Before 2024, students at Whiteland High School seeking advanced curriculum could already choose between Advanced Placement and dual credit courses.

So when school officials considered adding a new curriculum backed by the University of Cambridge in 2024, they wanted to address the needs of a specific subset of students: the community’s growing population of non-English speaking students, who represent around 14% of the district and speak 64 languages.

They found that the essay-based test in Cambridge courses allowed students to demonstrate their mastery of advanced content while they were still learning English, said assistant superintendent Cassandra Shipp.

“We don’t want to limit our students who we know are bright,” Shipp said. “Regardless of whether they’re taking AP or Cambridge, our students have to be global competitors.”

Indiana wants more schools to offer Cambridge STEM courses through $500,000 in grant funding earmarked in the latest state budget. The long-term goal is to create another way for students to earn an advanced diploma that leads to automatic college admission. Schools can apply for grant funding that will help pay for teacher training and program fees.

In February, the state’s department of education awarded six schools — including Whiteland — funds to introduce courses like Thinking Skills, Computer Science, Biology, and Chemistry. Now, it has opened another round of funding to allow up to 16 more public and private schools to start offering these classes.

What are Cambridge Courses?

Cambridge courses come from the University of Cambridge in England through its .

Though the courses are new to Indiana, and less common nationally than Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, they’re offered in approximately two dozen other states and 160 countries.

The offerings from Cambridge are a little like both IB and AP programs: Like IB, Cambridge offers programs that begin in elementary school and go through high school; but like AP, it also offers standalone courses.

Passing an A-level Cambridge course in an Indiana high school is equivalent to passing one in the U.K. or Singapore and indicates that a student is ready for college-level coursework, said Mark Cavone, the North American regional director for international education at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. While not necessarily aimed at multilingual students, some features make the courses a particularly good fit for them, like the incorporation of , a neutral form of English.

While most Cambridge courses are aimed at students going to college, the organization also offers some career-oriented courses, such as in marine science and travel and tourism, Cavone said.

“The thing that keeps us up at night is that we want kids to be college and career ready by the time they graduate high school,” Cavone said.

How can Indiana students use Cambridge courses?

Through the expansion, more Indiana schools will be able to allow students to earn the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education, or AICE, diploma, Cavone said.

The AICE diploma is one of the ways that students can earn an Honors Enrollment Seal in the state’s , which guarantees students admission to any of the state’s public universities. Students can also earn this seal by earning an associate degree, IB diploma, AP Scholar with Distinction, or other advanced pathway. And schools receive a $2,495 bonus for every student who earns an honors enrollment seal.

Cavone said ���Ի徱���Բ�’s diploma redesign and education choice policies made it a good fit for the organization’s expansion.

Currently, Cambridge courses are available mainly in traditional public high schools, Cavone said, along with some charter and private schools. The first round of grant funding from the Indiana Department of Education was awarded to four public high schools, one charter school, and one private school:

• Whiteland Community High School at the Clark Pleasant Community School Corporation. The district also offers Cambridge English courses in middle and high school that are not backed by the grant.
• North Central High School in the Metropolitan School District of Washington Township
• Terre Haute South Vigo High School at the Vigo County School Corporation
• East Chicago Central High School at the School City of East Chicago
• GEO Next Generation Academy
• Al-Haqq Foundation Academy

Schools interested in applying for the IDOE grant should fill out before July 17.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

���Ի徱���Բ�’s charter school students have experienced greater academic growth in the years following the pandemic than their peers in traditional public schools, according to a new preliminary analysis.

The also found that the gains were particularly pronounced for Black and Hispanic students, and for those who were among the lowest-performing and economically disadvantaged.

The findings could hold important lessons for how schools can recover from learning loss and have sparked researcher interest in what tactics charter leaders adopted to do that. While there are many studies examining the impact of charter schools on student outcomes, the authors note that there has been almost no research on charter school performance since the pandemic.

The findings tracked students from 2017-18 to 2023-24, focusing on how ILEARN test scores improved from their baseline levels during the pandemic in 2020-21. They have prompted researchers to examine how certain schools responded in the years immediately following the 2020-21 school year.

“What really matters is, what is it that these schools were doing?” said Joseph Waddington of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame, one of eight authors of the study. “We’re not so much interested in telling a story of how did this sector (perform) versus the other sector — we want to understand why. We want to understand the variation.”

The analysis, which is undergoing peer review, examined students who stayed in brick-and-mortar charter schools and in traditional public schools throughout the entire study period.

Charter students were matched with traditional public school peers who most closely resembled them based on a variety of factors, including their socioeconomic status, geographic location, and their 2021 ILEARN test score.

Most of the state’s charter schools are in Indianapolis, but the study also examined all counties in which charter schools are present. The analysis included few rural students, Waddington said, because of the lack of charters in those areas.

During the 2020-21 school year, charter students performed the same as their traditional public school peers in math and modestly outperformed them in English, according to the study. But after 2020-21, charter students outperformed traditional public students in all years in English, and nearly all years in math.

The difference was modest in 2021-22, but grew in 2022-23 and 2023-24, according to the study.

“The findings in this analysis suggest a shift occurred during the pandemic and its aftermath,” the study concludes. “Not only are students in ���Ի徱���Բ�’s charter schools experiencing more accelerated test score gains than their (traditional public school) peers, but these impacts appear to be growing over time in the post-pandemic period.”

Chronic absenteeism and instructional delivery — whether in-person or virtual — did not account for the differences in achievement, the study found. Charter schools were more likely to offer virtual learning for more of the 2020-21 school year than traditional public schools.

In Indianapolis, charter schools as a whole have posted higher rates of Black and Hispanic students reaching proficiency in both math and English, compared with those run by Indianapolis Public Schools, according to a .

The study’s authors are examining what could contribute to the differences in outcomes between charters and traditional public schools by surveying school leaders in both sectors across Indiana, Waddington said.

The changes could be attributed to additional instructional time or differences in instructional type, such as having students spend more time in smaller pull-out groups, he said. He also said some schools may have added certain types of staff, or utilized certain partnerships to bring in tutors.

The study’s findings mirror broader research on charter school students’ performance that finds positive impacts for Black students, those from lower-income households, and the lowest-performing students, Waddington said.

But the researchers are hoping to learn more details from survey results about how schools responded to COVID learning loss.

“There may be something in the story about differences in how the sectors responded to the pandemic that can actually be illustrative for all sectors going forward in terms of best practices associated with learning loss recovery,” he said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

An overhaul of ���Ի徱���Բ�’s public K-12 school accountability ratings will take effect despite objections from Attorney General Todd Rokita, who criticized the new system as diluting the importance of academic proficiency.

Rokita and Gov. Mike Braun signed off on the State Board of Education rule this month, concluding a multiyear effort by lawmakers to rewrite ���Ի徱���Բ�’s high school graduation and accountability requirements.

Braun on Wednesday brushed off Rokita’s criticism of the revised A-F ratings, which formally take effect for the 2026-27 school year.

A look at the new A-F model

The Board of Education the new statewide A-F model in March.

The new system assigns points to each student rather than using schoolwide averages and standardized test scores.

These student scores are based on academic proficiency, growth and other success indicators, which are then averaged within elementary, middle and high school grade bands and combined into the overall A-F grade assigned to each school.

Education officials praised the changes for better reflecting student progress, literacy and post-graduation readiness in place of the “all-or-nothing” model of the past.

The new approach mirrors changes to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s high school diplomas and diploma seals.

A school’s graduation rate and SAT performance each account for 10% of its score, combined with other measures like coursework, credentials, work-based learning and student engagement.

The state will calculate and publicly release letter grades under the new system for the 2025-26 school year, but will not take action against poorly rated schools during the transition year.

The rule is now final following signatures from Rokita and Braun on May 1.

Rokita argues new system blunts accountability

Rokita again raised concerns about the new accountability metrics in a letter to Braun this month, citing Board of Education metrics revealing few schools will be rated as D or F schools despite poor academic proficiency.

Thirty-three percent of Hoosier students in grades 3-8 are proficient in both English language arts and math on the state’s standardized exams, while fewer than one in four high school students meet SAT proficiency benchmarks, yet few schools will receive low ratings, Rokita wrote in the letter provided to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

“Under any system driven by academic performance, these proficiency rates would be expected to produce far more low-rated schools,” he wrote. “They do not.”

Rokita served as chairman of the subcommittee on K-12 education in the U.S. House of Representatives before his election as attorney general.

In his letter to Braun, Rokita criticized the Indiana Department of Education for not making its internal modeling public during the rulemaking process, writing the “surprisingly high number of schools” with higher-than-expected ratings is by design.

“In the extreme, a school where all students are fully proficient and a school where no students are proficient could receive the same rating if the nonproficient students satisfy various nonacademic indicators,” he wrote.

The Board of Education made revisions to the rule earlier this year to satisfy Rokita’s objections.

While those revisions satisfied his legal review, Rokita wrote he remains concerned the new system fails to accurately reflect student proficiency, which in turn could undermine the state’s school choice reforms.

He urged Braun to direct the Board of Education to reconsider its approach.

“If ���Ի徱���Բ�’s A-F system is to remain credible and transparent, it should clearly distinguish between schools where students meet those standards and those where they do not,” he wrote. “In practice, the Rule will likely not accomplish this task.”

Asked Wednesday about Rokita’s objections, Braun stood by Education Secretary Katie Jenner and the Board of Education.

“I’m going to trust the secretary of education, the boards that weigh into it,” Braun told reporters. “And to me, I’m always going to error on the side of more accountability, not less.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, created by the state legislature this spring, will help pay for charter and district school buildings, create a busing system that includes charter students and take over from the city’s elected school board the ability to ask voters for tax increases. 

Indianapolis is already one of Experts predict charter schools could become even more popular in Indianapolis under IPEC, despite some community opposition that the new board strips power from the city’s elected school board and may drain money and resources from district schools.

Indianapolis won’t likely jump from the 51% of students attending charter schools today to the 99% in New Orleans, charter advocates say. Hurricane Katrina destroyed most schools there in 2005, prompting the dramatic shift from district schools to charter schools as the city rebuilt. Indiana faces no such crisis, but the state’s push to treat charter schools as equal to district schools makes the city nearly as charter-friendly. 

“This is going to be a game changing model for charter schools,” said Cara Candal, vice president of policy for ExcelinEd, the education advocacy group of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

“It’s going to compare, at the very least, incredibly favorably [to New Orleans],” Candal added. “This might…might…actually put it over the top.”

The new nine-person board, appointed by Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett, includes members of the Indianapolis Public Schools’ board, but leans heavily pro-charter. A majority of its members have worked for or served on boards of charter schools. Its chairman, David Harris is founder of several charter schools and led the Mind Trust, a local advocate of charter schools, until 2018.

The plan was opposed by the local NAACP and the National School Boards Association, which objected to the legislature making “a shift from normal practice” by creating the new board.

“Having layers of governance can create unnecessary disruption,” said the association’s CEO, Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs.“Who’s going to suffer from that? It’s going to be the community, parents and students.”

Resident Megan Alderman, co-chair of Progressive Democrats of America, told the state senate at a February hearing the power shift “undermines democracy.”

“It strips core powers from our democratically elected school board, which is by definition, taxation without representation,” she said.

IPEC’s superseding the school board breaks the pattern of other pro-charter cities including Denver and Baltimore, where the local school board keeps some control over planning and oversight of charters, while also helping pay for them and letting them use former schools.

Mike Petrilli, president of the pro-charter Fordham Institute, called the new board and sharing of assets “very different than what we’ve seen anywhere else, maybe with the exception of New Orleans.”

Doug Harris, a Tulane University professor and expert on charter schools in New Orleans and nationally, said he could think of no other city, besides New Orleans, where a central board stepped in to oversee district and charter schools, other than state takeovers of districts because of bankruptcy or academic failure.

The first big step in the power shift will begin by Aug. 1 when the new board starts flexing its taxing authority. The board is expected to ask voters to approve a ballot measure for a tax that would provide more money for both district and charter schools.  

The new board will also research how to take the district’s busing plan and expand it to include charter school students by the 2028-29 school year, as the legislature requires.

And it will wade into a complicated tangle of property law and finance to merge district-owned schools and charter school buildings into one portfolio of properties for the new board to manage and maintain.

That will be a challenge experts believe no other city has faced on this scale. Managing school buildings centrally is simpler where districts share properties with charter schools and keep control of them. If a charter wants to build its own school, the district and charter can sort out who controls and pays for a building right from the start.

But Indianapolis is trying to create central control after-the-fact, with more than 60 charter schools, all with different building arrangements. Some use district buildings. Some lease old church schools. Others have purchased and rehabilitated old church schools. Some have built new facilities. And others have partnered with donors or community groups to rehabilitate old industrial buildings.

