Eleven years after founding a nonprofit that has dramatically reshaped Indianapolis schools, David Harris is stepping down to help launch an as yet unexplained national education group.
Harris is leaving his role as CEO of The Mind Trust, the most influential nonprofit in Indianapolis education, in April. He will be replaced by Brandon Brown, currently the nonprofit’s senior vice president of education innovation.
Harris’s impact on Indianapolis education has been immense but controversial. When charter schools came to Indiana in 2001, he led the office that oversaw the schools for Mayor Bart Peterson. In 2006, Peterson and Harris founded The Mind Trust with the aim of transforming the city’s education landscape. In the years since, the group has recruited education organizations to come to Indianapolis, incubated more than a dozen charter and innovation schools, given fellowships to more than 25 education leaders, and helped establish a new approach to partnerships between Indianapolis Public Schools and charter schools.
“David Harris is one of the most thoughtful and pragmatic education leaders in the nation,” Neerav Kingsland, who leads K-12 education work for the Arnold Foundation, wrote in an email. “The partnership between Indianapolis Public Schools and The Mind Trust serves as a model of how school districts and non-profits can work together to get more kids into great schools.”
Now, Harris is moving on from the city he helped shape to the national stage, although he still plans to live in Indianapolis. The national group is in the early stages of development, said Harris, who declined to provide more details about his co-founders or their plans. A release from The Mind Trust said the new organization aims to “help cities around the country build the right conditions for education change.”
It’s unclear how the new group would fit in with similar national efforts to promote Indianapolis’ strategy for improving schools. A group called Education Cities, for example, was started as a project of The Mind Trust to create similar local groups across the country.
Harris said that Indianapolis has made enormous progress on education, but many children still do not have access to great schools.
“I think there’s kind of a recognition in our community that didn’t even exist 20 years ago, and I don’t think was prevalent 11 and a half years ago, that the best way to produce result for kids is to empower educators in the building,” Harris said.
In Harris’s time at the helm of The Mind Trust, schools in Indianapolis have gone through significant changes. In addition to its support for charter schools, the group has helped launch a common enrollment system that allows parents to apply for district and charter schools in one place, and recruited several education oriented groups to support training and advocacy for educators and families in the city, including Teach for America, TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project), and Stand for Children.
But perhaps the most remarkable change that The Mind Trust helped bring about was the creation of innovation schools. In 2011, a Mind Trust report called for principals to have more control over spending and daily operations. A year later, the newly hired superintendent Lewis Ferebee embraced a similar idea, and in the years since, the district has created 16 innovation schools, which are managed by charter operators or nonprofits but are still under the district umbrella.
The Mind Trust’s role in Indianapolis has inspired significant backlash from some local parents and activists, who say the group’s outsize influence is pushing the district in the wrong direction.
“I honestly think that if The Mind Trust … hadn’t been in Indianapolis over the past 10 or 11 years, that IPS would not be decimated and flailing like it is now,” said Chrissy Smith, a parent and member of the IPS Community Coalition, a local group that is critical of the current administration. “We would not see innovation schools coming in. We would not see the proliferation of charter schools.”
When Harris leaves, The Mind Trust will be led by Brown, who has been with The Mind Trust since 2015. He previously led Mayor Greg Ballard’s Office of Education Innovation, which oversaw 38 schools serving nearly 15,000 students, according to The Mind Trust.
“We believe it’s critically important to have real, school level autonomy. We think it’s critical that you have an exceptional school leader in charge of that school,” Brown said. “Then it’s important to rigorously hold the school accountable for results.”
This year, about 6,300 students attend innovation schools in Indianapolis Public Schools, and nearly 10,000 students who live in the district attend charter schools.
“Lots of people have had their hands in this, but David has been the leader and the driving force without question,” said Bart Peterson, who is the board chair for The Mind Trust. “We’ve really created an environment that I think is second to none in the country.”