Ronak Shah: I’m a charter-school teacher who supports IPS

Every morning, our students discuss a daily question. Recently, the question was: “If you had three wishes, what would they be?” Students got creative—a flying pet elephant, a house on the moon, a coin that could buy anything.

Then a student asked me, “Mr. Shah, what would you wish for?” I teach science, so the first two were easy: affordable nuclear fusion and a lightspeed engine. But I kept the third to myself: I’d wish for stability for our city’s school system.

Indianapolis has a school bubble, with more classrooms than teachers and more desks than students. Over the past few years, Indianapolis Public Schools took an important step toward stability by trying to right-size the district in a plan called Rebuilding Stronger. To fund it, the board considered two new referendum questions. The first one was approved, but the second, under massive political pressure, was rejected.

I’ve taught for over a decade. I know how important funding is to an educational experience worthy of our students. So I was shocked at the amount of opposition to the referendum, especially by groups I’d considered champions of public schools.

Every year, teachers in Indy must work harder just to have students. We host enrollment fairs rivaling college fairs. We canvass neighborhoods. We call parents over the summer. Just look at the sheer number of billboards and ads for public schools these days.

Yet less than a third of the more than 100 public and charter schools in IPS’ boundaries are fully enrolled. In Indiana, state dollars follow the student, so empty desks mean less funding for teachers, electives, extracurriculars and supports. Under-enrolled schools face program cuts and layoffs and are too small to offer an equitable variety of classes and options for students. Every year, many of them close.

Despite this, more new schools open every year, often in the place of a closing school in neighborhoods that don’t have enough students to attend. So again, they are typically under-enrolled, understaffed and under-resourced. The closing of HIM by HER is just the latest example. These closures have massive impacts on students. As they hop from school to school, students face learning gaps and increased dropout rates.

So, maybe I’ll send my first two wishes to the roots of the problem.

First, I’d wish for unity among our many schools. It’s no secret that IPS’ octopus shape is a remnant of historic lines of segregation, crystallized when Unigov turned Indianapolis into one city with 11 school districts. But divisions have worsened. There are too many cooks, including competing authorizers outside Indy, that let aspiring schools shop around without sustainability in mind. A better system would have one authorizer per district, as in many other states, that is required to use data to make sure options are offered equitably and sustainably.

Second, I wish for schools that survive. People give a school its identity, and sustaining the place where they came together turns identity into legacy. But our current system has too much churn to build that legacy. What if we took the resources spent opening and closing schools and reinvested them in existing schools to make them better?

The referendum questions—paired—were a pathway for these wishes to come true. It’s too late for that. But it’s not too late to achieve a stable future for our district.•

__________

Ronak Shah is seventh-grade science teacher and a Teach Plus senior writing fellow.