All of which have different financing and debt, or shared ownership with other nonprofits or companies, that block any easy merger of schools into a collective portfolio.

That’s partly why the legislature gave IPEC until the 2028-29 school year to take over buildings. 

The legislature also allowed the district and charters to choose whether they want to put each building under IPEC control, or not – with millions of tax dollars riding on that choice.

The state now gives charters $1,400 per student for facilities costs, but that money will shift to IPEC and only go to participating buildings. Charters can also receive a share of local property taxes designated for buildings, but only those that join the portfolio.

Charters lose out on both sources of money if they don’t join, said State Sen. Bob Behning, the Senate Education Committee chair who authored the bill.

“There’s a distinct disadvantage for a charter to opt out because they’re going to lose their [money],” Behning said. “They’ll have no capital projects or no dollars for facilities.”

Charters are researching how, and whether, they should have their buildings included.

“Some of the facilities that we have ownership in, if we have full site control and full ownership, we’re happy to leverage that ownership through IPEC and see how that plays out,” said Tommy Reddicks, founder of the Paramount charter school network. “But we have some debt holders on some of our buildings, so it’s really not up to us whether or not we can give ownership away or share ownership. Because they’re the ones holding the note, they would have to approve anything like that.”

Charter experts could not point to any other districts which had to sort out these issues at this scale. Even in New Orleans, where charter schools were still so new when Katrina hit, experts said, only one school at the time was privately-owned. After Katrina, that school and the state-created recovery school district shared insurance and federal Katrina relief aid to build a new building the district owns.

Behning said that so many details need to be researched and ironed out that he expects the legislature to change state law several times over the next few years. 

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

The , which represents 35 members who work for the statewide teachers union, its president, vice president and a regional director were put on administrative leave and threatened with termination early this year following its objection to a staff restructuring proposal. The organization filed unfair labor practice charges April 7 with the National Labor Relations Board, saying the association’s actions violate federal law.

In February, the 40,000-member , an affiliate of the National Education Association, proposed reassigning 24 staffers who provide support to local union chapters, according to a . The organization said it protested the change because the teachers association failed to include input from members and local union leaders.

“These staff serve as front-line advocates for educators at the bargaining table and in grievance and representation matters,” the organization said in a . “ISTA’s proposal would have replaced these positions with on-call consultants responsible for roughly twice as many local associations.”

Rick Scalf, the organization’s president, said he and Vice President Anita Vernon were put on paid administrative leave Feb. 23. A third union member was also placed on leave but has since returned to work. All three work as unified service directors, the job title slated for reassignment. They assist Indiana State Teachers Association union locals with questions about negotiations and procedures. 

The association didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but in an internal fact-finding report published in March, it claimed Scalf and Vernon violated its policy that prohibits unified service directors from getting “involved in governance matters of local affiliates and the state association.”

The claim stems from a January meeting between Scalf, Vernon and Sandra Vohs, president of the Fort Wayne Education Association, according to the report. Vohs met with Scalf and Vernon to review a bylaw proposal she was planning to introduce at the annual meeting of the state union’s representative assembly, which is scheduled for Saturday.

One of the proposed bylaws related to the association’s proposal to restructure its staff by reassigning unified service directors.

“We didn’t have much reaction to the bylaws themselves, because she did a great job of drafting them — they were ready to go,” Scalf told ����Ӱ��. “The conversation really was more around making sure she understood the submission process.”

The association said in its fact-finding report that Vohs should have asked the director assigned to her local union for help instead of Scalf and Vernon, who were in charge of other areas of the state. Vohs said in a written response that person was absent, so she asked Vernon to weigh in because their offices are next to each other. Vernon then asked if Scalf could join the discussion because of his experience with the association’s procedures.

“Initially, there was no apparent reason for the Fort Wayne president to meet with the [Professional Service Organization] president and vice president to discuss a bylaw amendment,” the Indiana State Teachers Association wrote in the fact-finding report. “However, the explanation became much more obvious when evidence surfaced of the movement to build support for a proposed bylaw amendment that would inhibit ISTA management’s ability to structure the staff and give the Board of Directors the power to review any requests for addition or deletion of staff positions, as well as the power to approve or deny such requests.”

The association’s report recommended firing Vernon and Scalf. Both have meetings with union officials scheduled for Monday, where they will have the opportunity to defend themselves. Scalf said the association has until five days after the meeting to announce whether they will be fired.

The Indiana Professional Staff Organization is under the umbrella of the , which represents 4,000 members across the country. Justin Zartman, the organization’s vice president, filed unfair labor practice charges against the Indiana State Teachers Association with the National Labor Relations Board on April 7. 

Zartman, who used to work for the labor relations board, said it will gather evidence from both sides before announcing a decision about the case. If it finds a violation, he said, it will issue a complaint that will either result in a settlement or be considered by an administrative law judge.

Zartman said he’s never seen union leaders be disciplined like this in the 20 years he has been involved with National Education Association affiliates. Scalf and Vernon didn’t violate the Indiana State Teachers Association’s policy, he said, because they were solely answering a union local’s question about procedures — something they do regularly.

“This is clearly because they want to get rid of a president and vice president because they have opposed their reorganization and how it impacts the staff, but they’re using this as the mechanism to do it,” he said. “I’ve never seen a state go after a president or vice president like this. I have leaders from other NEA states asking me what’s going on.”

National Staff Organization locals in at least 22 states, along with other national labor groups, have voiced their support in recent weeks by publishing denouncing the association’s actions. A rally is scheduled for Saturday in Noblesville, Indiana, for members to protest as the representative assembly meets. The Indiana State Teachers Association will also be discussing the staff restructuring at the meeting, Zartman said.

The National Staff Organization’s executive committee Wednesday that it will boycott the Indiana State Teachers Association by prohibiting its members from applying for vacant positions there.

“We cannot stand by while our union siblings face such injustice,” President Brad Darjean said in a . “These sanctions are a necessary step to demonstrate that the broader labor movement is paying attention and we will act to defend our members. We are committed to supporting Indiana staff throughout this crisis.”

Monday, Indiana’s Fremont Classroom Teachers Association asked the statewide union to reinstate Vernon, who served as its unified service director. The union local said her sudden departure has “left our leadership frustrated, confused and unsure where to turn for guidance.”

“Her leave has also caused us to question what support we are truly receiving from ISTA at this point and where our financial contributions are being utilized,” the Fremont union wrote. “Our UniServ director is a crucial part of our success as a teachers union. Without Anita’s guidance, Fremont CTA would not be where it is today.”

Scalf said there’s no just cause for the state union’s actions, especially because the assistance he and Vernon provided in January is work the association has directed them to do in the past. 

“The ISTA members rely on staff to advise them on union activity and day-to-day business,” he said. “This creates a chilling effect on our ability to effectively advocate and represent those members.”

Why the Classic Learning Test, which embraces Aristotle but spurns calculators, has caught ���Ի徱���Բ�’s eye

A test that relies on classic Western texts and bans calculators for math will soon play a role in assessing how well Indiana students and schools are doing.

Since February, Indiana has expanded the use of the Classic Learning Test in two key ways. First, a new law requires state colleges and universities to consider CLT scores to the same extent that they would consider SAT or ACT scores for admission.

Second, under a new state accountability model that gives schools an A-F grade based on points students earn for proficiency, the Classic Learning Test is one way high school students can earn bonus points for their schools’ grades. The Indiana State Board of Education approved the use of the test at the last minute when adopting the new A-F model in March. It was not part of previous drafts of the model.

The Classic Learning Test’s expansion is part of a in Indiana and by conservatives to counter what they see as an education system that leans too progressive by providing alternatives they believe are more rigorous and in line with Western tradition.

The elevation of the CLT follows state leaders’ decision in 2024 to in Indiana higher education, a move seen by many as a boon to conservatives on campuses, as well as previous years’ efforts to that could make students feel guilt or . This year, lawmakers also required higher education leaders to explore — in line with .

Supporters of the CLT say they like the test because it assesses students’ reading skills with texts that are foundational to the country’s history. That also aligns with a to foster “a shared understanding of America’s founding principles” on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

But there’s also practical reason to welcome the CLT, supporters say: It shakes up a long-standing testing establishment that gave students just two options for college readiness testing — the SAT or the ACT. That reflects the school choice environment that includes a growing number of classical schools.

“The CLT is the first newcomer since Eisenhower was president,” said Michael Torres, director of legislative strategy for the CLT. “We offer an opportunity for our students to prove they’re ready for college based on the curriculum they use.”

But critics counter that there is not enough evidence to say a CLT score is on par with a score on the SAT or the ACT — especially when the scores are used for high-stakes decisions about school accountability and college admissions.

“It especially matters to make sure that kind of mathematical relationship between the scores is stable and well-founded when there are any consequences in how these tests are used,” said Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president for College Readiness Assessments at the College Board, which administers the SAT.

Indiana could eventually decide to let students using vouchers to attend private schools take the CLT instead of the ILEARN state exam that voucher students must now take. A private school leader raised that idea during the legislative session, and CLT officials would support it, Torres said.

But that could make it harder to compare how private school students are performing compared with their peers in public schools. Indiana officials have not discussed this idea publicly.

As Indiana expands the use of the CLT, the state should want to ensure the test it’s well-suited to its academic content standards, measures for school quality, and its goals for students, said Chris Domaleski, executive director of the Center for Assessment. The state advisory committee that focuses on required assessments did not weigh in on including the CLT for school accountability because it’s an optional test, Indiana Department of Education officials said.

“The more it’s used, the more we need to seek evidence that it’s useful, that it has reliability, validity, and fairness, for all student groups, including students with disabilities and multilingual learners,” Domaleski said. “All those kinds of questions we’d ask for any assessment used in a consequential way.”

How do Classic Learning Test scores stack up?

The CLT for juniors and seniors is a two-hour, 120-question test developed in 2015 by founder Jeremy Tate, who “saw there might be interest in a third option that proved students are ready to go to college but didn’t force schools to embrace the Common Core,” Torres said, referring to the state standards that some conservatives came to distrust. Classic Learning Initiatives, the company behind the test, also offers a CLT for grades 3-8 and a 10th grade test.

The CLT uses passages by a bank of Western writers from the ancient to the late modern times — the most recent listed is author Toni Morrison — as well as contemporary nonfiction texts.

Sample questions on “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” for example, ask students to determine based on the passage the reason that caused the gods to flood the land, and determine which lines in the poem support the argument.

Critics say this focus promotes of culture and society — and that the test offers an advantage to students familiar with the pieces. Still, classical schools and educators say these works are fundamental to all students’ understanding of history.

“When we talk about college readiness, what are we talking about? Is it the use of AI? Is it being able to critically think, look at passages, look at historical text?” said Kylene Varner of the Indiana Association of Home Educators, who supported the bill to require colleges to consider CLT results like SAT and ACT results. “If we can’t understand the culture and history … and the writing of our Constitution, how do we learn?”

There are also differences on the math portion of the test, where the CLT does not allow calculators; Torres said that means students must show they are “independently numerate.”

And around 15% to 20% of test-takers utilize a remote option not available on the SAT or ACT, Torres said. This option is important to home-schoolers who may not have access to other tests, Varner said.

But what makes the CLT stand out has in turn raised questions about whether comparing scores from the test to results from other exams can be misleading.

The CLT has published between CLT scores and SAT and ACT scores. Torres said the study behind that table relied on a sample of about 4,500 students and produced reliable results. He noted that in addition to self-reported scores, the company received some scores from the colleges that accept CLT, SAT, and ACT scores.

But representatives from the ACT and SAT . To establish that one score on the SAT reliably correlated to a score on the ACT, the College Board and the ACT jointly examined the scores of more than 500,000 students who had taken both exams, said Colin Dingler, ACT’s chief policy analyst.

In addition to a smaller, less-representative sample size, there are two other key issues with CLT’s score comparison, Rodriguez said: The students’ SAT scores were self-reported, and that sometimes years had passed between the two tests.

Ultimately, it would be unfair if two tests had different passing scores, and one was easier to pass than the other, but some students only had access to the harder test, Dingler said.

“It’s very important from an equity standpoint to have some scientifically established tool to go from the scores of one assessment to another assessment,” he said.

How the CLT factors into school quality, college readiness

One of the primary uses of test scores is to indicate that a student is ready for college.

A handful of private colleges in Indiana — along with around 300 nationwide — already accept the CLT scores, and the .

But few K-12 schools offer the test right now, state education officials said, and most public universities in Indiana don’t require any test scores for admission, although Purdue University is a notable exception.

Supporters of the CLT, including leaders of private classical K-12 schools in Indiana who testified in support of it earlier this year, said the test is for measuring students’ college readiness — or .

