‘The Mind Trust’ exploits Black & Brown students in Indianapolis Education Fight - by Wildstyle Paschall
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This is an opinion piece from Wildstyle Paschall, a community advocate and strategist, renowned local photographer, and founder of All317HipHop. Originally published in Black Indy Live
Typically, I stay out of serious public education fights between charter school/school choice advocates vs Indianapolis Public Schools. Hearing that school choice advocates were proposing to end school choice completely, defund IPS with SB518, take resources from IPS families and disrupt the lives of thousands of children, got me more involved this time.
It’s not that I don’t think education is important, but I don’t believe either charter schools or IPS have magical solutions to educating low-income Black and Brown kids. One out of five Indianapolis children are below the federal poverty level, most of them Black or Brown. Consistent educational success typically requires focus and stability from parent and child. So it takes a certain level of privilege to be more concerned about educational choice for your child, than keeping a roof over their head. Educational achievement is much more likely when parents actively are involved. Statistically 38% of Indianapolis households with children are the working poor, one emergency away from possible homelessness and don’t have that privilege. Indianapolis also has over 8,000 people on a Section 8 housing wait list, with almost 73,000 evictions filed in Marion County in 2023 alone. Many of those, evicted are families, because we haven’t had a functioning public housing agency in years. None of this is normal.
As poverty, homelessness, and a housing crisis ran rampant in Indianapolis disproportionately affecting Black and Brown families, many so called education advocates ignored this humanitarian disaster. Instead education advocacy orgs like The Mind Trust pushed fantastical notions that school choice and more tutoring will allow Black and Brown children to achieve as their families remain at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, fighting for food, shelter, safety and rest. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are universally accepted in psychology and lists four other important needs that must be met before humans prioritize self-actualization and reaching one’s full potential. In layman’s terms, humans focus more on education when they’re not in constant crisis. Charter school advocacy orgs like the Mind Trust ignore the root causes of racial disparities in education, instead working to turn public education in Indianapolis into a hellscape similar to a shady used car lot. BUYER BEWARE!
One out of three Indianapolis charter schools have closed since 2001 and Indianapolis averages at least one charter school closing each year. The Mind Trust’s website of confusing word salads does not even hint at that. Instead, it makes up completely false statements such as “Indiana’s charter schools ranked number one in the U.S. for the seventh year in a row” when no such thing has ever happened ever. Another study The Mind Trust quotes to suggest we closed the low-income achievement gap in Indianapolis because one-third of the city’s students are enrolled in charter schools when none of those statistics are true either.
Thanks to the Mind Trust’s tireless “advocacy”, low-income non-teacher IPS district parents now have to wade through false information, research education models/curriculums, English/Math proficiency rates, transportation options for about 90 schools, choose which one’s to visit, ask about the schools financial health, whether administrators and teachers are actually licensed to teach since charter run schools have little oversight to make sure staff is properly trained to deal with children. The state of Indiana granted 5,074 Emergency permits to allow unlicensed teachers to teach in the 2022-2023 school year and 6200 the previous school year. I spoke to former educators who received emergency permits that left those schools or teaching altogether when they realized their charter schools were doing nothing to support professional development for them to become quality teachers. Several said they were doing more harm than good to their students. Parents would also be wise to ask for school discipline stats because some charters hand out more out-of-school suspensions each year than they have students.
Picking through a list of quality schools is hard enough, but it’s exceptionally cruel to expect low-income parents to pick through a bunch of substandard ones too. Even expecting them to provide school transportation and then paint them as parents that don’t care if they can’t. There’s no data to show charters actually outperform IPS run schools in general. To be clear there are great schools and educators in both systems but there’s no evidence one system consistently outperforms the other in Indianapolis. Two of the three IPS schools I attended on the Far Eastside still exist and today one is a charter school, the other an IPS run district school. Yes the charter school is doing better than its counterpart because 94% of its students FAILED either the English or Math portion of ILEARN testing vs 97.6% at the IPS run school.
