In a recent media release, Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) announced they are looking for “quality partners” to launch innovation network schools for the 2018-2019 school year. IPS explains their innovation school network as a group of “public schools with expanded autonomy to make academic and operational decisions that will maximize student achievement. Innovation schools also expand quality choices for all families.”

In 2014, IPS Superintendent Dr. Lewis Ferebee realized that the centralized policies of IPS prevented principals and teachers from making significant changes in their schools. He began to look for ways to empower them.

Ferebee publicly supported state legislation to allow the creation of innovation network schools. These schools are exempt from the same laws and regulations that charters are exempt from, and they operate outside IPS’s union contracts. The principal and teachers are employed by a nonprofit corporation with its own board, not IPS. Yet all the innovation network schools operate in IPS buildings. They have five-to-seven year performance contracts with the district. If a school fails to fulfill the terms of its contract, the district can terminate it or refuse to renew it, but otherwise it cannot interfere with the school’s autonomy.

There are already 16 innovation network schools, out of 70 total in IPS. They come in four varieties:

1. New start-ups, some of which are also charter schools.
2. Existing charter schools that choose to become innovation schools and are housed in district buildings.
3. Failing district schools restarted as innovation schools.
4. Existing IPS schools that choose to convert to innovation status.

Regardless of the type of innovation network school, all of the schools benefit from full charter-style autonomy. With that autonomy, IPS has seen a growth in the types of schools the district has to offer.

Francis Scott Key Elementary School, a failing district school that became the first innovation school, has focused heavily on creating a culture of parent involvement: the school hires parent advocates, invites parents to regular events at school, and has a breakfast program for fathers and kids. Teachers do home visits before each school year begins.

School 93 is a teacher-run school. Project Restore, a group of teachers who were tired of top-down initiatives created by those far removed from the classroom, had earned a reputation for turning around district schools. Ferebee encouraged them to bring their model to School 93, and the teachers chose to pursue innovation network status for the school.

Global Preparatory Academy is the first dual-language immersion school to be chartered in Indiana. Mariama Carson, the founder of the school, recruited teachers worldwide to get 50 percent native Spanish speakers on staff. Her school is both a charter, authorized by the mayor’s office, and an innovation network school, located in an IPS building. “I thought I would never again work inside a district,” she says, “but I think this way of working inside a district will work for us.”

By embracing school autonomy, IPS has spurred the creation of unique and successful district schools. Soon the charter sector and innovation network schools will educate half of all public school students within IPS’s boundaries.

By calling for new partners to open other innovation network schools, IPS is showing its continued effort to expand the diversity of school designs and its intent to create a 21^st century school system.

IPS has decided to open the application process to “attract a broader pool of diverse applicants with innovative ideas.” The call for applicants is open to any non-profit group, charter school operator, or individual. The application can be found here.

Under Chancellor Antwan Wilson, the children of current and former public officials will no longer receive preferential placement in the District’s infamously competitive school enrollment system. The move follows a report from the D.C. Inspector General that former Chancellor Kaya Henderson had allowed the children of several top public officials to bypass the My School DC lottery system and enroll directly in the District’s most coveted schools.

Adopted to replace a chaotic system of individual lotteries and applications (and the occasional donated brownies), My School DC is a common lottery for a majority of the District’s public and charter schools. A computerized system uses a student’s stated preferences and randomized lottery number to determine which students receive the most demanded seats.

My School DC – and its Denver, New Orleans, and Newark counterparts – was designed for efficiency, transparency, and impartiality. A database of participating schools saves parents hours of researching, and a single, online form replaces mountains of paperwork. Information can be provided in several languages, and the process is fairly simple.

Though it can be complicated by high demand and shrinking class sizes, the lottery in theory is neutral. Those who govern it, however, are not.

Chancellor Henderson authorized the transfers under a regulation introduced during Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s tenure, which predates the district-wide lottery system in place today. Such discretionary transfers are only valid if “in the best interests of the student, and that the transfer would promote the overall interests of the school system.”

The enrollment of a high-profile student in DCPS may spur confidence in the quality of the District’s public offerings. But the condition of their enrollment—bypassing waitlists nearly 1,000 students long—undermines DCPS’s commitment to the common lottery system. In a district already troubled by intense competition, each line-jumper only deepens public distrust of DCPS’s ability to provide for all students.

As growing 21st Century School Systems implement their own lottery systems, the vulnerability of the District’s system to favoritism and Chancellor Wilson’s ban on preferential enrollments for the children of public officials should stand as both a warning and a lesson.

No system of school choice is absolutely fair. But the combination of a lottery system and similar preemptive policies can level the playing field for students regardless of social standing or parental activism.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher everyone loved: Mr. C.

Mr. C told us stories about traveling, he talked about baseball, and he let us sit with our friends and socialize. We completed worksheets; we earned As in the class. We were happy, and our parents were happy with our grades.

When the A.P. Exam results came in, only two students out of our class of twenty-five received passing scores.

The problem with Mr. C. wasn’t that he was a bad person. The problem was that he wanted to be our friend first and our teacher second. Our test results showed that we had learned none of the course content, and, ultimately, Mr. C did a disservice to us as students, regardless of how much we liked him.