Not everyone agrees. Iowa in 2024 recommended against the use of the CLT for admission to its public universities, about the academic performance of the students who took it.

A key question for assessing college readiness is whether a test based on a prescribed curriculum is gauging students’ knowledge of that curriculum, rather than their general readiness for college-level classes. Even in subjects like science, the ACT is written so that students without a familiarity with a specific scientific concept can figure out the question, Dingler said.

“I don’t think that philosophically, there’s something wrong with assessments that are anchored in content or a specific reading list,” Dingler said. “But I do think that using the results of that test to generalize that any student is ready to succeed or to do well … that’s a really different matter.”

Torres said that while classical schools have embraced the test, familiarity with the texts is not a prerequisite for success on the CLT.

“It merely uses those texts to test reading comprehension and grammar,” Torres said. “We find that to be a rigorous measure of college readiness.”

Test scores also play a role in assessing Indiana school quality.

Students’ SAT proficiency will make up 10% of a high school’s letter grade on the state’s new A-F accountability model. But the state’s decision to let schools earn accountability bonus points through student scores on the ACT or CLT might lead schools to push students to take the CLT, “where it may be easy to get a score that looks high compared to the ACT or the SAT but maybe actually isn’t,” Rodriguez said.

In a statement, the state education department said the school accountability system approach to the CLT balances “personalized pathways” with elevating “real opportunities for students.”

The test’s supporters like that flexible approach, which could play a role if Indiana considers letting students using private school vouchers take the CLT instead of the state’s standardized test.

“Allowing schools to use nationally normed assessments like the CLT that are also rigorous … objective, and publicly reportable, this respects both accountability and also educational diversity,” said Rachel Oren, head of school at the Classic Academy in Indianapolis.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Student demographics are shifting so that in just six years, districts have lost nearly 2 million students nationwide. Meanwhile, charter schools gained about half a million, private schools added thousands more, and homeschooling rates remain higher than pre-pandemic levels. These shifts look different depending on where you live, but almost no district is immune. The result: Traditional district schools are serving a shrinking share of a shrinking market. 

In many states, options that used to be considered fringe alternatives are now much more accessible. Policy shifts favor charter schools and open enrollment across district lines; and education savings accounts and tax credit scholarships incentivize alternative school options. 

This means the traditional assumption that most students in a district’s boundaries will attend its schools no longer holds. It also means districts need to rethink how they can continue to successfully serve their students and communities. And it means that it is more important than ever to think about how districts and states serve students with disabilities so they don’t fall through the cracks. 

Enrollment declines create immediate pressure. Districts still have to maintain buildings, transportation systems and central office functions even as student numbers fall. Political realities often make it difficult to close under-enrolled schools. And districts must continue to meet legal obligations, especially for students with disabilities.

Over time, this leads to hard tradeoffs. Resources shift away from classrooms just to keep systems running. Meanwhile, are often the first to leave. That can concentrate marginalized students and students with disabilities in the schools with the fewest resources and the least capacity to adapt. Staffing becomes harder. Financial strain grows. Academic outcomes can suffer.

Left unchecked, this becomes a downward spiral that, in some places, ends in state intervention or financial insolvency. States will increasingly face a choice: develop a new playbook for districts or manage the consequences of decline. 

Two paths districts must pursue at the same time

For decades, districts operated as vertically integrated systems: They ran the schools, delivered the services and served nearly every student in their area.

That model no longer reflects reality. Today’s districts face two distinct but connected challenges:

First, they must compete for students by offering schools and programs that families will actively choose. That means understanding what families want and building options that respond to those preferences.

Second, they must support a broader ecosystem of public education,finding ways to serve students, families and schools beyond those they directly operate. 

Districts that succeed will do both.

Competing today isn’t about marketing existing schools more effectively. It’s about rethinking what schools look like.

Some districts are already moving in this direction. Orange County, Florida, is facing enrollment declines for the first time in decades. To meet new demands, they’re exploring screen-free microschools and other specialized programs. Elsewhere, districts have launched classical education schools modeled on approaches gaining traction in the private sector. In Houston, a district-run virtual academy now serves more than 11,000 students, helping offset losses elsewhere.

The most effective efforts share a common thread: They start with understanding what families want and build new models from the ground up.

Other cities like Denver, New York City, Indianapolis and New Orleans have expanded school options while maintaining common enrollment processes, accountability frameworks and access to services like transportation and special education.

States can accelerate this work by removing barriers. Creating more flexibility around staffing, seat-time requirements and program rules can make it easier for districts to launch microschools, hybrid programs and career pathways that reflect how families want their students to learn.

At the same time, districts can no longer afford to disengage from families who choose other options.

In many places, families are piecing together education across multiple providers: a few district classes, an online program, tutoring or homeschooling. In Florida, more than half of districts now offer classes or services to students using scholarships or education savings accounts, often on a fee-for-service basis. This keeps districts connected to students and creates new revenue streams.

But doing this well requires clearer rules. Questions about pricing, accountability and safety are often unresolved. States can help by setting expectations for part-time enrollment and unbundled services, making it easier for districts to participate while protecting students.

There’s also an opportunity to simplify choice. Many families just want an education that works; they don’t want to have to navigate a complex marketplace of options.

Even as student enrollment declines, districts will continue to control significant assets: buildings, buses, food services and specialized expertise,especially in areas like special education. 

Those assets don’t have to sit underutilized. Districts that partner with charter schools offer a template for how to use these assets in new and novel ways. In places like Miami, Indianapolis, Camden and San Antonio, charter schools have been able to lease space, opt into transportation or food service or purchase maintenance and security services. This lowers barriers for new providers, improves use of taxpayer-funded infrastructure and creates revenue streams for districts. 

Districts can also play a larger role in delivering specialized services, particularly special education. Smaller schools often lack the capacity to provide comprehensive support for students with disabilities. With the right funding and flexibility, districts can offer these services across multiple schools and providers. 

States set the conditions for success

Districts didn’t become rigid by accident. State policies that impact funding formulas, staffing rules, accountability systems have shaped the current model. Now those policies need to evolve.

States can help districts adapt by:

• Funding students, not systems, while maintaining strong accountability
  
• Removing barriers that limit innovation and flexibility, such as seat time requirements or teacher certification rules
  
• Clarifying rules for part-time enrollment and shared services
  
• Ensuring districts are compensated for serving non-enrolled students
  
• Modernizing facilities policies to support shared use
  
• Stepping in when districts cannot or will not adapt

The era of school districts as monopolies is over. But their core mission remains: ensuring every student has access to a high-quality education.

The question is not whether districts will change. It’s whether they will change fast enough, in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken, public education.

Districts that embrace both being a competitor and a connector have a path forward. With the right support from states, they can remain central, trusted institutions in a more dynamic and diverse education landscape. 

Disclosure: Travis Pillow wrote this commentary while working as the director of thought leadership and growth at Step Up For Students. He has since taken on a new role as a spokesperson for the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program at the Texas Comptroller’s Office.

In Kristin Lidstrom’s business classes at Hamilton Southeastern High School in Fishers, the finance lessons quickly become personal.

“They begin thinking about their own spending habits, future goals, or even what they’re seeing at home,” Lidstrom said. “Concepts like interest rates or debt suddenly carry weight when they realize how long it can take to pay something off or how quickly costs can grow.”

Not every student will pursue business after Lidstrom’s class. But all of them can apply the lessons they’ve learned from business class in their future career paths, she said.

And Indiana wants all high school students to start thinking about what those paths will look like beginning in high school. The state will have in 2029 that emphasize career learning and financial literacy.

Lidstrom’s own career journey started with studying marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. But she found the path she wanted to pursue through volunteering in schools, and combined it with her passion for business to become a teacher.

Now the business department chair at Hamilton Southeastern with 22 years of experience in the district, Lidstrom has been piloting an AP Business with Personal Finance class this year, which is open to grades 9-12. The course, which is set to roll out nationwide in the 2026-27 school year, has the backing of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and local employers.

Read more below about Lidstrom’s class at Hamilton Southeastern High, and the projects that students complete pitching business ideas and putting together a realistic budget.

These answers have been edited for length and clarity.

What does a typical day look like in AP Business with Personal Finance? How is this class different from other AP courses?

A typical day in this class is very active and hands-on. The course is intentionally designed with a project-based learning approach, so while there are occasional moments of direct instruction, most of the time students are learning by doing, working through real-world scenarios, collaborating with peers, and applying concepts in meaningful ways.

What really sets this course apart from other AP classes is that it’s less about memorizing content and more about developing skills. Students are consistently engaging in problem-solving, critical thinking, and communication, which mirrors how business actually works outside the classroom.

One of the anchor projects in this course is an entrepreneurship business plan that students build from the ground up, centered around solving a real problem.

Students start by identifying a need — something they’ve observed in their own lives, school, or community. From there, they develop a product or service to address that need and work through the full business planning process. This includes defining their target market, analyzing competitors, creating a marketing strategy, and building out basic financials.

What makes this project especially meaningful is that it’s not hypothetical in the traditional sense. Students are expected to make realistic decisions, justify their choices with data, and adapt as they encounter challenges along the way.

The project leads to a presentation where students pitch their business as if they were seeking investment. It’s a great example of a real-world scenario because it requires them to bring together everything they’ve learned.

The culminating project in the course is a financial-adviser simulation, in which students take on the role of advising a client through real-life financial decisions.

What makes this project impactful is that students have to think holistically and justify their recommendations based on the client’s situation. It pushes them to apply what they’ve learned in a realistic context and communicate their reasoning clearly.

Have you seen any moments where the material “clicked” in a real-world way for students?

One of the biggest “click” moments is around things like compound interest or saving for the future. When students see how small, consistent decisions can significantly impact their financial situation over time, it changes how they think. They start asking better questions, making more intentional choices in simulations, and connecting it to real-life decisions they’ll be making soon.

It’s in those moments you can tell it’s no longer just a class, it’s something they see as directly relevant to their lives.

What do your students hope to do after high school and has taking this course changed the way they think about money, entrepreneurship, or next steps?

My students have a wide range of plans after high school. Some are heading to four-year colleges, others to community college or trade programs, and some are eager to jump straight into the workforce or start something of their own. What this course does is give all of them a stronger sense of direction and confidence in those next steps. While not all students will pursue business after high school, they all come away with an appreciation for how business acumen can support them in any career path.

How does the course support students in meeting ���Ի徱���Բ�’s new diploma requirements?

This course directly supports ���Ի徱���Բ�’s new diploma requirements by fulfilling the Personal Finance requirement, ensuring all students graduate with a strong foundation in money management, credit, and financial decision-making.

As an AP Career Kickstart course, it also helps students begin building a purposeful pathway early in high school. It encourages them to pursue additional AP coursework, putting them on track toward earning Honors and Honors Plus Seals. By starting that progression earlier, students are more prepared and confident as they move into more rigorous AP classes, while also developing practical, real-world skills that connect to both college and career opportunities.

If you could adjust one thing about how business or personal finance education is taught nationwide, what would it be?

If I could adjust one thing, it would be to make business and personal finance education more consistently rooted in real-world application rather than theory. Students don’t just need to know what a budget, credit score, or interest rate is, they need to actively use those concepts in realistic scenarios. When students are making decisions, experiencing the consequences, and reflecting on those choices, the learning sticks in a much deeper and more meaningful way.

I’d also push for this type of learning to happen earlier and more consistently across grade levels. By the time students are making real financial decisions, they should already feel confident navigating them, not encountering the concepts for the first time. Ultimately, the goal should be to move beyond exposure and toward true readiness, so students leave school not just informed, but capable.

What’s the best teaching advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

The best teaching advice I’ve ever received is to never do for students what they can do for themselves. In practice, that’s shaped how I structure my classroom in a big way. Rather than stepping in with answers, I focus on asking questions, creating space for productive struggle, and designing experiences where students have to think, decide, and reflect.

It can be uncomfortable at times (for both the students and me) but that’s where the real learning happens.

In a course like this, it means students aren’t just learning concepts, they’re applying them, making mistakes, adjusting, and building confidence along the way. Over time, you can see them become more independent, more thoughtful, and more willing to take ownership of their learning, which is ultimately the goal.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

Iowa’s governor said the approval would result in less time spent on administrative duties, allowing educators to put more resources and time back into the classroom.

Other states have pointed to the of having flexible accountability and assessment systems that reflect local priorities, foster innovation and empower local decision-making, rather than adhering strictly to federal mandates. But some education leaders, such as the , worry that if states ultimately establish 50 distinct accountability and improvement models, students’ access to learning accommodations and opportunities will vary based on where they live and learn. Academic outcomes can depend on the availability of tutoring, advanced coursework and enrichment, special education services, assistive technology and other supports.

