to embrace students’ culture and families.

“I would love to to see us really utilize the communities that we’re serving to leverage their language so that kids have pride in who they are and in the language they speak instead of downplaying who they are,” said Mariama Carson, founder and principal of Global Prep, a pre-K–6 school that plans to expand to eighth grade.

Global Prep Academy is part of Indianapolis Public Schools’ Innovation Network Schools, created in 2014, which give greater freedom to educators to create their own school design, control budgets, and hire and fire staff. These innovative schools can be charter schools or existing traditional schools, but they are all run by their own nonprofit boards.

“I think the work we’ve done around our Innovation Network Schools has just been about redefining,” said Aleesia Johnson, innovation officer for the district, in . “It was how we think about school improvement and what it means to empower schools to have flexibility and decision-making authority and to be able to leverage that flexibility on a local level, but still have the support and resources of a traditional district to support you.”

It’s not easy. Carson’s school began last year as a reinvention of Riverside 44 school, where of the students are low-income, half the students are black, one quarter are Hispanic, and 12 percent are white. In 2016, only 7 percent passed standardized math and reading tests. But in the year since Carson brought in her school model, passing rates rose to 14 percent.

Global Prep wasn’t the only school that saw improvement. Innovation Network Schools registered some of the best academic growth in Indianapolis during 2017 state testing, , with the top 10 schools growing by 3 to 10 percentage points in reading and math over one year. (Global Prep ranked number six.)

But a majority of students are still failing the state tests. There’s a long way to go to flip that trend, and Carson readily admits that.

“This is just the beginning, and 14 percent is not something we’re proud of. We’re proud of our growth, but I’ll be happy when we get to 80 percent and 90 percent of our students in this environment reaching grade-level proficiency,” she said. “I believe it’s possible, but we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Carson’s record is in her favor. In four years as principal, she led a D-rated school in Pike Township to a B status. She’s been honored for her practice, including winning the national Milken Educator Award.

Parents have noticed Carson’s expertise, enough to pull their children out of coveted charter schools and send them to Carson’s Global Prep Academy. That was the case with Ann Foisy, whose daughter, Claire, is beginning her second year at Global Prep as a first-grader. After several meetings with Carson, Foisy was impressed by her leadership, the emphasis of love in the mission, and the promise of learning a second language.

As a parent, Foisy said, she feels welcome to observe classes and is impressed to see her daughter’s teachers play with the students at recess or get down to their eye level as they work through Spanish lessons.

“I want [Claire] to be part of a real community that’s representative of the real world and really builds her character,” Foisy said.

Global Prep Academy is one of two schools in Indiana incorporating dual-language immersion correctly, according to . Researchers recommend enrolling equal numbers of native Spanish and native English speakers, so students can learn from their peers. In 2016, Indiana offered $1 million in language immersion funding to schools, but many of those programs enroll mostly English-speaking students.

Carson hired her Spanish-language teaching team from countries like Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba. Third-grade Spanish teacher Lidia Vidal Sandate, who grew up in Mexico, was first drawn to the school for its emphasis on love, which she felt had been missing from her experiences as a teacher in Arizona. While witnessing the challenges her urban students face has been difficult, she said, the school’s team, or familia, has made addressing students’ needs easier.

“I’m going to go back to the idea of love,” Vidal Sandate said. “These kids are heard and cared for. They’re receiving a lot of support.”

At the Pike Township school, Carson said, students would say goodbye to their parents in Spanish when they were dropped off in the morning — and then not speak their native language again for the rest of the school day.

“I know that’s because there was shame associated with language,” she said. “When there’s shame associated with who you are, it’s really difficult for you to realize your true potential, because you’re hiding portions of yourself.”

Carson wanted to start a dual-language program there, but was denied. So she applied for a fellowship from the Mind Trust and received a two-year grant to develop Global Prep Academy around this language immersion model. Currently, dual-language immersion starts in kindergarten and goes through third grade, but it will expand each year as students age with the program.

“I never see my kids here deny their language or their culture, ever,” Carson said.

