July 31, 2009
INDIANAPOLIS STAR:
Education innovation starts here

By Russ Pulliam

With no mountains or oceans, Indianapolis needs other ways to attract national attention.
For decades, much of that attention has come by way of sports. Hosting the world's biggest auto race has always helped. The Colts and Pacers also have raised the city's profile. The 2012 Super Bowl will put Indianapolis in an international spotlight for a week or so.

But the city also is gaining attention, although admittedly in a quieter manner, as a leader in education reform.

J. Patrick Rooney started the CHOICE charitable trust in 1989 to give low-income families a chance to use private schools through scholarships. Mayor Bart Peterson launched a wave of charter schools, winning a Harvard University award for innovation.

With his top education adviser, David Harris, Peterson also helped start the Mind Trust, which has spearheaded education reform. The trust looks for good ideas such as the New Teacher Project as a means to attract midcareer professionals into teaching.

Based in Indianapolis, the GEO Foundation sponsors charter schools with a college prep emphasis.

Joining these groups has been the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. The foundation was created by Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006. Friedman was known most for his free-market economic theory. Yet he and his wife, Rose, also promoted education reform because, as economists, they saw the benefits of competition in urban settings. In 1955, Friedman set forth the voucher concept, which gives parents a way to choose public or private education for their children.

To honor Friedman's emphasis on freedom, the foundation is having a birthday celebration this afternoon at the Conrad Hotel, with state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett as the primary speaker.

In contrast to massive efforts to attract the Super Bowl and other sporting events and organizations to the city, there's been no grand scheme to bring all these education groups to Indianapolis.

Rooney, an Indianapolis insurance company executive, was frustrated when the General Assembly wouldn't give low-income families a voucher system for school choice. So he put his own money into the idea by creating CHOICE, which became a model for similar programs around the country.

Friedman located his foundation here because he wanted Gordon St. Angelo, then at Lilly Endowment, to run it, and St. Angelo, a longtime resident, wanted to stay in Indianapolis.
Years earlier, Eli Lilly, the company's boss, had an informal arrangement with Friedman for Lilly to provide a scholarship to any University of Chicago economics student who Friedman recommended to him.

If Indianapolis continues to grow as a laboratory for educational innovation, it likely will come out of these kinds of personal relationships between key people, as opposed to a grand vision in a well-organized civic plan.