As states consider the opportunities that waivers present for greater flexibility in using federal funds, they should consider lessons from the recent past. The pandemic-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds were a lifeline for schools, but they also exposed critical gaps in states’ approaches to innovation and evaluation. While ESSER funds enabled rapid response and recovery, the program lacked robust provisions for evaluating which strategies worked and why. As a result, there is limited evidence about which interventions — such as summer school, tutoring or targeted supports — were the most effective. 

For the department and states, the lesson is clear: Rigorous evaluation and continuous improvement must be embedded in the waiver and experimentation process from the start. States should clearly show how their plans connect to better student outcomes, and the department should assist them in these efforts. With more flexible financial strategies in place, states could find new ways to combine funds to reach their goals and learn from one another as they develop innovative approaches. Most importantly, however, states should ensure their investments include research and evaluation components, so they know what works and what does not.

Even as it cedes some control, the department has an important role to play in ensuring the following elements are in place: 

1. Purposeful Experimentation: States should be empowered to innovate, but with the expectation that they will rigorously evaluate new approaches and share what they learn. This will help ensure that successful strategies can be replicated and adapted elsewhere. Existing investments can be used toward these goals. For example, the Regional Educational Laboratories, the Comprehensive Center Network and the Educational Innovation and Research program help schools build their data-using skills and provide guidance on evidence-based practices.
2. Capacity Building: Many states will need expert guidance to design and implement effective reforms. Federal investment should focus on making lasting improvements, not just short-term fixes. The comprehensive network, for example, is a government-funded organization of regional centers that help states design, test and strengthen new ideas and strategies, and guide policymakers, state education agencies and educators in building the skills needed to improve teaching and learning.
3. Collaboration Over Isolation: The government should continue to facilitate collaboration among states, ensuring that innovations and lessons learned are shared widely. This may be done by providing insight on how to launch and sustain new programs and develop continuous improvement strategies, or by strengthening ongoing cross-state work through grants, technical assistance, conferences and national networks that help align standards, share data and improve student outcomes.

States have always been constitutionally responsible for providing public education, though federal policy — since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was enacted in 1965 — has incentivized states to serve disadvantaged students and promoted greater consistency in educational quality nationwide. 

Now, the department is signaling a willingness to let states experiment. But to avoid repeating the missed opportunities of ESSER, federal and state leaders must prioritize evaluation, capacity building and collaboration. Only then can the flexibility presented through these waivers lead to lasting improvements in educational excellence. 

���Ի徱���Բ�’s is officially on the books, pending a few final signatures.

The State Board of Education on Wednesday voted unanimously to formally adopt the new statewide model, locking in a that state officials said better reflects student progress, literacy and post-graduation readiness.

“This has been something that has been a long time coming,” said Katie Jenner, ���Ի徱���Բ�’s secretary of education. “Many, many stakeholders around Indiana weighed in.”

after Indiana dismantled its previous accountability framework and rewrote high school graduation requirements. Schools have been without a grading system in the interim while the replacement model was in development.

The rule now heads to state Attorney General Todd Rokita, who has 45 days to sign off, and then to Gov. Mike Braun for final approval.

“This model values academic outcomes as well as skills and experiences. It’s so much more than just creating a robot who can memorize things,” said Paul Ketcham, assistant secretary of education. “It is a very granular model. Every student will have the opportunity to grow, and it’s our responsibility to grow them.”

“In 49 other states, it’s an accountability rule,” Ketcham said. “In Indiana, it’s a roadmap for schools and students and families to be successful.”

A familiar framework — with a rebuild

Indiana schools will continue to receive single-letter grades — A, B, C, D or F — under the new system, but those grades will now be calculated in a fundamentally different way.

Rather than relying primarily on schoolwide averages and standardized test scores, the new framework assigns points student by student. Jenner and other education officials have described it as a model in which schools earn credit for each individual student based on a combination of academic proficiency, growth and additional “success indicators” that vary by grade span.

Those student-level scores are averaged within separate grade bands — elementary, middle and high school — and combined into one overall A-F grade for each school.

The model was intentionally designed to move beyond an “all-or-nothing” approach and incorporate multiple measures while keeping academic mastery central, particularly reading and math in the early grades, according to a .

“No longer does an indicator encourage schools to dismiss certain students that might be way behind,” said Ron Sandlin, senior director of school performance and transformation for the Indiana Department of Education. “We fundamentally flipped the paradigm. Every student in a school generates points.”

At the high school level, the model more directly ties accountability to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s newly redesigned diplomas and diploma seals.

Graduation rate and SAT performance each make up 10% of a school’s grade-12 score, alongside measures tied to coursework, credentials, work-based learning and student engagement.

“What we’ve tried to do is understand the student in their entirety,” Jenner said. “So that they don’t get washed in simple numerator-denominator math that we’ve been doing for so long.”

Multiple education groups and other board members additionally voiced support during Wednesday’s meeting.

“This framework gives teachers the tools to celebrate and support success beyond a single test score,” said Rachel Hathaway, Indiana executive director at Teach Plus, a national nonprofit focused on education policy. “Accountability should not be about labeling schools. It should be about improving them.”

Todd Bess with the Indiana Association of School Principals emphasized that the new model “prioritizes student growth alongside proficiency.”

“It recognizes the progress schools make every day with students at all starting points. Moving up those that are below (proficiency). Those that are just about there — and then obviously, those that are still wildly proficient — keep moving them, too, and finding those success indicators,” Bess said. “Families and communities can better understand school performance … and what I like is we can say we’re going to add these things up. Every kid matters, and here’s the greatest outcome.”

A transition year before grades ‘count’

The new accountability system will roll out through a transition period Sandlin tagged “Year Zero,” which applies to the 2025-26 school year.

Letter grades for the current academic year will be calculated and publicly released under the new model, but they will be informational only and will not trigger any timelines or consequences tied to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s accountability laws.

Sandlin said that the goal is to give schools and communities time to understand the new calculations and respond before the grades formally carry weight. Year Zero, he said, is intended to “set a clear baseline” and provide families and schools with transparent information about where performance stands under the new system.

IDOE plans to begin sharing detailed performance data with schools later this year, followed by the public release of Year Zero grades.

“This is different than any past A-F years,” Sandlin said.

As part of the transition, the grading scale will also be temporarily adjusted. For Year Zero, an A grade will span 85 to 100, rather than the traditional 90 to 100 range.

Starting with the 2026-27 school year, letter grades will once again count for accountability purposes. At that point, the cutoff for an A will gradually increase over time, rising by 2.5 points in any year when at least 25% of schools earn an A, until it reaches a final target of 90 to 100.

State officials said the approach is intended to allow an initial transition period while steadily increasing rigor as schools improve under the new model.

Wednesday’s vote followed months of revisions and public feedback led by IDOE, as well as parallel negotiations with federal education officials over ���Ի徱���Բ�’s accountability obligations.

Jenner said the — which would give Indiana added flexibility in how it aligns accountability and funding — to avoid locking in a model that was still being revised.

The seeks permission from the federal government to overhaul how Indiana spends and tracks billions of dollars in education aid — a request that Hoosier officials said would align the state’s accountability system with federal law and allow more freedom in how schools use their funds.

Hoosiers officials specifically requested exemptions from multiple provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, the federal law governing K-12 education, plus permission to combine funding from more than 15 federal education programs into a single “strategic block grant.”

The U.S. Department of Education has 120 days to review and respond to waiver applications once they’re received. ���Ի徱���Բ�’s was submitted in October, but the pause extends that timeline.

“We intentionally paused our federal waiver process as we were working through the final touches in our accountability model ….  in order to get this at the best place,” Jenner said. “We will unpause our waiver timeline shortly.”

“The fact that we’re doing this accountability work simultaneously as we’re working on our waiver has been a huge advantage to Indiana,” she said. “In addition to stakeholders in Indiana pushing us on some things, (federal officials) have also pushed us on some things. … A lot of people think policy work is threading the needle. We’ve had, like, multiple pieces of yarn.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

A second-round education deregulation effort advanced to the governor’s desk Friday despite concerns from Democrats that the measure weakens educator protections and professional standards at a moment when Indiana schools are struggling with teacher recruitment and retention.

The House voted to concur with Senate changes to , capping a multi-year effort to strip unused, outdated and conflicting language from ���Ի徱���Բ�’s education code. The Senate approved the bill Wednesday in a vote.

Authored by Rep. Bob Behning, R-Indianapolis, the bill is part of the House GOP’s broader push to reduce regulatory requirements across state agencies and education systems. Behning has framed the effort as ongoing cleanup, .

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Behning said Friday that concerns raised earlier by school administrators over contract language had been addressed in the final version of the bill.

“There was collaboration between the principals association [and] school boards,” he said.

Behning also pointed to changes affecting school referendums and partnerships with outside providers.

“There was some language taken out dealing with first class mailing specifically on referendums,” Behning said, adding that the bill allows schools to contract with private, for-profit or nonprofit providers for after-school care or preschool services.

But Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, held that the deregulation package goes too far.

“For several years, educators have been coming to us … asking for deregulation, and I supported deregulation. However, this bill went way too far,” Smith said.

He zeroed in on provisions eliminating contract language specifying teacher work hours.

“When you take this provision out, what you’re doing is you’re allowing somebody who wants to be a dictator … to force people to stay as long as they want them to stay,” Smith said.

“We’re having a problem already trying to attract people into the … career of being a teacher. Teachers all over the state have responded saying that they are concerned about this provision,” he continued. “We’re going to look back and we’re going to regret what we did to public education, because every session we destroy a valuable portion of it.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

These changes led to exceptional improvements in academic outcomes, as researcher Doug Harris has thoroughly . In the two decades since, however, no city has attempted such an ambitious structural reform.

Until now.

The Indiana General Assembly on Wednesday passed , a dramatic restructuring of public education within the boundaries of Indianapolis Public Schools. The bill was a direct result of recommendations made by the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, of local education and civic leaders. Chaired by Mayor Joe Hogsett, the alliance voted 8 to 1 in December to support a that proposed, among other things, revamping facility and transportation management for public schools within IPS boundaries.

Indiana legislators used these recommendations to craft HEA 1423, and The Mind Trust advocated for the bill because it presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a school system that serves all students well. The legislation establishes the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, which will have a nine-member board appointed by the mayor. Board members will include representatives from IPS and charter schools, as well as facilities and transportation experts with extensive knowledge of sound business practices. This new entity will be tasked with several key activities, among them:

• Creating a unified transportation plan to ensure that all public school students have access to safe, quality and efficient transportation.
• Developing a system-level facilities plan that would maintain, and potentially own, buildings for all schools that choose to opt in.
• Levying property taxes for both operating and capital costs so that all public schools within IPS boundaries benefit equally.
• Establishing a unified performance framework, including the default closure of persistently low-performing schools, that charter authorizers and IPS would be tasked with implementing.

The changes will effectively put charters and traditional public schools on the same footing — both in terms of the money spent per student and the consequences for poor performance.

All of this comes at a critical time for IPS. Today, a clear majority of public-school students within IPS boundaries attend charter schools, not IPS-managed schools. IPS has struggled to adjust to this new reality and, as a result, is running a $44 million structural deficit this school year, which is projected to grow significantly in the coming years. Without significant changes, the district will exhaust its rainy-day fund next year, risking insolvency and state takeover. 

Underutilized buildings and inefficient operations are key drivers to the district’s financial woes. An independently governed authority has the potential to both significantly downsize the district’s facility footprint and ensure the efficient provision of transportation. This structure also benefits charter schools by ensuring universal access to transportation and fully eliminating over time the funding disparity that currently leaves charter schools with about $8,000 less per student than traditional public schools.

While hard decisions remain for IPS, the legislation creates the opportunity for a reimagined school system, acknowledging that the status quo is no longer acceptable. The revolutionary component of the bill is simple but powerful: Separating the education of children from the management of operations. This approach allows educators to focus more time on what’s happening in the classroom. IPS will now become another school operator alongside charter schools, and district schools will compete on the same playing field and be held to the same accountability standards.

Critically, HEA 1423 allows for greater efficiency and coordination at the system level while safeguarding school autonomy and the ability to innovate at the school level. The new corporation’s role is well defined and limited to facilities, transportation and the creation of a new performance framework. Schools will be in charge of what happens inside classrooms and will even have the option to continue owning their buildings — and foregoing local debt service funds — if they feel the facilities plan does not meet their unique needs. A collaborative, multi-year planning process will ensure thoughtful implementation and the ability to identify future legislative tweaks.

Unlike New Orleans, where a hurricane forced leaders to quickly rebuild a school system, Indianapolis’ approach is a product of decades of methodical reforms and, more recently, a diverse group of local leaders coming together to reimagine what’s possible. And unlike more recent attempts at reform like Houston’s state takeover, this legislation activates a form of local mayoral control that has never before been tried: one that respects school autonomy while providing a single point of accountability for the financial and operational health of public education.