And she sees her school’s mission of incorporating language and culture as more relevant than ever as national rhetoric has turned hostile toward immigrants. After one of her students missed school for four days, Carson knocked on the family’s door and found out that the father had been picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and the mother didn’t know how to drive, leaving the student stranded.

“Our kids are paying attention because they’re living it,” Carson said. “And if they’re not living it, then their classmates are.”

But the ceremony is anything but typical. For one thing, the graduates are grown men and women instead of gawky adolescents; their speaker, one of the film’s central figures, is a 31-year-old single parent who interrupts his own address to embrace his young daughter. And their school, The Excel Center, is no ordinary place of learning. It’s a dropout-recovery program specifically targeted toward the thousands of Indianapolis adults who never completed high school.

Each smiling participant followed a different path to the commencement stage. Many were initially sidelined by family tragedy, teen pregnancy, or scrapes with the law. Others simply drifted away from chaotic urban classrooms. But all of them overcame setbacks large and small to return for their diplomas after years — or, in the case of another main character, more than three decades — out of the education system.

Although a high school diploma now represents the minimum level of educational attainment for jobs that pay a decent wage, Census figures indicate that high school graduates over those with a GED. What’s more, in 2015–16, 96 percent of Excel Center graduates finished with either college credit or an industry certification. Students begin as dropouts, but they leave as graduates and go on to become college students and skilled laborers.

Director and Brooklyn native Andrew Cohn moved for eight months to a neighborhood near the school to chronicle students’ harried lives as they progressed toward Indiana’s End of Course Assessments. In relocating, he received almost uncomfortably fulsome access to his three main subjects, each buckling under circumstances beyond their control.

Greg, a repentant ex–drug dealer, is repeatedly back drawn to the hospital, first to tend to his gravely wounded brother and then to his epileptic child. Melissa, languishing in middle age, fights loneliness and self-doubt as she puzzles over algebra homework. The youngest of the three, Shynika, alternates between sleeping in her car and crashing with friends because her job at Arby’s doesn’t pay enough to cover rent. During Night School’s 80-minute run time, each will nearly collapse in moments of helplessness.

“One of the biggest challenges was getting intimate access to the same students throughout the year,” producer Steve Bannatyne said. “A lot of people would do one or two days of filming and then disappear once they realized what a pain it is to have a crew following them around for hours at a time.”

School officials sympathized with their ordeal.

“It’s hard to say I loved [the movie], because it’s pretty poignant and at a lot of times very painful,” said Betsy Delgado, vice president of education initiatives at Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana, which founded and operates The Excel Center. On the other hand, she added, “It speaks volumes for our students and will accelerate understanding of what it means to have dropped out of school. And what it means to go back.”

As a new school year begins, Delgado helps administer 12 Excel Center campuses around Indiana, collectively serving about 4,000 students. Expansion locations have spread to Memphis, Austin, and Washington, D.C. But when it was first chartered in 2010, the original Excel Center was a single school — the fruits of Indianapolis’s pervasive dropout problem. In 2009, Indianapolis Public Schools’ four-year graduation rate was. As of 2016, it has risen to nearly 77 percent, but an estimated 100,000 people over the age of 18 lack high school diplomas.

Tracing the trajectory that left her homeless at 26, Shynika reflects on the end of her academic career in one of the most affecting scenes in the film. An honor roll student as a middle schooler, she lost focus after enrolling in a dysfunctional high school.

“Everybody was everywhere. The teachers didn’t care,” she says. “I started getting into a group of people that I shouldn’t have been around. And after that … I just stopped going.”

Luring students like Shynika back to English and physics classes means accommodating work schedules and family obligations. Delgado says that half of all Excel Center students have children, and virtually all are poor.

“We knew transportation was an issue, so we offer free transportation. We knew that childcare was something that many could not afford, so childcare is embedded in the program,” she said.

Most important is the program’s corps of life coaches, who are assigned to students to provide guidance and support. For graduation, every Excel Center student chooses someone close to them to present their diploma. Delgado estimates that 70 percent select their coaches.

