Welcome to the Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics.

I'm Ravi Gupta.

And today I welcome on Brandon Brown from the Mind Trust.

Brandon is the CEO of the Mind Trust, which is an organization that is doing a ton of work to transform the Indianapolis school system and now serve as a model for the rest of the country.

He's a veteran of the sort of education

reform community in Indianapolis and elsewhere. He served in Teach for America in St. Louis. He worked

under the mayor of Indianapolis to scale charter schools there and bring other innovative practices

and schools to the city of Indianapolis. And as we'll get to, that city is among

the most excellent and innovative school systems in the entire country. And we're going to talk a

little bit about why and whether that approach can work elsewhere. Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, it's so great to be here.

Well, I have long been a fan of the work that you're doing and the work

writ large in Indianapolis.

Like, wherever I go, like in every conversation I have it, it just seems like people

are always mentioning Indianapolis as the example of excellence.

And I, you know, I'm somebody who went to Nashville in 2010 when Carl Dean was creating the charter

incubator there and there's some great folks doing awesome work over there.

But we ran up against massive, massive political resistance.

And I would say a little bit of a set of just conflicting feelings

from the city about whether they truly wanted to move forward with reform. And that has

kind of stalled some progress that that city could have seen. And it could have had a trajectory

like Indianapolis. How did you manage to keep a bipartisan coalition together in that city for pretty sweeping reforms?

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