Indianapolis has been a national leader in education innovation since the 2001 passage of the state’s charter school law. Through three different mayors of both political parties, strong mayoral and civic leadership have been the cornerstone of that progress. A growing body of research shows that the growth of charter schools in Indianapolis has led students to significantly more academic progress, closed achievement gaps and helped usher in key system-level reforms.

This legislation is the culmination of 25 years of concerted effort. Now the hardest work begins, implementing this system in a way that significantly improves student achievement and forever breaks the connection between socioeconomic background, student success and long-term life outcomes.

As districts across the country struggle to deal with declining birthrates, universal school choice and lagging student achievement, Indianapolis provides a potential model for cities looking to create a modernized school system built for the future – not for a world that no longer exists. If this new structure is implemented well in Indianapolis, it won’t take another two decades for other major American cities to replicate that success. A little bit of courage today will go a long way toward securing a bright future for our children.

Indianapolis — flyover country to some — might just have the roadmap to get there.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

The rise of artificial intelligence and other technology has traditional high schools scrambling to keep up — with states doing an uneven job of encouraging schools to embed critical thinking skills, and offer students access to internships and college courses, according to a new report.

Today’s world, the nonprofit XQ Institute argues in its new report , “requires an entirely new kind of educational experience — one that traditional high schools were never designed to deliver,” the report found. 

“We live in an age of self-driving taxis, blockchain, and renewed interest in space exploration. The public launch of ChatGPT placed a powerful form of generative artificial intelligence (AI) within the reach of every American,” the report continued. “(The) stage is shifting rapidly. Our young people are growing up at a time when the economy and workforce are in constant flux. And high schools must keep pace.”

Schools not only need to emphasize work and early college experiences, XQ found, but also teach interpersonal and thinking skills as much as academics.

“What do we need to know when we leave our high school doors?” asked XQ CEO Russlynn Ali. Math, English and science are still important, she said.

“But layered on top of that, we need to be critical thinkers,” Ali said. “We need to be able to collaborate. We need adaptability. We need these skills that will help us succeed in life, no matter what direction we choose after we leave high school.”

XQ wants states to encourage schools to follow the lead of Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis or the Museum High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where students learn academics and interpersonal skills through projects, not lectures. Another standout: Oakland, California’s Latitude High School, where every 10th grader follows an adult through a work day to learn about the job, 11th graders have month-long internships and seniors can choose to do a longer one.

The new report takes a different approach from XQ’s previous work, which has centered on schools.

“States have more responsibility and authority over their schools than certainly in recent memory, if not in my lifetime,” Ali said. “They must be the locus of change.”

States are mixed however, XQ reports in the new study, in how they are succeeding in meeting 10 goals XQ considers key to school innovation. XQ met with school leaders across the country to create the goals — and then researched how much progress each state and Washington, D.C., has made toward them:

• 46 states have met the goal of offering work experience, such as internships, as credit toward high school diplomas.
• 38 states give every student a chance to earn college credit before graduating, by taking Advance Placement, International Baccalaureate or college classes.
• 32 states give schools the ability to award students class credit under a mastery or competency system showing they know the material, instead of just attending a class. 
• 32 states have identified key skills students need to learn for the future, including non-academic skills XQ has made a major part of its work, such as teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving. States often created a “Portrait of a Graduate” spelling these out.
• Just 10 states — Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington — met six of the goals; and no state met all 10, though 31 met at least four. Two states — Alaska and Florida — met only two of the goals.
• Two of XQ’s goals — finding ways to measure how well students have learned interpersonal and thinking skills, then showing those on report cards  — haven’t been realized by any state.

XQ plans to track changes and update the report every two years for the next decade.

“I think of these as a start, definitely not a finish line,” Ali said.

To highlight the 10 policy goals and encourage states to adopt them, XQ is planning to visit schools and policymakers in 25 communities, likely over the next two years. Details of that tour, which starts March 4 in Indianapolis and stops in Columbus, Ohio, the week after, are still being developed.

XQ, a nonprofit and affiliate of investing and philanthropic firm Emerson Collective, was co-founded by Ali and Laurene Powell Jobs. Powell Jobs is Emerson’s founder and president, and wife of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

XQ has been refining its vision for redesigning high schools since launching in 2015 with a well-publicized campaign to identify and support innovative “Super Schools” across the country. It gave a total of $102 million in 2016 to 18 schools — including the schools mentioned above — before expanding its work to 28 states.

XQ’s vision has its , who say it and who are to prepare students. But school districts and several states, including Indiana, Rhode Island and Utah, agree with the approach and are open in their support.

Utah’s state superintendent Molly Hart said the state rarely adopts any national approach, but there is great overlap in what XQ promotes and the state’s push to redesign high schools, including the support of mastery teaching approaches and requiring students to earn a meaningful professional credential before graduating.

”We align closely when you look at some of the goals and policy actions that XQ does,” she said. “We have a lot of similarities in what we’re looking at.”

The report, and shorter reports XQ released for individual states, also highlight policy changes and efforts already in place that XQ considers “beacons” for change. Among them:

• Indiana: For giving schools increasing flexibility in giving students class credit for showing proficiency in a subject, rather than just sitting through a class all semester or year. 

• Rhode Island: For changing diploma requirements so that all students, beginning in 2028, must take the courses in math, foreign language and even art that qualify them to attend college.
  
  “Our kids were not even taking the classes to be able to apply to those schools,” said state education commissioner Angelica Infante-Green. “Once they got there, they were in remedial courses because we weren’t preparing them for college level achievement.”  

• Texas: For allowing students to earn 12 hours of college credit in high school, either through college, AP or International Baccalaureate classes.

• Colorado: For encouraging the growth of CareerWise high school apprenticeships, the largest youth apprenticeship program in the country. Colorado also broke career preparation into three categories — Learning ABOUT Work, Learning THROUGH Work, and Learning AT Work.  

• Utah: For giving schools grants to train teachers how to educate students using a mastery/competency approach; and how to rate student progress. Utah also backed some schools in trying out vastly different report cards – keeping the traditional A-F grade scale, but also giving students a new Mastery Learning Record that shows their progress on durable skills.

Ali said XQ also wanted to highlight two goals that haven’t been met yet, but that she considers vital — developing tests to measure how well students have learned key non-academic skills and then changing student report cards to rate students on those skills.

Ali said the standardized tests states use to measure student skills in math, English and science offer some sense of what students know, but are outdated. There’s no clear way yet to assess how well students have mastered durable skills to prove to colleges or employers they have those skills. And Ali said that schools tend to prioritize learning the state measures and judges them on, so schools won’t teach them vigorously until they are part of report cards and school ratings.

But XQ recognized 12 states for trying to develop those tests and report cards, six of them for participating in a pilot project with the Educational Testing Service, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Mastery Transcript Consortium (now part of ETS). The Skills for the Future project has been working to create tests on durable skills, starting with three — collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

XQ is not part of this effort, but partners with Carnegie on some related work, and says it enthusiastically backs it.

The Skills for the Future team, which includes Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, is still working on creating new tests but recently broke down each of those three skills into smaller skills as one step toward creating tests.

Communication, for example, is broken down into segments — presentation skills, making messages more clear, adapting messages for different audiences or comprehending communication of others — that are then broken down further into sub-skills.

Infante-Green said measuring these skills will be a “game changer.”

“I think it will give employers things that they have been looking for, as well as change how we teach, what we teach, and how we incorporate (those skills) into the academic field,” she said. “It’s important. It won’t be one or the other, it’ll be both.”

Ali also stressed that just passing policy changes won’t be enough. Schools, teachers and parents need to also be on board.

“It’s not a checklist,” Ali said. “It has to be implemented in a way that is sustained and empowering and supportive of what needs to happen in the classroom.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

The parents of called on Indiana lawmakers to limit minors’ access to social media after their daughter’s death was linked to a 39-year-old man she spoke to online.

The original version of SB 199 would have banned social media operators from allowing Hoosier children to make accounts on their platforms and limited access for older teenagers. But this language was stripped in the Senate.

Now, House lawmakers are considering adding a version of the restriction back with an amendment.

Speaking at the House Education Committee Wednesday in support of the amendment, Beau Buzbee said 17-year-old Hailey had been lured away from their home by an online predator last month. Law enforcement announced Feb. 1 that she is believed to be deceased and that an Ohio man was arrested in connection with her disappearance.

Buzbee said their experience showed glaring gaps in Indiana law that needed to be addressed.

“We are losing the fight to protect our children. The internet and social media are the devils’ and predators’ playgrounds, and it’s on this front that we must fight,” Buzbee told lawmakers. “Please do not let this opportunity slip away.”

Supporters of have also called for schools to provide mandatory updated predator education and for updates to the state’s missing person alert system. they would add an expansion to the alert system as an amendment to HB 1303, a bill that increases the penalties for child exploitation, and that they would discuss adding more education to the existing health standards.

Indiana— but ultimately — a social media ban for minors under 14 and restrictions for those under 17 this year.

The most recent iteration of the ban is the amendment to SB 199, which requires social media providers to estimate the age of an account user and seek permission from the parents of users under 16. For minor accounts, the amendment forbids social media providers from using an algorithmic feed or selling data for advertising purposes, restricts who can contact the user, and gives parents monitoring tools.

Critics have raised First Amendment concerns as well as the possibility that the state will be drawn into an extended legal challenge over the law.

But supporters of a restriction on social media, including Secretary of Education Katie Jenner, say the state must act to address the risks of social media to children and teens the way it does for other dangerous activities, like tobacco use. Social media use is linked to depression, irregular sleep, and a lack of physical activity and social emotional support, said State Health Commissioner Lindsay Weaver. And these issues spill over to classrooms and affect learning, school leaders said.

House lawmakers heard hours of testimony overwhelmingly in support of the language on Monday, but did not take action to add it to the bill.

Supporters of the amendment included South Bend student Rima Bahradine-Bell, who said social media use promises community and affirmation but actually leads to comparison and dependency.

“I’m coming to you as a teenager and a high schooler, and I’m telling you that I would have liked to not have any social media at that age,” she said. “My friends are telling me to tell you that we did not want this.”

Amy Klink, a school counselor at Guerin Catholic High School, said she frequently speaks to students experiencing mental health crises as a result of social media and to their parents, who struggle to restrict social media access.

“Even when parents are aware of a social media account, they can’t be aware of every account with a new name. Parental verification could help with this,” Klink said. “It’s not the magic pill, but it will help.”

SB 199 will return to the House Education Committee on Wednesday for lawmakers to amend and vote.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

That feeling increased after the club, known as the O.C. Carmichael Youth Center, was used as an all-day learning pod during the pandemic for kids that needed help taking classes online, a role clubs in many cities took on.

“This building sits empty,” Wilson, now CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Northern Indiana Corridor, remembers thinking at the time. “We want every inch of this space to be utilized as much as possible for kids.”

So Wilson found an unusual way to get more use out of the building. 

After first considering loaning the 15,000 square foot space to a preschool, Wilson struck a deal with a charter school that builds many of its lessons around projects or field trips. The Career Academy Network of Public Schools, which has four other schools in the area, opened a K-5 elementary school with just over 110 students in the club at the start of the 2023-24 school year.

The partnership gives the Success Academy at Boys and Girls Club — which is not affiliated with the New York-based Success Academy charter schools — use of the building until 3 p.m. when the doors open to kids from other schools for the afternoon. Many of the school’s students stay for sports, crafts, and extra academic help with the same club aides that were in their classrooms.

“They stay with the cohort that they’re with during the day,” said Wilson. “That’s the whole idea, so that they can have that continuity of care. They know the strengths of the students that they’ve been working with all day.”

Career Academies Superintendent Candida Van Buskirk called the afterschool lessons “an additional power punch of literacy.”

“There’s no acclimation of a new leader,” said Van Buskirk. “There’s no acclimation of a new curriculum. This is the work that we do all day long, and we’re just getting an extra dose after school.”

Partnerships with schools are common for Boys and Girls Clubs, who run before and after-school programs across the country. Clubs are usually separate sites, but are often located at schools that have extra space.

But clubs hosting schools are rare. Van Buskirk said club leaders looked for clubs with similar arrangements when negotiating the partnership, but had no luck.

“We were unable to find one where it was fully enmeshed like this,” she said. 

The partnership helps the charter school in several ways. The school and Boys and Girls Club have jointly applied for grants together, which they say has helped win some. 

In addition, the Boys and Girls Clubs nationally include teaching about careers a priority of their afterschool programs, which matches a focus of the Career Academies charter chain. As part of the partnership, Katie Rodriguez, the regional workforce development coordinator for the Boys and Girls Clubs, works with the school to arrange field trips that teach students about careers.