“That’s the person that calls them when it’s freezing outside, saying, ‘You coming?’ The person they go to if they don’t have tires on their car, or they can’t afford gas, or they don’t have a home — whatever it might be,” Delgado said. “We hire for empathy.”

More than encouragement and understanding, though, graduates walk away with a degree.

Night School’s success thus far has been nearly as impressive. After premiering last year at Tribeca, it went on to capture the grand prize at the prestigious Heartland Film Festival. Producer Steve Bannatyne was taken aback by the film’s initial reception.

“When the lights came up and I saw the audience wiping tears from their eyes but with big smiles on their faces, I knew we had something special,” he said. “Tears and cheers in the final scene is a great combination to have.”

In 1997, Paul Hill published his book (the center where I work at the University of Washington was founded on the ideas presented). With his co-authors, Lawrence Pierce and James Guthrie, Hill proposed that all schools in a city should be contracted out to school-based nonprofits as a means of improvement. He contrasted his proposal with the concurrent charter school movement, in its infancy at the time. He wondered about the then-limited scope of the charter concept. Often seen as “piloting” new ideas for the public school system at large, would charter schools ever grow to serve every child in a city?

Charter schools have grown quite a bit since then, yet the basic question remains: Can or should every school be a charter? Is that the best way to ensure that every neighborhood has a quality option? The flexibility that charter schools have can often lead to innovation. Yet creating an entirely new system of schools from scratch is challenging. Charter school growth is slowing, and the challenge of finding school buildings is partly to blame. Proposals to close under-enrolled district schools often meet fierce opposition when cast as making room for charters. Parents prefer schools close to their homes and face difficulty enrolling in school choice options when application systems aren’t coordinated or streamlined. As we at the Center on Reinventing Public Education know from our research, many leaders in both the district and charter sectors call for closer collaboration, but the work requires a high level of effort and clear benefits for both sides.

Cities such as Los Angeles, Tulsa, Atlanta, and Indianapolis are exploring a third way for school improvement — contracting out neighborhood public schools, much as Paul proposed in 1997. Partnership schools might unlock the innovation of charter networks and other nonprofit organizations while minimizing political friction, as they are developed in closer coordination with districts and local communities. They are often developed with the intention of serving a particular neighborhood or turning around a struggling district school. My colleague Christine Campbell and I describe the motivations and challenges for district and charter leaders as they balance the desire to have school-level autonomy with the need for systems-level coordination in our new .

While districts may be able to contract on their own initiative, Indiana adopted a specific state framework for partnership schools, known there as Innovation Network Schools. Indiana’s law presents an option for independent entities, including those operated by charter school networks, to operate autonomous schools in partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools. There are 16 Innovation Network Schools operating in district buildings, including two associated with KIPP and one associated with Purdue University. Recently, the network’s schools were as making some of the largest yearly gains on standardized tests in Indianapolis, one measure of school quality. IPS gets credit for this success; the partnership schools’ test scores are included in the district’s reporting on state assessments.

Each Innovation School has its own unique partnership agreement with IPS, although many are authorized as charters as well. Innovation School leaders have more freedom than principals of traditional district schools but must negotiate many aspects of their operation with the district, which could be more restrictive than a charter would be. Districts in Indiana must themselves opt in to the law, underscoring the need for favorable civic support and leadership. But because Innovation Network Schools remain district schools for the purposes of state funding and accountability, districts have greater incentives to pursue this arrangement than they might to support charter schools. Access to facilities and other services provided by the district provide powerful incentives for charters or would-be charter operators.

Many questions remain about partnership schools. Will the partnership agreements be sustainable? Will new school providers emerge that wouldn’t have under charter school laws? Will we see greater innovation in new instructional models? Still, partnership schools present an opportunity. Leaders contemplating school improvement strategies in their communities may find that partnership schools can help deliver on the promise of high-quality public education for students and their families in ways that neither district or charter schools could on their own.

Sean Gill is a research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell.

