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Indianapolis Public Schools leaders made a tough decision in 2008 to close six underenrolled schools.
“Each of the selected schools serves far fewer students than the building’s capacity can accommodate,” the superintendent said at the time. “We simply can’t continue to operate this way.”
One school is now a senior living center. Another is a private school. And two of them are charter schools.
This is how the education landscape has transformed in Indianapolis. Since the creation of charter schools in 2001, IPS — which had already been losing students for decades — has had to compete with other public schools within its borders.
Today, that landscape does not look favorable for the district. There are roughly 49,000 students living within IPS borders who attend public schools or get private school vouchers. Just 38% of them attend schools run by IPS, according to state transfer data from the spring of this year. The district is projected to go into the red by 2028, unless voters approve another tax increase. As the overall pot of property tax revenue available to public schools shrinks, IPS is projected to lose millions in property taxes as charters gain new access to those dollars.
Earlier this year, a bill in the state legislature called for dismantling the district completely in favor of charters. Although that proposal didn’t get far, lawmakers did establish a task force that must submit recommendations about the district’s future to the GOP-run legislature, which fully embraces school choice. Most members of that task force, the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, have ties to the charter sector.
These realities have revived an existential question that some have wondered for years: Is it inevitable that IPS will be completely replaced by charter schools?
Education experts and local observers say that kind of transformation — akin to what transpired in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — isn’t inevitable. But it’s more likely than ever, due to statehouse politics, shaky finances, and declining enrollment that recently led IPS to hire a public relations firm to recruit students.
The influential pro-charter Mind Trust nonprofit, for example, has not called for IPS to become all charter. But it says giving schools and educators more autonomy, among other changes, would help IPS avoid collapse.
IPS Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said in an interview that she doesn’t know what the future holds, but acknowledged that leaders must answer big questions.
“We are at a really critical juncture as Indianapolis Public Schools,” said Johnson, who is on the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, or ILEA. “And what do we mean by Indianapolis Public Schools? What do we desire for IPS to be?”
Key aspects of city public schools don’t look especially healthy regardless of who runs them. Across IPS-run schools and charters, test scores remain below the statewide average. One-third of charter schools have closed since 2001. IPS has closed at least 18 schools in that time, and many schools operate at well below their building capacity. And while IPS schools offer transportation, not every charter school can.
Although other outcomes are possible, Indianapolis may be one of several cities that are “slowly tipping towards becoming all-charter school systems,” said David Griffith, an associate director of research at the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The challenging part, he said, is the period that Indianapolis is going through — the transformation.
“It may not be something that people want to say out loud necessarily,” Griffith said. But if the district continues to lose 3.7% of its students per year, Griffith said, “Then in 20, 25 years there will not be a district.”
ILEA weighs options for fractured education system
Although many charter schools have come and gone in Indianapolis, overall enrollment in charters has increased from roughly 3,000 students in 2005-06 to over 22,000 last school year. (That population includes those in IPS Innovation Network schools, the majority of which are charters.) Charters can get the green light to open by one of several authorizers.
Meanwhile, over that same time period, IPS has lost roughly 44% of students in the schools it runs directly, or over 16,000 kids, bringing enrollment to 21,055 at the start of last school year.
The future supply of students could dwindle even further: A 2020 demographic study commissioned by IPS predicted the student population would decline by anywhere from 152 to 478 students annually from 2025 to 2030.
Students already move freely to neighboring township school districts, and can also use private school vouchers in the state’s choice-friendly environment.
Figures from the city’s centralized enrollment system, Enroll Indy, indicate that Indianapolis had roughly 9,000 more seats than students enrolled in the 2024-25 school year in both IPS and charter schools. The majority of those — nearly 7,000 — were on the IPS side. And while excess seats can allow students to move to schools that may be a better fit for them, they can also spread resources such as teachers very thinly across schools.
That could mean more school closures for IPS, which has nearly one-third of its school buildings operating at less than 60% capacity, according to a review of state enrollment records and a building analysis the district conducted in 2020, the most recent available.
Perhaps 15 or 20 years from now, the system will have right-sized and IPS “will either have taken on a more efficient way of operating or given up,” said Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. He said certain charter school operators may leave.
“But in the meantime, the transition is pretty nasty,” he said, “and a lot of kids are getting less than they might.”
Unlike New Orleans, Indianapolis education has changed slowly
New Orleans and Indianapolis carry the same historical problems that have plagued urban school districts nationwide: the flight of white students from the inner cities, the subsequent underenrollment of the school system, and high rates of poverty.
In Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina triggered the complete transformation of New Orleans Public Schools.
After the storm hit in 2005, the state’s Recovery School District took over most New Orleans schools and eventually converted them all into charters. In 2017, the state began returning those charter schools back to the control of the local school board, which had a few charter schools of its own.
Today, all but one school in New Orleans Public Schools are charters authorized by the school board. A few other charter schools in the city are authorized by the state.
By contrast, in Indianapolis the transformation of schools has been slow but steady.
Democratic Mayor Bart Peterson helped usher the creation of charter schools into state law in 2001. In 2006, he helped found the Mind Trust to build school leaders and launch charter schools in the city.
In 2012, pro-charter political action committees and out-of-state donors began boosting the profile of school board races, starting an ongoing trend of giving tens of thousands to IPS school board candidates. And in 2014, IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee forged a deal with charter schools that resulted in the Innovation Network of autonomous schools. Most of them are charters.
Now, the district’s future could be in the hands of the ILEA, which includes Peterson, Johnson, and others with experience in education reform.
To traditional public school advocates like Alejandro Samaniego, there has long been an unspoken plan to turn Indianapolis into New Orleans — just without the natural disaster to spur it.
“We’re being kind of sold the school choice [model],” said Samaniego, an IPS parent and teacher who is the lead member organizer for the local teachers union. “And it is a process of convincing people that this is the correct model.”
But Peterson said he viewed charters as a way to avoid the bureaucracy of a large district that can impede individual schools’ success, and not as a way to achieve some “final, ideal state.”
“There might have been some people who thought, you know, eventually every school would be a charter school, period. End of discussion. IPS wouldn’t exist,” he said. “I never thought that way, and I don’t think most people thought that way.”
Parents affiliated with charter-supportive groups, such as Stand for Children Indiana and EmpowerED Families, say they see an opportunity to create a system where every school is great, regardless of type.
Many charter schools are also underperforming and have low enrollment, said Katrina Anderson, an education advocate at EmpowerED Families, whose daughter and granddaughter attended charter schools.
“I don’t think it would be all charter — it should not be,” she said of the district. “There’s IPS schools that are doing well, just like there are charter schools.”
There are models Indianapolis could follow other than the one in New Orleans — like that of Washington, D.C., where enrollment is split roughly evenly between charter schools and the district.
Becoming an all-charter school district is not the sole path to success, Johnson argued.
“You don’t actually have to have that be the outcome in order for schools to come together and say, ‘Actually, we’re going to all operate by X system, X policy,’” she said. “Everyone would have to be committed to doing that in service to a greater good.”
Some say IPS governance, charter authorizing should change
While Indianapolis might not evolve to mirror the top-down approach in post-Katrina New Orleans that relied exclusively on charters, the idea of unified control in key areas could have broad appeal.
For example, having a single governing body oversee schools based on one set of standards could support good schools and shut down bad ones if they don’t improve, regardless of school type. And having just one charter authorizer, instead of the several the city has now, could be a strong gatekeeper and ensure there aren’t too many or too few charters.
Advocates affiliated with Stand for Children Indiana recently pitched some of these solutions to the ILEA, such as an accountability framework by which to determine school closures.
Their plan calls for a new IPS board of elected and appointed members that also has the sole power to authorize charter schools.
Johnson told Chalkbeat she would be open to the board acting as the one authorizer — like in New Orleans — because “it would create a level of coherence we don’t have right now.”
Whether current authorizers would easily give up power over charter authorizing is another issue.
The unified policies in New Orleans for day-to-day life in schools could be a goal for Indianapolis schools as they evolve.
For example, although nearly all New Orleans public schools are still charters, the school board has established a universal discipline policy, and a single district office conducts things like expulsion hearings. Meanwhile, IPS has its own discipline policy, while charters and charter networks in Indianapolis can adopt their own.
But opinions are mixed on whether New Orleans is a good model for Indianapolis. While test scores and graduation rates have improved overall since the hurricane, the city still struggles with transportation costs and declining enrollment, according to a 2025 report from the Cowen Institute at Tulane University. Wealthier and white students enroll in the city’s higher-performing schools at a disproportionate rate.
The approach in New Orleans is designed to ensure equity across schools, said Carlos Luis Zervigón, the vice president of the Orleans Parish School Board, which oversees New Orleans schools.
“If they want to be like New Orleans, I’d say an elected body is responsible under a unified structure of governance under a guardrail of equity measures, to make sure everyone is playing by the same playbook in the interest of fairness to children,” Zervigón said. “No one gets left behind. No one gets different treatment.”
Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.