"Star of the snowbelt": On the Genealogy of Indianapolis Charter Schools

Abstract

This thesis traces the ideological genealogy of the charter schools Indianapolis from the 1980s to the mid-2010s, examining how power over public education shifted from democratic school boards to a complex network of political, philanthropic, and market actors. Using archival research from the Indianapolis Mayoral Archives and a historical genealogical approach, this study reveals how national reform discourse materialized into distinctive local governance structures that fundamentally reconfigured educational power relationships. The analysis unfolds in three parts. First, it examines how the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” government report created a crisis narrative that enabled educational alternatives. Second, it analyzes how charter school legislation proliferated across states. Each state adapted the concept to local political contexts while federal administrations from Clinton through Obama provided bipartisan support through different governance mechanisms. Third, Indianapolis is used as a case study of how this mechanism evolved in Indiana’s capital city. The Indianapolis landscape reveals unique factors that shaped charter development: Unigov’s exclusion of school districts created institutional space for mayoral intervention; demographic transformation of Indianapolis Public Schools following white flight provided the crisis narrative for reform; and intermediary organizations like The Mind Trust channeled philanthropic capital into local charter expansion. The city developed distinctive features including mayoral authorization of charter school and Innovation network Schools that hybridized charter autonomy with district oversight. Qualitative analysis empirical data on school outcomes reveals the contradictions in charter reform. While Herron High School achieved success, Flanner House Elementary perpetrated systemic fraud, and approximately one-third of Indianapolis charter school shutter due to financial and administrative failures. Such divergent outcomes demonstrate that reconfigured educational governance created possibilities for both innovation and exploitation. This thesis concludes that charter school reform in Indianapolis represents neither simple privatization nor democratic renewal. Rather, it is a fundamental reconfiguration of who, or what, has power over educational governance, one that blurs boundaries between public and private control. This transformation illustrates how neoliberal reforms operate through local adaptation rather than wholesale replacement of public institutions, raising questions about democratic accountability in public education.