In 1968, Phalen was adopted as an infant by George and Veronica Phalen into their Norwood, Massachusetts, home. Growing up in the blue-collar suburb of Boston, Phalen was the youngest of his seven siblings. He was also the only black member of his family of second-generation Irish immigrants. His parents had been active in the civil rights movement and continued to instill in Phalen a sense of self, heritage, and culture as a black male in America.

Phalen attended local schools, did well academically, and excelled in athletics. He later earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and graduated from Harvard Law alongside a young Barack and Michelle Obama.

For a while, Phalen thought he was going to enter politics. But a year spent volunteering at a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., made him realize that he wanted to be the one on the ground making the difference in the lives of young people, not behind a podium talking about it. While at Harvard, Phalen founded a nonprofit tutoring and mentoring program with a fellow classmate. Through volunteering at a local community center, he saw that 15-year-olds, supposedly the best in their classes, couldn’t even read at a sixth-grade level. grew from serving fewer than two dozen children in a low-income community of Boston to more than 17,000 students across four states. In 1997, President Bill Clinton recognized Phalen with a President’s Volunteer Service Award for his work.

In 2009, Phalen founded , whose success and national recognition led the Indiana Charter School Board in 2012 to grant Phalen approval to open 10 .

With seven schools in the state of Indiana and three in Detroit, Phalen Leadership Academies now serves a student population that is 97 percent black and Latino and 99 percent low-income. to discuss the landscape of educating the neediest students in America today.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: You were the product of public schools. What made you believe in the charter model?

Phalen: I think my belief is really, first and foremost, that every child deserves a good public education — whether that’s public traditional or public charter. Seeing the transformation that getting access to a good public education can have, versus the absolute unfairness that exists every single day in almost every low-income community, which is, if you go to the public school that is available for you in your community, more than likely you have a less than 10 percent chance that you’re going to make your way to college. And it’s not the only path, but college-to-career still is one of the best ways to change your living situation. So I firmly was brought up with the belief that education is the way that you improve your life.

I’ve been frustrated for 20 years watching children be forced, based on ZIP code, based on parents’ income, based on the parents’ parents’ ZIP code and income, not be able to have access to the quality of education that they deserved en masse. And charters, especially high-quality charters, have certainly changed that in a positive direction. They’re not the panacea, but they’ve certainly changed that in a positive direction.

In July, the NAACP at its convention. For the approximately 1 million black students , the option is seen as a lifeline in communities where families find traditional district schools failing their children. How does this add up, and what is your take on the NAACP’s latest push?

It’s even hard for me to listen to the message, because of the organization that’s been saying it. [W.E.B.] Du Bois is one of my favorite black heroes, and the founder of the NAACP, and to have this organization that has not been relevant for 30 years making comments and statements about communities in which they haven’t stepped in, in many cases, 30 years, is offensive.

There are good charters and there are bad charters, but what a weak statement from such a historically great organization. If you’re going to call out charters on quality, and remain silent on public education as the pathway forward for our kids, then I think you’re a phony organization. I think you’re disingenuous, and I think you should go back to what you’ve been doing for the last 30 years, which is, I don’t know, I think it’s debutante balls.

If you ask any person in the heart of the black community, “What does the NAACP stand for? What does it do?” they would pause, scratch their head, and say, “I think they have the image awards.” That’s all the NAACP has been doing in most of its chapters.

I think it’s weakhearted to say charters should be closed when millions of children and families — black children and families they purport to represent — are actually now benefiting. They now have a pathway that if they make good choices, they will actually get the type of education that can transform their children and their futures.

I think it’s absolutely cowardice that they came out with that statement and said nothing about distinguishing good charters from bad charters, which if they had said that, I would have been right next to them, saying, “Yeah, we need to distinguish good charters and bad charters.” And I would’ve still said, “Aren’t you going to say something about the absolutely wretched public education that exists in most of the communities where most of the children and families who you supposedly are speaking for live?”

In issuing its report, the NAACP said its task force before making its recommendation to stop charter school growth until certain conditions are met. (The task force was created after the NAACP ratified in October 2016 a resolution issuing a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools.) What is it, then, that they were missing in those communities?