Extend that scenario to an entire school: The school creates a comfortable and safe environment. Students are happy with their teachers, and parents are happy with their children’s grades. But the students perform abysmally on standardized tests. Despite the overall satisfaction of parents and students with the school, there’s evidence that the students aren’t learning.

In the new book Charting a New Course: The Case for Freedom, Flexibility & Opportunity Through Charter Schools, Jeanne Allen, Max Eden, and others argue for the end of results-based accountability for charter schools, at least as far as standardized testing is concerned.

The charter sector they envision is one where authorizers no longer carefully screen charter operators prior to issuing a charter, and they no longer shut down schools based on the results of test scores. The free market guarantees quality control: if the customers are happy, the school stays open. If enough families desert it, it runs out of money and closes.

But this would ultimately do a disservice to students, regardless of how much they and their families liked their schools.

Schools are first and foremost places of learning. If we’re going to spend taxpayers’ money on them, we need objective evidence that students are learning.

Of course, test scores should not be the only relevant factor in determining the success or failure of a school, and no good charter authorizer judges schools on test scores alone.

Chester Finn, senior fellow at The Fordham Institute, explains that effective authorizers are also looking at various gauges of student growth, as well as graduation rates, pupil and teacher attendance and persistence, and more (e.g., Advanced Placement scores, dual credit results, where kids go to high school after leaving the charter middle school, etc.). Good authorizers also do site visits and pay attention to school climate.

We need authorizers who investigate charter operators prior to allowing them to open schools, then conduct in-depth evaluations of schools based on a variety of factors, including test scores, and finally close or replace those whose students are falling far behind.

Not all parents have the ability to assess schools, and those parents trust regulating bodies to ensure that the schools available to their children are high quality. Parents and students have a right to choice, but we need to make certain that they choose from a selection of effective schools.

In 21^st century school systems, we need well-authorized charter sectors in which strong authorizers scrutinize charter operators, shut down failing schools, and invite successful schools to replicate, so we have no doubt that our students are learning. Otherwise, we’re simply replacing one failing school system with another

On June 22nd, the House unanimously passed the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (H.R. 2353). Referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions the following Monday, the bill is a reauthorization of the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. If passed, it would make headway in creating local programs that address the widening “skills gap” and the threat of increasing automation. While President Trump’s proposed budget would cut $168 million from career and technical education (CTE) funding, this bill essential level-funds the programs.

For the last decade, education reformers have made a strong push for schools to prepare students for college—reinforcing the national narrative that “everyone must go to college.” This national push has ignored kids for whom college is not the right choice, many of whom could earn a middle-class income with the skills provided by a two-year apprenticeship, training program, or community college degree.

CTE programs are designed to create opportunity for these students, while reducing the gap between employers’ desired skillsets and prospective employees’ skills. Today 40 percent of global employers report talent shortages in technical fields.

The bill would require work-based learning for all state and local programs, so students developed the actual skills needed by local employers. It also would require that CTE programs have partnerships with local stakeholders, such as community leaders and small businesses, to make certain students are prepared for in-demand jobs in their regions. CTE programs in different regions would be able to tailor their offerings to ensure that they produced employees suited for jobs that actually existed in their area.

The bill would simplify the state application process and local plan requirements, which should lead to more money being spent on CTE and less on bureaucratic paperwork. It would increase from 10 to 15 percent the amount of federal funds states could set aside for rural areas and areas with high concentrations of CTE students, and from 1 to 2 percent the amount for juvenile justice programs and correctional facilities. Representation in the development of state plans would be expanded to include advocates for homeless children and youth, at-risk youth, and the children of active duty Armed Forces members.

Overall, this bill is a moderate proposal that would not fundamentally change the Perkins law. Instead, it would change the methods of implementing and assessing CTE programs, within the framework of the original law. For instance, it would tweak the requirements for performance indicators, in an effort to improve accountability and transparency. States would also have to publish annual performance results, making shortcomings and successes available to students, taxpayers, and leaders.

The bill would move more control over Perkins funding from the federal level to the state level and from the states to local governments, to allow more flexibility in the creation of programs. It would also give states the authority to set their own performance targets for each of the bill’s core indicators. The Secretary of Education would retain the authority to disapprove of a state’s Perkins plan based on the performance targets that the state sets, but CTE programs would now be evaluated by an independent advisory panel appointed by The Institute for Education Sciences, acting on behalf of the Department of Education. The Secretary could no longer withhold funds from a state that did not meet certain performance targets, if the state developed an improvement plan that met the guidelines set forth under the bill.

The reauthorization would fund CTE for six years, starting with $1.133 billion for fiscal year 2018—only $8 million more than the amount for 2018 under the previous reauthorization. The figure would gradually increase until it reached $1.213 billion in 2023. But if inflation averaged 2 percent a year, that seemingly 9 percent increase would actually be a loss of nearly 5 percent.

While the reauthorization of Perkins is a step in the right direction, Congress should make a more significant investment in those young Americans who choose not to attend a four-year college. Failure to do so is one more sign that this Republican Congress cares not a whit about reducing inequality.