Those trips also fit the school’s experiential learning model. Students have visited community organizations like the local food bank, local colleges, the local library so students could take home their first library cards and a theater so students could see a play and learn about all the jobs there, from actors to lighting technicians to ticket sales. 

The school also invited a judge to preside over a mock trial of the Big Bad Wolf for blowing down houses of the Three Little Pigs.

One week last fall, students visited the meteorologist at a local television station after learning about weather and how meteorology works in class.

Teaonna Miller, a school employee who works with Rodriguez to set up visits, said the hope is that students connect what they learn in class to the rest of the world.

“If they’re learning about weather inside the classroom, we find destinations that we can take them to that would relate to and correlate with the weather,” she said.

Mary Donlon, the school’s literacy coach, said the trips give students perspectives they otherwise miss out on.

“They don’t go out of their neighborhoods very often,” Donlon said. “They don’t go to museums. They don’t go to zoos on a regular basis. Generally, those experiences only happen in the school setting, and connecting it to academic things is really powerful.”

How well the school is doing is hard to say, since it is only in its third year and draws students from a low-income part of the city. School officials are proud of its giant leap from 2024 to 2025 in third grade reading proficiency from 33% of students to 70% on state tests, after participating in a state literacy effort credited with boosting scores statewide.

New tests this spring will show if gains continue.

But Wilson said he tells other club officials to consider placing schools in their clubs. He said contributing to any gains by students just furthers goals of the clubs.

“We want what’s best for kids,” Wilson said. “So it’s well worth it.”

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation would not have the direct authority to close public schools, and charters could keep control of their school buildings, according to a bill amendment lawmakers approved Thursday.

Under the amendment to House Bill 1423, charter authorizers and Indianapolis Public Schools — not the proposed Indianapolis Public Education Corporation — would maintain the power to close schools. But if they fail to do so, the corporation could appeal to the state board of education to close the school. The state board would ultimately have to approve the school closure.

In addition, the — introduced by Rep. Bob Behning, the Republican chair of the House Education Committee — would allow charters within IPS boundaries to opt into or out of a facility management plan overseen by the new corporation.

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The proposed changes to how school closures work and who controls buildings is part of a broader plan to change key aspects of how public schools work in the city and shift some resources from IPS to charter schools.

The amended bill clarifies that both charter authorizers and IPS must agree on a universal performance framework that could be used to determine which schools must close. in recent years, while over the last few decades.

The revised bill says IPS would still be required to cede authority over their school buildings to the corporation, and also give up power over transportation and the ability to collect and levy property taxes, to the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, or IPEC. But Behning said during House discussions Thursday that he would commit to allowing IPS to opt out of the mandate to give up control over its buildings.

Such a move could further reduce the proposed corporation’s ability to unify oversight of key aspects of how the city’s public schools work.

Shortly after that comment from Behning, IPS released a blasting how the revised bill created a carve-out for charters. The district said it created “a glaring double standard” because it would grant “charter schools the power to opt out of management and control of school property by the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation Board while denying that very same flexibility to IPS.”

Before the House discussions, Behning said his amendment came in response to concern from charter schools that paid for their buildings with private dollars. Since charters have not historically had access to property tax funding for such expenses, they have relied on other funding resources to acquire facilities.

But there would be significant consequences for charter schools that choose not to participate in facilities management, like losing capital referendum and debt service funding, and the charter school facility grant once charter schools have access to more resources, Behning said during discussions with other House lawmakers.

“If I’m a charter … I would have to figure out how I’m going to do all my operations, pay for everything out of those operating dollars, which they have never had to do,” Behning said. “I don’t really think any of them are going to do it.”

Within district borders, over 20 charter schools owned their buildings in the 2024-25 school year, while another 19 leased space and 12 operated in IPS buildings as part of the school’s Innovation Network, according to a report from the Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation.

The amendment allows charters that lease or own their buildings to decide whether to give control of the facility to IPEC. But if charters do opt out, they would not receive property tax dollars for capital needs.

During Thursday’s House discussion of the bill, Behning said his amendment didn’t outline how charter schools with privately owned buildings, or even IPS with outstanding bonds, would participate in facilities management. That’s a task for IPEC to determine in its feasibility study before assuming control of buildings in 2028-29, he said. The bill directs the new corporation to .

“If I was a charter that had privately built a building with private dollars, not with public dollars, if I want to be part of this, that’s going to be something they’re going to have to figure out,” Behning said. “My guess is, you can’t just come in and take away a private asset.”

Charters that own their buildings but are then forced to close could dispose of the building as they see fit if they don’t opt in to the corporation’s facility management plan, according to Behning. The corporation would not assume control of the building.

In theory, the new corporation would ultimately own all district buildings, Behning said. But there could be legal challenges to transferring ownership of buildings with remaining debt attached to them.

HB 1423 is eligible for a final reading in the House on Monday. If passed, it would move on to the Senate.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

The students at Circle City Prep aren’t big fans of squash – no matter which type their school chef makes. But they do like brussels sprouts.

Tracey Couillard, lead chef at the school, leans on her days working in Indianapolis restaurants to come up with ways to cook with vegetables and fruits that might be new to the students.

It’s all about “making sure we are intentional about what we are offering, and not just throwing spaghetti at a wall to make it stick,” said Couillard, who started her job a year ago.

The school’s kitchen is a , a nonprofit formerly known as the Patachou Foundation which aims to make sure all students have access to good food. The organization partners with schools to have cafeterias that serve fresh and scratch-made foods. At Circle City Prep, Couillard leads a kitchen team of six other people to prepare scratch-made food for breakfast and lunch for more than 430 students that include fresh vegetables and fruits as well as daily salads.

What students are eating is also getting attention at the statehouse where house lawmakers from public schools that participate in a “federally funded or assisted meal program.” The bill also requires schools to post a menu and ingredients online.

At Circle City Prep, Couillard said the fresh foods help students build healthy habits both inside and outside of school. And it’s led her to build relationships with students too.

“Sometimes kids will be in a sad spot and ask if I can have lunch with them, so then I sit with them and let them talk and let them share their feelings because there are a lot of big feelings between kindergarten and eighth grade,” she said.

Chalkbeat talked to Couillard about her daily routine, what makes her cafeteria special, and the biggest thing she’s learned on the job.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What led you to become the lead chef at Circle City Prep?

I was in the Army National Guard for 20 years, and after I retired from the guard, I started working in restaurants around Indianapolis and did that for about 12 years.

This opportunity popped up at a time when I needed a change, and I honestly didn’t know if it was going to be for me. Working in restaurants with adults is very different than working in a school kitchen with kids from kindergarten to eighth grade as your primary customers

But the kids are the best part. I’ve got kids that come into my office when they are having a bad day, and they build Legos while I’m working on something. I’ve got a couple of kids who come in after school and do extra practice on their reading.

I get a lot of joy and feel like I’m actually doing something helpful and making a positive difference in kids’ days.

Tell me about the meals you make at the school.

It’s mostly all from scratch and we do a lot of our own sauces. We’re very mindful of sodium, fat, and sugar to make sure we are serving good healthy foods for the kids to eat. Students have fresh vegetables and fruit. Every day they have a different salad option.

I started a program at the beginning of the school year to introduce them to new fresh fruits and new fresh vegetables, just trying to broaden their horizons.

At first, they were apprehensive because it’s something new but now, the kids get really excited about it, they are really invested in it.

How has the food made an impact on students?

They eat more vegetables now when they are coming through lunch, and that’s just good fuel for their bodies and their minds. They’re more willing to try something new too. It’s shocking to me how many kids I see with salads compared to last year because it’s just different exposure.

When they ask their people at home to cook something we had at school and it doesn’t taste the same, they’ll ask if I can share a recipe with their parents on how we do it so it tastes like it does here, which is really cool.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My day starts between 6:30 and 7 a.m. I check out the breakfast stations and make sure they are set, and oftentimes I’ll be walking the halls while the kids are coming in, touching base with them and making sure they are getting their breakfast.

I sit in on late breakfast. There are kids that come in late almost every day so they are already a little behind the curve. I sit down with them, make sure they have a good breakfast and their mind is set to jump in and go to class. I’m trying to be a positive touchpoint for them when they are starting their day.

In between breakfast and lunch, we are prepping. And at lunch, I’m helping kids move through the line, making sure that they have all the items they need on their tray to have a good meal.

What do you want people to know about what it’s like to have a cafeteria that emphasizes fresh foods?

They have to look at the kids as they are an investment. We are able to run a fully staffed kitchen and feed breakfast and lunch to more than 430 kids a day, and we are operating a scratch-based kitchen in the black.

You can run a successful school kitchen without using all of the processed foods, it takes practice, and it takes a certain amount of skill that maybe you wouldn’t expect from a school cafeteria.

But it’s an investment in the future. You are building healthy food habits and eating habits and trying to develop healthy relationships for kids with food. I’m teaching kids that good food can taste good.

What do you want to do next?

I would love to have a hydroponic garden in the cafeteria space. I would love to have a little green space where we can grow veggies and fruits and things like that. Because we serve salads every day, so how cool would it be to have lettuce growing in our cafeteria? The kids could see this is what is actually nourishing our bodies and this is how it grows to develop more of that connection of where does the food come from and how does it get to our plate.

What have you learned doing this job?

You don’t understand how much of an impact you can have on somebody else’s day. And you don’t always see that impact with adults, but it’s really easy to see that with kids. You can see their whole day shift with just a “Hey, how are ya? You good?”

You give them two minutes and those little time investments make a difference. That’s the biggest thing I’ve learned because it’s not hard to make somebody smile and share a little joy.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

These ideological battles replace meaningful progress and distract from the work that matters most: building schools where kids feel they belong, are pushed to grow and are understood as individuals.

Unfortunately, the longer adults argue, the longer kids wait.

At in Indiana, this ongoing discourse prompted a growing number of families to leave the district and homeschool their kids. Rather than debate these parents about the merits of traditional public education, district leaders chose to learn from and collaborate with them to create the supportive, student-tailored learning environments they were looking for. 

Eastern Hancock administrators and educators began working with families, state leaders and community partners after two parallel realizations emerged. First, conversations with parents who chose homeschooling made clear that they were not dissatisfied with the school system, but were seeking alternatives that offered more flexibility, individuality and personalized learning. 

At the same time, district leaders had spent years rethinking how learning could be organized through personal pathways, competency-based progress, real-world learning experiences and closer collaboration with community partners. That work pointed to the value of starting fresh, without being locked into rigid bell schedules, one-size-fits-all lessons and a system where students move forward based on age and time spent in class instead of what they actually know and can do.

Together, these insights sparked the idea for a new learning model. And in 2025, Eastern Hancock formed a board, started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and secured approval for a new school from the Indiana Charter School Board.

The result was the . On paper, Eastern Hancock and the collaborative are independent organizations. They operate under different statutes, use different funding models and are governed by different boards. But in practice, they are two sides of the same coin, each based on the shared belief that students deserve schools that feel like they were designed just for them.

This fall, the collaborative and the district opened ���Ի徱���Բ�’s first publicly funded rural microschool. Serving 60 students, Nature’s Gift offers an education at each child’s individual pace, without lowering expectations. Students learn through hands-on activities and real-world projects designed by , building skills step by step until they’re ready to move on, rather than advancing simply because the calendar says it’s time. In addition, educators work closely with families to set goals, track growth and create a tailored path for their child. 

The district provides operational support to the microschool — taking on responsibilities such as payroll, compliance and infrastructure — so Nature’s Gift teachers can focus on relationships and learning. In return, the collaborative serves as a testing ground for new ideas that Eastern Hancock can learn from, including more personalized, clearer goal-setting with students and ways to measure progress beyond seat time. Several of these practices are already shaping conversations and decisions across the district. 

The flow of innovation moves in both directions because the focus is on outcomes, not ownership. The question isn’t, “Whose idea is it?” The question is, “Does it help kids succeed?”

Families are recognizing that it does. Nearly 40% of Eastern Hancock students now enroll from outside the district under Indiana’s public school choice option, embracing either the expanded hands-on instruction and work-based programs offered by our traditional schools or the flexibility and individualized pacing of our microschool. 

And, in the near future, the draw could be an entirely new, student-centered learning environment, designed in conjunction with families and community partners.

Because at the end of the day, students care about whether they feel successful. Whether they’re growing. Whether they love coming to class each day. Whether they are surrounded by adults who believe in them. Whether they are on a path toward something meaningful. Whether learning feels relevant. Whether the school experience feels as though it was created just for them.

The work ahead is not about fighting one another. It’s about fighting for kids. That should be a cause everyone can stand behind.