The NAACP is a national organization with chapters in every major city and every low-income city in the United States of America. This was not a task force. This was, I believe — and I don’t know their motivations, I can’t even begin to guess — but given there was an election coming up, and given the fact that some organizations’ policies are largely driven by who their donors are, it made me very concerned about the timing and the message and saying that they had a task force go to seven cities.

The NAACP is supposed to be an incredibly relevant organization in 500 cities across the United States. So did they survey their base, does their base even know what’s happening in our communities? I’ve been from Boston to New York to Baltimore to Detroit to Chicago to Indianapolis to Gary [Indiana], and I haven’t seen the NAACP as a relevant force in any one of those communities.

So was it an error of process in their research?

I don’t think it was a process piece. I think there was a predetermined message that was supposed to help attract a crowd of donors, or maybe a specific donor, or maybe a political party. I don’t believe there was any research done in a serious way that could’ve given the outcome that “all charters should be stopped because they’re bad, and we should continue pushing our kids into public education.”

There are tons of great charters that are serving tens of thousands of children. They must not have stopped at any of those schools, or they must not have talked with any of their representatives, or their representatives are so disconnected to what’s really happening in their communities that they shouldn’t call themselves representatives anymore. Which is my stance on the NAACP — they are not representative of the black community, they haven’t been relevant as leaders in the black community for well over 30 years, and I might even say 40 or 50. So I think that their motivations were either political or to buffer their own coffers.

I put the Urban League in the same bucket. I think unfortunately — part of that is a little bit racist — these were the organizations in the ’60s and ’70s that were beacons. They were beacons both in terms of pushing the mainstream establishment, but also beacons for us, providing leadership, changing laws, fighting segregation. Like Thurgood Marshall, these were the great leaders, and I think folks who are now risen haven’t taken the time, and it’s not as easy to find leadership in the black community as it was when you had the old NAACP, when you had leaders like Malcolm X, [Ralph] Abernathy, Dr. [Martin Luther] King, Adam Clayton Powell, when you had a black church that people would drive to.

It’s now harder to find our leaders, so I think folks are either just being lazy or they’re kind of saying, “Well, that was the group that was very important when I was coming up and when things were really serious, so that must still be the group 50 years later.” They’re not. And I don’t know anybody who’s in the heart of the black community who thinks those organizations are organizations we would call our leaders.

So who is the modern-day NAACP or Urban League that the black community can look to for leadership?

I think leadership is much more diverse and diffuse at this point. There are not a ton of national leaders. There are a lot of national voices. There are a lot of national black quote-unquote leaders who show up when reporters need to talk to somebody black to get expertise on an issue, and some of their articulation of our struggle and what we’re going through is accurate. Some of it is not.

I think the leadership right now is much more dispersed, and I think that there are a lot of local leaders who are phenomenal, who people look up to in every city. And there are dozens of them. Many of them are very young. Some of them are not quite as young. I think that’s the leadership that exists right now. And again, it’s harder to find who are the leaders in Indianapolis that parents really respect, who parents talk to.

And I could name a handful of leaders here in Indianapolis, in Gary, but it’s not that same, “Oh, call Reverend Al Sharpton, he has the hand on the pulse.” He’s done an enormous amount, so I’m not disparaging all the great work he’s done, but it’s not that same day where it was Jesse Jackson, it was Reverend Al Sharpton, it was Bill Cosby. There was a two-decade period that those three individuals were the most prominent and most prevalent voices when somebody needed to find out what is going on in the black community. That day has changed.

The NAACP’s report calls for a more rigorous authorizing and renewal process for charter schools, as well as eliminating for-profit charter schools, among other recommendations. Are they fair conclusions?

I think some are partially fair and some are out of touch, which is how I describe the institution and the study. I think the notion that for-profit — and I run a nonprofit — makes you a bad organization is ludicrous.

I think that having tighter financial accountability is good. But it’s tighter financial accountability to charters in most communities that are already getting 20 to 30 percent less public funds than the schools right down the street. So it’s with that caveat.

