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Spanish flows easily between students during recess at Enlace Academy on the west side of Indianapolis.
The school has a large Spanish-speaking population, as well as students who speak other foreign languages. Here, the Haitian-Creole speaking population is roughly equivalent to the English-speaking population, school leaders say. In class, teachers sometimes flip between English and Spanish.
The charter school in the International Marketplace neighborhood has historically had a majority of English language learners as its student population. That made this year’s administration of the third-grade literacy test particularly stressful: Under state law, 2025 marked the first time students could be held back for failing to pass the IREAD exam. And at the time of the test, lawmakers hadn’t yet passed an extension on the retention requirement for certain schools that would ultimately give Enlace some relief.
Despite the odds, Enlace posted significant improvements on the test. The percentage of students passing the exam increased from 40.5% to 60%, while the share of English language learners who passed the test jumped from 38% to nearly 61%.
The results mirror trends across Indianapolis Public Schools and charter schools in the district’s borders, the majority of which had higher IREAD pass rates over last year. The pass rate for IPS jumped about 10 percentage points from 59.8% to 69.8%. And the share of English learners in the district passing the IREAD rose from 42.4% to 56.7%. For independent charters and those in the IPS Innovation Network, the combined pass rate was about the same as in IPS at 70%.
The increase did not come out of nowhere. Pressured by the new retention law and a statewide requirement to adopt science-backed literacy curriculum, schools focused an infusion of funding on second- and third-grade literacy in the years following COVID. Lawmakers also tweaked the law to add more supports this year, required summer school for students who did not pass, and gave students up to five chances to pass the test — extra retakes that staff at Enlace say also helped.
After Enlace’s students took the IREAD, legislation passed in the spring that exempts schools from retention until 2027 if at least 50% of their third graders are English language learners. That exemption applies to 17 IPS and Indianapolis charter schools, including Enlace, and 38 statewide, according to an Indiana Department of Education memo.
Without the extension, roughly one-third of Enlace’s third graders would have been retained this year.
Enlace staff give the most credit to their students.
“They knew what the end goal was, and I think that really helped them,” said Enlace third grade master teacher Bailey Rager. “But also, they had a very good work ethic when it came to learning to love to read.”
IPS, charters schools post similar IREAD gains
Within the charter sector, independent charters posted a slightly higher overall pass rate at roughly 73%, compared with 66% for Innovation Network charters.
The latest improvements still leave the IPS and charter sector just below the pre-COVID proficiency rates of 2019.
The IREAD gains follow a number of early literacy initiatives that district and charter schools adopted in the years following COVID. They include overhauls to literacy curriculum, the Circle City Readers program that will operate at 10 schools this year, the Indy Summer Learning Labs that offered summer school at over 50 sites across Marion County this summer, and several tutoring programs that IPS has launched at certain schools.
The district’s largest tutoring initiative, led by Tutored by Teachers, paired second- and third-grade students at 19 IPS schools with virtual tutors multiple times a week for small group instruction.
IPS Chief Learning Officer Lela Simmons credited the jump to a variety of measures, including last year’s new literacy curriculum — Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts — that was paired with a K-2 phonics curriculum the district adopted in 2023. The district also created IREAD plans for students that did not pass.
“It’s really a very intentional daily effort with our kids and our families and our teachers to ensure that we are intentionally teaching these skills — and then assessing whether or not they’ve learned them in a very cyclical way,” Simmons said.
The district has since announced a $10.5 million investment from the Lilly Endowment that will be used to support reading proficiency in elementary schools over the next five years. The money includes continued funding for Tutored by Teachers, which will serve high-risk second- and third-graders across 23 schools in preparation for next year’s IREAD exam.
Struggling schools improve, as do students of color
Chronically underperforming schools also largely showed improvement in both the district and charter sector.
All eight of the district’s “restart schools” — chronically underperforming schools in the Innovation Network of autonomous schools through the IPS turnaround process — improved from last year. Nearly all of these schools also surpassed pre-pandemic levels of 2019, and all but one of them are charter schools.
Among the district-run chronically underperforming schools, known as “emerging schools,” all nine that enrolled third graders also improved their IREAD scores over last year. Four of those schools have reached or surpassed pre-COVID pass rates: Eleanor Skillen 34, James Whitcomb Riley School 43, Brookside School 54, and Charles Warren Fairbanks School 105.
Nearly all student subgroups in IPS saw improvement over last year, including double-digit percentage point increases for Hispanic, Black, and English learner students.
Within IPS, white students have exceeded pre-pandemic proficiency levels with a pass rate of 87.9%. Black students are just behind their 2019 rates at 65.7%, while Hispanic students still have not caught up to pre-pandemic levels of 67.6%.
Racial breakdowns for charter schools and the charter sector as a whole are less reliable because public-facing data for those racial subgroups are often suppressed for student privacy, due to the small number of students tested in those subgroups.
Enlace embraces extra funding for English language learners
Enlace Academy hit a post-COVID low in 2023 with an IREAD pass rate of 38.7%. Today, it’s in the fourth year of its literacy initiative that focuses on the science of reading and has also trained all K-3 staff in the Orton-Gillingham approach that features systematic lessons on phonics.
Students in grades K-3 were separated into phonics and small-group reading instruction every day. Extra funding from a $3.3 million federal grant paid for multilingual instructional assistants, a reading interventionist, and high-dosage tutoring. And the school partnered with the National Center for Family Learning to provide English classes for families.
All those changes were put to the test when students began taking the IREAD in March, before lawmakers gave schools like Enlace a two-year extension on the retention requirement until 2027.
“I’ve given IREAD so many times over so many years, but this year, I think our kids were really feeling the anxiety,” said Lauren Perkins, the K-8 reading specialist who helped craft the school’s literacy plan. “I could just really see it on their little faces on test day in March. Some of them had that throw-up look on their face.”
As the school prepares for 2027, another $338,000 from the Lilly Endowment will help maintain some of the school’s literacy efforts. Staff will also focus on making sure kindergartners and first graders are on grade level.
“I think what fuels us every day is we’re looking at the whole picture,” said school leader Stephanie Campos.
Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.