These abysmal statistics indicate neither side is winning, only that Black and Brown children are losing. To be clear, one charter school has an “advantage ” on the Far Eastside but they don’t in many other neighborhoods. My neighborhood, the Near Northwest/Riverside has four elementary schools, one IPS district run school and three charter run schools. All three charter run schools were in a $1.2 million taxpayer funded tutoring program run by Rise Indy, and not ONE had English and Math proficiency above 10%. Black student statewide proficiency is already lower than every other demographic Indiana at 11.7% but the charter run schools in my neighborhood can’t even match that. One school was a partner in a Mind Trust tutoring program as well. The IPS-run school had three times the proficiency rate as the charter run schools but wasn’t in either program. Rise Indy is an education advocacy org with a political action committee.
The IPS run school in my neighborhood is a popular Montessori school that enrolls fewer students from the neighborhood and has an extensive car line of parents picking their kids up everyday. But that speaks to the issue that parents able to provide daily transportation for their children typically have more capacity to oversee their education too. My parents were very committed to my education growing up but we were a one car household. My father needed a car for work as a salesman and my mother worked at home as a seamstress because she needed to be responsive to my younger brother with down syndrome and autism. School choice wouldn’t have involved picking us up everyday had it existed back then. Many families today don’t have real “choice”, they have just enough capacity to send their children to schools providing transportation or close enough for them to walk. It surprises me how many DEI trained professionals can’t understand that charter schools are able to choose students by the options they offer.
Last year I talked to a neighbor whose daughter attends a school that’s been run by so many different charters I call it “school of the week”. She was hopeless because her daughter couldn’t read but she couldn’t provide transportation to send her to schools farther away she believed could help. 56% of our zip code is impoverished or working poor and many aren’t “choosing” anything. No charter explicitly bars students from their school, but some more “desirable” schools do make themselves inaccessible to certain families. Some charters even use targeted advertising to serve up a barrage of ads on YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc. Despite being a “childless activist“ I’m served up daily ads from charters like Paramount, Phalen, and more, simply because I made social media posts about education. Transportation options, special education, social emotional learning options or lack thereof do screen potential students. And at the end of the day schools can always tell certain families that this school just isn’t the best option for them, and what parent advocating for their child’s education is going to disregard that? So when charter schools do excel, do they teach better or simply entice preferred families to their schools?
I don’t know anyone who resents families who “chose” charter schools but the system is operating like a pyramid scheme. Like all pyramid schemes, it gives some false hope as there are more losers than winners and eventually the pyramid needs someone else’s money. This brings us to the current debacle where a diverse publicly accountable school district like IPS is being threatened with being dismantled, defunded, dismembered and run by charter school operators only accountable to—*checks notes— The lawyers, real estate agents, and developers they invite to sit on their boards. As fear and panic spread about what might happen to IPS, most Indy city councilors ignored their IPS families questions, concerns and organizing. Instead they booted a colleague from the Democratic caucus for standing with those IPS families while some of them took money from charter school advocacy orgs and sent their own children to private schools. I don’t know what IPS families did to make Indy city councilors hate them this much but maybe I really am better off being a childless activist. What I do know is parents never forget who did harm to their kids, and they won’t forget who sold out their kids. Charter school advocacy orgs like the Mind Trust push to lower safe student transportation standards and peddle wildly inconsistent unsupervised charter schools to Black parents looking for hope. They are the NRA of public education, fighting to make it more unregulated and profit driven.
Too many politicians have shown their contempt for Black and Brown families by not speaking to them or reviewing actual data before repeating their false statements about charter schools. I want all of our children to thrive and I, like many, have no issue paying more taxes to fund it as long as all schools are given oversight and accountability to protect all of our students. But the bills on the table take from IPS children, close their schools, and give to unaccountable, wildly inconsistent charter operators in a system of taxation without representation. This won’t reduce racial and low-income disparities, only increase them. If education advocates cared about achievement for Black and Brown children, they’d advocate to end poverty and the housing/homelessness crisis in Indianapolis disproportionately affecting them.
Links:
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