���Ի徱���Բ�’s Senate Education Committee on Wednesday advanced two bills aimed at reshaping how young Hoosiers interact with technology — one that would restrict minors’ access to social media platforms and another that would require schools to strengthen technology plans and give parents greater control over at-home device use.

, authored by committee chair Sen. Jeff Raatz, R-Richmond, passed the panel 11-2 and was recommitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it must be approved before moving to the full chamber.

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Democrats Sen. Andrea Hunley, D-Indianapolis, and Sen. Shelli Yoder, D-Bloomington, were the only “no” votes against the social media.

The measure contains multiple provisions, but a highly-discussed section would substantially restrict minors’ access to social media. Under the proposal, social media companies like Meta would be required to obtain written parental permission before a minor under age 18 could create an account.

social media restriction language but ultimately stalled in the House.

Supporters argued in committee that the bill is a response to growing concerns over social media’s impact on children’s mental health and school environments.

Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner emphasized the toll she said social media is taking on students across Hoosier schools.

“For most of us in the room, social media arrived when we were already well into adulthood,” Jenner said, adding that “our children growing up today do not have that same luxury” of a childhood free from constant comparison, cyberbullying, algorithm-driven content and addictive features.

But critics raised concerns about enforcement, privacy and rights of students.

Samantha Bresnahan with the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, for example, argued that such restrictions could infringe on minors’ constitutional rights and require intrusive data collection to verify age and consent.

Parents get more say

, authored by Sen. Spencer Deery, R-West Lafayette, takes a different tack on technology.

The measure, which passed the education committee 12-1, would require ���Ի徱���Բ�’s traditional public and charter schools to include in their technology plans a description of how they will enable parents to exercise control over school-provided devices when they are not in school and strengthen internet use and wireless communication policies.

If approved, schools must adopt policies by Jan. 1, 2027, that would let parents increase the strength of content filters on school-issued devices and limit the time students can use those devices outside school hours. The bill also directs schools to prohibit use of school equipment “for noneducational purposes during instructional time.”

Hunley was the lone vote against the proposal.

“I think that our school boards can already do this if they would like to,” she said. “I’m a big fan of home rule and local control, and I think that the level of government that’s closest to the school building should be the one to make this decision and enact this policy, not the state.”

Sen. Stacey Donato, R-Logansport, voted in favor but urged additional consideration of how parental controls might apply during e-learning days.

“We talked about the parental controls on an e-learning day, that (parents) may not want a YouTube video or a TikTok or pick-your-poison that may be used in structure for the educational experience,” she told Deery. “I just encourage you to look into that.”

Democrats also pressed for clarity on potential costs to schools.

Sen. Fady Qaddoura, D-Indianapolis, asked whether districts might need to spend money to implement stronger parental controls.

Deery said his office could not identify any examples where Hoosier schools would take on additional costs because most already contract with vendors that offer such functionality. “

We’ve yet to find any institution that does not have a contract with a vendor that does not offer this,” he said. “I’ve confirmed with virtually all of the major vendors. So, I’m not aware of (any costs schools would incur).”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

Nearly 92% of ���Ի徱���Բ�’s high school seniors graduated in 2025, setting the highest graduation rate on record, the Indiana Department of Education announced Monday.

“Today’s record-high graduation rate is a testament to the hard work of ���Ի徱���Բ�’s students, families, and educators,” Gov. Mike Braun said in a news release.

“While high school graduation marks the end of a student’s K-12 journey, our schools play an essential role in preparing students for all that comes next, whether that’s going to college, starting a career, or joining the military,” he continued. “This strong improvement in our state’s graduation rate shows that when we focus on academic excellence and establish clear, personalized pathways, our students thrive.”

The 91.83% graduation rate bested the 90.23% by 1.6 percentage points.

It represents the third straight year of post-pandemic improvement kicked off in 2023, when 88.98% graduated. Seniors recorded a decade-low graduation rate of 86.65% in 2022.

“As we continue to scale the new Indiana diploma and readiness seals statewide, we will not only strengthen the value of high school and help more students graduate, we will ensure that they are prepared to succeed in whatever path they choose for their future,” state Education Secretary Katie Jenner said.

Numerous student populations improved in the results released Tuesday.

Almost 87% of Black students graduated in 2025, up 3 percentage points from the previous year, along with nearly 90% of Hispanic students, in a boost of 2 percentage points. White students improved to 93%, or by about 1.5 percentage points, and their multiracial classmates logged a graduation rate of 88%, up by 1 percentage point.

Seniors learning English, receiving free and reduced-price meals, and in special education also graduated at higher rates than the year prior — but still lagged their native speaker, paid lunch and general education peers.

The rate of students who graduated without waivers additionally cleared 90%. Students who do not complete or pass some graduation requirements can still qualify for a diploma if they demonstrate knowledge or skill.

The waivers are intended to help students with special circumstances, like those who’ve transferred to a new school or who have attempted to pass competency tests at least three times.

State education and policy leaders have for years sought to lower dependence on waivers, including by setting caps on the percentage of graduation waivers that can be counted toward a school’s state and local graduation rate. They took effect with the 2024 cohort.

Non-public schools outperformed their public counterparts by about 1 percentage point — 93% versus 92% — but the differences between traditional public and public charter schools were not reported. In the 2024 results, about 93% of students at traditional public schools graduated as opposed to just 59% of students at public charter schools.

���Ի徱���Բ�’s federal graduation rate increased, almost hitting 90% compared to 2024’s 89%. The rates are calculated differently because of differences between state and federal accountability models, according to IDOE.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

The Department of Education granted the state to blend the funds from programs that support teacher quality, English learners, student enrichment and afterschool programs, a move that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said will shift “nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.”

During an in western Iowa town of Denison, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the move a “groundbreaking first step that gives state leaders more control over federal education dollars.” 

The waiver, however, is not as expansive as what Reynolds, a Republican, originally floated when she announced the request in March. The funding flexibility only applies to the dollars the state manages, not federal funds going to districts, such as money for low-income students. 

Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, an advocacy group — and a former Education Department official — called the consolidation of funds for state activities “unprecedented,” but noted that the state scaled down after conversations with the department. “This is not the seismic shift in federal funding that perhaps was first contemplated in their original draft.”

The department also granted the state an , which releases districts from some requirements tied to federal programs and gives them more time to spend the money. But , both blue and red, already participate in that program.

The Iowa is one of six before the department. , for example, has asked for a similar block grant, while both Indiana and want to make changes to their accountability systems. Once McMahon grants one, it will be “hard to say no to another state that shows up with the same asks,” said Adam Schott, former acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education during the Biden administration.

  with the aim of reducing bureaucracy and giving states and districts more authority over spending has long been a Republican policy goal. Supporters argue that block grants are a more efficient way to address local issues and can reduce staff time spent on paperwork. But skeptics argue that the students whom Congress intended to help through specific programs could be shortchanged as states shift funds to other priorities. 

“I see how this could help to perhaps reduce redundancies, but at what expense?” asked Melissa Peterson, legislative and policy director for the Iowa State Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association. “We do have grave concerns that some of the various student populations may, quite frankly, not receive the services as intended.” 

Republicans pushed for education block grants almost as soon as Congress established the Department of Education. In 1981, the Reagan administration in the Chapter 2 block grant. But Congress kept cutting funds for the program, and . 

In 1998, the House passed the Dollars to the Classroom Act, another block grant. Conservatives liked the “political symbolism of getting Washington out of what has traditionally been a state role,” said Vic Klatt, who worked at the department during George H.W. Bush’s administration and then spent several years working on education policy for House Republicans. But no one, he said, ever wanted to get rid of the major programs, like Title I for high-poverty schools and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The bill died in the Senate.

‘The data collection burden’

Some school finance experts stress that the Every Student Succeeds Act, the primary education law, already offers a lot of flexibility to combine funds. But Catherine Pozniak, a consultant based in Louisiana who works with states on waiver requests, said agencies and districts still struggle to manage multiple programs. The “grievances” that Iowa and Indiana have expressed are real, she said.

“Flexibilities exist, but they are actually quite difficult to take advantage of,” she said. 

While the department didn’t waive requirements related to data collection and reporting, McMahon wrote in to the state that “the conversations between our staff have been informative and insightful regarding the data collection burden” on states and districts.

Jim Blew, co-founder of the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, called the announcement a “remarkable breakthrough” and said he hopes all states would try to follow Iowa’s example. “One of the most burdensome parts of dealing with the Education Department is the reporting,” he said. The agency “just needs time to think through how allowing it in one state will impact others, but I’ll bet they are going to make that a priority.”

Schott challenged the argument that reporting how states are using federal funds is a waste of time.

 “One person’s compliance is another person’s accountability, transparency and general prudent treatment of funds,” he said. ​​”The reason you’ve got these discrete funding streams is not to make someone’s life difficult. It’s to make sure that marginalized student groups don’t have to fight and claw for the resources they’re going to need to access a high-quality education.”

In her comments during the event, McKenzie Snow, Iowa’s education chief, talked about using the flexibility to better train teachers to serve the state’s growing English learner population, which has increased by 40% over the past decade, she said. But Hyslop said the state has yet to “make a compelling case” for how the waiver would improve outcomes for those students.

For Snow, block grants are a familiar strategy. She served as an aide to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during Trump’s first administration. At the time, DeVos proposed  combining 29 programs into a $19.4 billion fund that would give states and districts more authority over how to spend the money. Democrats, who had control of the House at the time, didn’t support the idea, and e in both houses .

As Iowa’s chief, Snow asked the department to in the Perry Community School District following a 2024 at Perry High School that left two dead and six injured.

Schott said most of the waiver requests he received were due to similar tragedies or natural disasters that forced students to miss school. But he always urged states to work with regional education labs or other outside centers to evaluate how the changes they made affect students.

That will be more difficult, Hyslop said, due to the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and shut down the Education Department.

“The department has fewer staff to monitor right now,” she said. “Understanding the impact of this is going to be really challenging.” 

Stricter cellphone bans, more focus on STEM and increased school “efficiency” are shaping up as some of the highest-priority education debates Indiana lawmakers will tackle during a fast 2026 legislative session that starts back up next week.

The session will be shorter than usual — ending by late February — after legislators already convened for two weeks in December on redistricting. Senate bills must be filed by Jan. 9, and House bills by Jan. 14.

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Multiple education bills have already moved, and one — a cellphone crackdown proposal — was heard in the Senate education committee in early December. Caucus leaders in the Republican-dominated General Assembly won’t formally roll out their priority agendas until next week, however.

At an annual legislative conference hosted last month in Indianapolis, lawmakers and Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner previewed a crowded policy landscape shaped by academic recovery concerns, declining enrollment, student disengagement and growing unease about children’s use of technology.

Cellphones in classrooms — and beyond

One of the most visible education debates of the coming session is already underway: whether Indiana should expand restrictions on student cellphone use to cover the entire school day.

Under current law — approved by lawmakers in 2024 — schools must prohibit cellphone use during instructional time unless a teacher permits it for academic purposes.  would go further, requiring public schools to ban cellphone use “from bell to bell,” including during lunch and passing periods, with limited exceptions.

The bill and was authored by committee chairman Sen. Jeff Raatz, R-Richmond. Raatz said the committee is likely to vote on the measure early this month.

Supporters argue the change would reduce distractions and improve student focus and mental health. Opponents — including some parents and students — have raised concerns about safety, emergencies and local control.

Jenner signaled broader alarm about technology’s impact on children, calling for a statewide conversation that extends beyond classrooms.

“I cannot tell you how much it is impacting our children,” Jenner said. “We are seeing seven- and eight-year-old[s] with social media accounts. We are seeing nine-year-old[s] on anxiety medicine because they’re obsessed with the number of likes and the comments.”

House Education Committee Chair Rep. Bob Behning, R-Indianapolis, said lawmakers are also exploring ways to regulate social media platforms themselves, particularly the algorithms that keep children engaged.

“We’re also … looking at some language that could potentially avoid litigation, but goes after the algorithms,” Behning said. “That’s what’s getting the endorphins … that impact their cognitive ability.”

More work on literacy

Lawmakers and education officials continue to tout ���Ի徱���Բ�’s recent gains in early literacy, driven by state investments in reading instruction and intervention. But Jenner said the work is far from finished — and may prompt additional statutory changes on top of major policies passed in the last two sessions.

“We’ve seen some great success in reading, but we have a lot more work to do,” Jenner said, noting that the state . Current law requires schools with fewer than 70% of students reading proficiently to participate in a state literacy cadre program, which provides targeted, evidence-based instructional support for teachers.

“What we wanted to see is … should we adjust that percentage a bit, or should we do a rolling average of some sort,” Jenner said. She emphasized that any changes should avoid creating an unfunded mandate.