I think the notion of high accountability with all schools is great. If a school is not working and demonstrating the level of growth in student improvement, I think those schools should be shut down. Why not say, “We want a moratorium on bad schools, and we’re against bad schools, and we want to up state legislator accountability around what happens to underperforming public schools, whether they’re traditional, district, or whether they’re charter, and we want to find a way to get more funds into good schools, whether they’re parochial, traditional district, or charter”?

If they said that, I would be probably second in line behind their quote-unquote leadership, touting this as something. But to choose the small sliver of where our 8 million kids are going, and then to know that within those 8 million children of color or black children, many of them are getting the only educational choice that they have, the only good one, through charters, I don’t know what the motivation could’ve been.

And the NAACP does have, despite what I’ve said, a lot of smart people, so there had to have been a very intelligent motivation to say, “We’re going to ignore where 95 percent of our kids go” — and by the way, 95 percent of our kids in low-income communities are in atrocious schools. And that’s why most NAACP members don’t live in the community. They live in the suburbs, don’t step into the community, and their kids go to schools in the suburbs, so I struggle with the recommendations because I know there has to be some bias that smart people would say, “I’m going to take away millions of high-quality seats that have existed for the first time in 20 years, from kids, low-income black children and families.”

So some of the recommendations of shutting down low-performing charters, I’m on it. If the school is bad, we’ve gotta shut it down. Making sure that dollars are going towards children, I’m with that. But I’ll also say that we’re getting 30 percent less to begin with.

On the designation of for-profit versus nonprofit, I’d just keep the designation on, “Is this school delivering the type of outcomes that they should for kids?” And then I’d encourage the NAACP to show some real courage and actually start to talk about where most of our black, Latino, and poor white children attend, and what are we going to do to put pressure on that system to respond.

The one thing I will say is, having been in this sector and having done more turnarounds and seeing some of the agreements that community members got into with for-profits — now I’m making a statement that does agree with the NAACP — those contracts, those agreements are disgusting. There are well-meaning community members who say, “I can run a school, I can run a school,” they organize themselves, they say, “Oh, but I need someone to help with the facility, and we need someone to help manage.”

Then the company will say, “Pay us 20 percent of your per-pupil for the facility that you’re renting — you’re not even going to own it. And then give us 15 percent to do management, back office, finance, HR things, so you can focus on the educational program.” On a long-term 15-year lease, 20 percent fee, and you don’t own anything at the end of it is criminal.

So I will give them credit on that point, that if you take 35 percent out of the per-pupil funding, it’s going to be very hard to deliver results. That part of NAACP’s resolution piece doesn’t make me say, don’t do for-profits; it makes me say, if you’re starting a charter school and you’re ambitious enough to believe you can create a great education program for children, then do your homework. There is more than enough research on what a good agreement should look like, what good financial metrics should look like.

On the notion that the traditional district is a solution, I have 100 years of evidence that demonstrates that sending our kids back to traditional low-income public school is an absolute near-death sentence for that child’s future. That, I know, and the NAACP knows, and that’s why I say, shame on them for taking some political move or some donations that made them say something that is patently untrue. Or, shame on them for being so ignorant to have no connection to the community to think that their recommendations are actually going to help, not hurt, our children and families.

What’s it going to take to overshadow that message?

First and foremost, I don’t think the NAACP has that much juice. I’m not seeing charters decline, I’m not seeing anybody other than the original splash talk about there should be a moratorium except for the same people who oppose charters to begin with, and so I’m not seeing that they have that much juice to make an impact.

I think what we should do, those who are really focused on the work, focused on the children, and focused on change, is continue to drive harder than ever to make sure that every school that we operate, whether nonprofit like mine or for-profit like some others, actually delivers extraordinary results to children.

I think the best thing we can do at this time is, I think legislators should shut down bad charters, and they should also put extreme pressure on bad public schools to be transitioned — like in Indianapolis — be transitioned to a different operator who can give the kids a chance and, if you’re on the ground, deliver for children.