One persistent challenge, she added, is middle school literacy.

“The only needle that we have not moved in Indiana is middle school reading,” Jenner said, pointing to seventh- and eighth-grade outcomes as key concerns heading into 2026.

Doubling down on STEM

Beyond literacy, lawmakers and state officials signaled a renewed push to strengthen math and STEM instruction — an area they acknowledged is lagging behind recent reading gains. STEM is shorthand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Behning said ���Ի徱���Բ�’s success with literacy initiatives could serve as a model for , particularly early numeracy.

“We know that if we’re going to be successful in STEM, we have to be successful in math,” Behning said. He pointed to the state’s literacy cadre as an approach lawmakers could look to replicate in math classrooms.

Behning added that many educators were never trained in “foundational, explicit skills in math,” leaving schools struggling to improve outcomes without additional state support.

Funding equity and school operations

Education funding is also expected to remain a flashpoint, particularly for districts with . Rep. Ed DeLaney, an Indianapolis Democrat who sits on the House Education Committee, warned that public schools’ share of the state budget has declined over the past decade and urged greater state investment to support high-need districts.

“If we move money to them from the state,” he said, “that may free up some local property taxes.”

But legislators are also watching closely as Indianapolis leaders advance recommendations from the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, which calls for a new authority to manage school facilities and transportation across traditional public, charter and innovation schools.

Supporters say the plan could reduce costs and allow school boards to focus more on classroom outcomes. Critics worry about local control and whether similar models could spread statewide.

“I think we’ll be able to learn some things and probably apply them more broadly in Indiana,” Jenner said, while stressing that conversations around consolidation and shared services look very different outside Indianapolis.

Rural lawmakers and education leaders, she added, are closely watching how urban proposals could influence policy elsewhere, particularly in counties facing population decline, long bus routes and limited resources.

Jenner cautioned legislators against using enrollment alone to drive decisions, however, instead urging them to weigh student outcomes and fiscal health when considering changes.

“I would challenge the General Assembly that those are the two elements, at the very least, that we need to understand statewide,” Jenner said.

Other priorities rolling in

Education advocacy groups are also beginning to roll out their own legislative priorities, calling on lawmakers to address school funding, staffing and student supports.

The Indiana Coalition for Public Education has greater state investment in K-12 schools, more equitable funding for districts with limited property-tax bases, and caution against additional mandates without funding.

Meanwhile, the Indiana School Boards Association is to focus on local flexibility, shared services, school safety and workforce-related learning, while reducing regulatory burdens on districts.

The Indiana State Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, has not yet released its 2026 agenda.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

But the state’s request before the U.S. Department of Education has raised concerns by advocates who worry needy students could “lose both dedicated attention and resources” in Indiana and other states.   

Indiana joined Iowa this fall in asking the U.S. Department of Education for permission to merge their federal “Title” education grants – such as Title I to combat poverty and Title III to help English Language Learners — into one block grant for states and schools.

A similar attempt by Oklahoma is on hold after state Superintendent Ryan Walters resigned in September, while several state school leaders have asked U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to work with Congress to ease restrictions.

“Our goals…include less red tape for our people,” state Education Secretary Katie Jenner told the state school board. “We’re shifting towards…the flexibility to put the resources where they’re needed the most.”

At the same time, advocacy groups are shouting warnings that removing guardrails on the $30 billion in Title grants, created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” could lead to the country’s most needy students being left out.

In Indiana, officials have asked the U.S. Department of Education to pool the more than $350 million it receives in Title grants in the name of efficiency — to save time and millions of dollars now spent documenting how each dollar is used for specific groups of students.

Instead, the state wants the freedom to use the money for its main statewide education priorities — literacy, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) proficiency and reshaping high school education.

It’s also seeking freedom to spend federal School Improvement Grants — money now targeted at improving failing schools — to go instead toward state school choice goals.

Indiana would create an “innovation fund” with that money to help other schools nearby that students could choose instead. Such a fund would “better support a growing ecosystem of effective, innovative school models,” according to ���Ի徱���Բ�’s application.

“Students and families cannot wait — sometimes for years — for a chronically underperforming school to improve in order to receive access to high-quality instruction,” the application adds..

Both Iowa and ���Ի徱���Բ�’s request to the Education Department — with rulings expected early next year — “are expected to set a precedent for the scope of future waivers granted to other states,” the American School Superintendents Association

���Ի徱���Բ�’s request, however, is raising concerns from several education advocacy groups — including The Education Trust, All4Ed, UnidosUS and the National Parents Union — that removing restrictions on the money will mean that students that most need extra help won’t get it.

“This approach fundamentally misunderstands — and threatens to undermine — the purpose of these targeted federal programs, which were created to address specific, documented gaps in support for vulnerable student populations,” the groups said in a . “When Indiana lists numerous state priorities without any specific commitments to individual student groups, it signals that these populations would lose both dedicated attention and resources under the proposed consolidation.”

���Ի徱���Բ�’s request to the U.S. Department of Education to waive restrictions on the money goes beyond Iowa’s, said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, Assistant Director of P12 Policy at The Education Trust. Indiana is seeking leeway from restrictions both for the state and for individual schools and districts, while Iowa is asking for an exemption just for the state, he said.

“In its current form, ���Ի徱���Բ�’s is much more dramatic and wide-ranging in its scope and potential impact,” Munyan-Penney said.

Within Indiana, the Indiana State Teachers Association is also raising concerns.

“ISTA believes flexibility can be beneficial when paired with transparency, collaboration and a clear focus on student success,” the association . “However, we remain concerned about provisions in the waiver that could reduce input from educators and parents and divert critical resources from schools working to close opportunity gaps.”

The union also has concerns about shifting the School Improvement Grant money.

“The proposed waiver could redirect these funds to schools or programs that are not identified as low-performing, potentially diluting the impact on historically underserved students,” the union said.

And residents of Gary, a high-poverty city, also worry that the neediest students will be left out if guardrails are removed.

“When I hear…this waiver is about ‘cutting red tape,’ I don’t buy it,” Natalie Ammons, grandmother of three students in the Gary school district, testified last week in a webcast to Congressional staff. “It may be cutting something, but it’s not red tape — it’s cutting away the few protections families like mine have left.”

Asked for school officials who are seeking the waivers, the Indiana Department of Education did not suggest any. ����Ӱ�� also requested a copy of feedback the department sought from residents and officials on the waiver, but the department did not provide it.

The goal of combining Title grants, which total about $30 billion a year nationally, have been a growing priority of Republican officials after a version of it was proposed in Project 25. Oklahoma and Iowa proposed merging them this spring, but concerns arose about what the U.S. Department of Education could legally allow.

Trump also put a hold on disbursing several Title grants to states this year before backing down.

In July, McMahon encouraging them “to seek creative and effective waivers for improving student academic achievement and maximizing the impact of Federal funds” and spelling out a waiver process.

Title I, which accounts for more than half of that money, is awarded to states and schools according to poverty levels and enrollment. All4Ed, estimates that more than two thirds of school districts receive some Title I money, though sometimes in low amounts if poverty is low.

Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, are scheduled to receive $15.7 million in Title I money next school year, while several smaller districts receive well under $100,000.

As if that weren’t enough to keep her busy, she worked with legislators to co-write three climate bills for the Indiana General Assembly, raised $87,000 to support student journalism programs as director of , and helped secure winning votes for Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett in a critical municipal race.

It’s the kind of résumé you’d expect from someone twice her age. Yet when you ask how Maiga got here, she doesn’t talk about awards or titles—she credits her high school.

Maiga is a graduate of Indiana-based , designed in partnership with , a nonprofit working to modernize the high school experience. In 2016, only 12 graduates from Indianapolis Public Schools enrolled at Purdue University, the state’s flagship postsecondary institution. Determined to change course, the community came together to create PPHS, a project-based, STEM-focused high school serving students citywide.

In its first graduating cohort, the school single-handedly tripled the number of Indianapolis public high school graduates entering the university. The network of now three schools has become a statewide model helping to shape policy across Indiana. 

It’s that flexible, out-of-the-classroom thinking that defined Maiga’s four years at PPHS’s Englewood campus. The school gave her the opportunity to discover her passions with interest-driven classes and meaningful internships, shaping her skills and, ultimately, helping her chart her future.

One of those opportunities was the , a pitch competition that gives local high school students a chance to develop their entrepreneurial skills while learning from business leaders and investors. Magia, who had honed her professional skills at PPHS, was well prepared. She and her Compleyes.ai co-founder walked away with first place—and a $25,000 check.

“High school was so important to me,” she said. “I feel like if you talk to a traditional high school student, they probably don’t feel heard enough in educational decisions—that’s pretty different when you talk to students at my school.”

Instead of taking four years of English classes, Maiga interned with a legal organization where she practiced the same reading and writing skills—perhaps with even more rigor—while gaining immersive, practical experience and class credit.

“People think internships are in addition to what you do in the classroom, like joining a sports team or an extracurricular, but they’re not,” she said. “In my internship, I did essentially the same things I did in a lot of my English classes, but it was more technical and advanced.”

Work-based learning let Maiga imagine a career on her own terms—and redefine what success meant along the way. Growing up, she’d always loved the humanities, but her family—who immigrated from West Africa when she was in fifth grade—valued more conventional, financially secure paths. “These roles didn’t fit the traditional idea my family had of a successful career.” 

That perspective began to shift during Maiga’s time at Purdue Polytechnic. Through hands-on learning and exposure to a variety of industries, she began to see that success had many definitions, opening her eyes to the range of possibilities after graduation. “It was really important because it showed me there are different career paths where you can have a lot of impact.”

The experience didn’t just change Maiga’s mindset — it also helped bridge a gap between her and her family. “That was the one thing standing between us,” she said. By seeing the kinds of professional paths Maiga could pursue, her parents began to understand that her interests in the humanities could lead to real, fulfilling work. “My experience at PPHS helped us get closer.”

Maiga’s story is a testament to what’s possible when schools give students room to explore, fail, and redefine success for themselves. For her, work-based learning wasn’t just an academic exercise—it was an invitation to connect her passions to real-world change. 

Today, Maiga continues to lead the charge at as the company evolves and grows while also supporting Mayor Hogsett as an intern. And, of course, she is beginning her next chapter at Cornell.

As she looks ahead at her future and future generations, Maiga hopes more students get the same chance to learn on their own terms. She believes that when young people are empowered to explore their passions, they not only transform their own lives but also shape the communities around them. For Maiga, the journey is only beginning—and she’s determined to make sure others can start theirs, too.

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of ����Ӱ��.

About 3,000 Indiana students are repeating third grade this school year for not meeting the state’s reading proficiency standards.

by the Indiana Department of Education showed 3.6% of the 84,000 children who took the statewide IREAD exam were retained in third grade under the first enforcement of a .

Those 3,040 retained students are more than seven times the 412 children held back in third grade two years ago.

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Education Secretary Katie Jenner credited improved performance by students in the IREAD exam given last school year with the retention figure being lower than anticipated when the literacy requirement was being debated.

“The numbers that were being thrown out is that it would be 7,000 to 10,000 that this law would trigger retention,” Jenner told State Board of Education members. “But, in fact, a huge shout out to our teachers and our people, we have thousands of kids who are now readers.”

Education officials announced in August that — about 73,500 out of more than 84,000 students statewide — demonstrated proficient reading skills in 2024-25. They hailed the nearly five percentage point improvement from the previous school year as the largest year-to-year jump since the state began IREAD testing in 2013.

That left about 10,600 children who didn’t meet the standard, with almost 7,000 being given “good cause exemptions” to avoid retention. Nearly 75% of those given exemptions were special education students and about 24% are English learners with less than two years of specific literacy services.

Anna Shults, the Department of Education’s chief academic officer, said the new retention requirement was having its intended effect.

“We are now ensuring that students that are promoted on to grade four are doing so with an ability to read and show mastery of key foundational reading skills,” Shults told the State Board of Education.

The Department of Education will have an online dashboard providing breakdowns of the Indiana Reading Evaluation and Determination assessment, or IREAD, by school district and individual schools, including charter schools and nonpublic schools.

Officials noted about 670 children who didn’t meet the literacy standards were not enrolled in Indiana schools this year, saying they likely moved out of state or were being homeschooled.

Jenner said a determination would need to be made about those students if they returned to Indiana schools.

“That’s a question that we’ll need to sort through, because some may move back into Indiana, or if they left for homeschool may come back in,” Jenner said. “Because we’re looking at every unique student, I think we’ll try to figure out exactly where they are.”

According to 2023 data, 13,840 third-graders did not pass I-READ-3. Of those, 5,503 received an exemption and 8,337 did not. Of those without an exemption, 95% moved onto 4th grade while only 412 were retained.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.