The Most Interesting Job in Education Isn’t Running Schools Anymore

Karega Rausch spent the last decade professionalizing charter authorizing. As president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, he was arguably the field’s leading voice on what good oversight looks like: how to hold schools accountable without becoming their operator, how to build performance frameworks that actually mean something, and how to make hard closure and renewal decisions defensible.

Crucially, he was also a critical voice for a different proposition: that quality schooling, including charter expansion and replication, should happen with and in response to community needs and community voice, not by the fiat of a philanthropy-backed network moving fast in a market it liked the look of, and not by the fiat of an authorizing agency most community members don’t know exists.

He just left that job to go manage a portfolio of buildings and buses.

That is not a joke, and it is not a demotion. It is possibly the most consequential public education innovation in the past decade: the disintermediation of the traditional role of the public school system, whether district or charter, from provider of public education, steward of public facility investments, and direct operator or contractual leader of what in most communities is their largest, and often only, public transportation system.

Those three functions, instruction, facilities, and transportation, have always been bundled together inside whatever entity ran your local schools. A district ran its own buildings and its own buses because it also ran the schools inside them. A charter network did the same at smaller scale. Nobody separated the three, because nobody had to.

Rausch has been named the first executive director of the newly created Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, a board formed by the state legislature to oversee transportation and facilities for both Indianapolis Public Schools and the city’s charter schools together. His mandate includes building a joint district-charter transportation system, making shared decisions about which buildings stay open and which don’t, and addressing a surplus of roughly nine thousand school seats across the city.

IPEC’s authority extends to closing not just low-performing schools but inefficient buildings, a power no single school board or single authorizer has ever really held, because no single school board or authorizer has ever been responsible for both sectors’ physical footprint at once.

Sit with that for a second. Facilities and transportation are being pulled out of the school system entirely and handed to a separate entity that answers to neither sector alone. The person who spent ten years writing the rulebook on authorizing is now the person managing that disintermediated infrastructure directly.

Buildings aren’t interchangeable, and neither are the reasons people trust them

There’s a temptation to treat this kind of work as a straightforward optimization problem: count the seats, count the buildings, match supply to demand, done. But this isn’t a McKinsey consulting project: these are consequential choices with profound impacts on children, families, and communities. Schools aren’t just square footage, and treating them that way is exactly the failure mode this kind of body has to avoid.

Let’s be clear: some of what a district or charter network owns is genuinely interchangeable; a standard classroom is a standard classroom. But a lot of it isn’t. Advanced CTE labs, performing arts infrastructure, specialized career-pathway facilities, these are capital-intensive investments, expensive to replicate, and often built with real community and political support behind them. Treating that kind of asset as ordinary square footage, fungible with any other building on the ledger, risks losing something a PowerPoint and the supporting spreadsheets can’t easily price back in.

Nationally, charter schools tend to occupy less square footage per student and fewer of these specialized, capital-intensive spaces than their district counterparts, and it’s worth being precise about why. It’s not simply that charters are more efficient. It’s that charter school facility costs typically come straight out of their operating budgets. That’s money that would otherwise reach a classroom goes to the building instead, creating a real incentive to minimize the building rather than invest in it.

That’s a rational response to how charters are funded, not evidence of some inherent efficiency advantage that should necessarily be praised or replicated uncritically, notwithstanding the points raised by charter supporters who focus purely on productive efficiency.

I watched a version of this argument play out in Nevada around 2015 and 2016, when Nevada civic leader Glenn Christenson chaired a specially created Spending and Government Efficiency Commission examining, among other things, the delta between how charter schools and the school districts spent money on facilities. I testified before that committee.

For some members it seemed self-evident, at least initially, that charter facilities were simply more efficient than district buildings. Glenn’s probing questions and the broad sources of evidence and testimony he invited into those discussion demonstrated that this preliminary conclusion was too simplistic to be useful on its own.

Part of the problem was the metric: cost per square foot isn’t the same question as cost per student, and neither one accounts for the useful life of the asset you’re actually building. A cheaper building that needs to be replaced in thirty years isn’t obviously more efficient than an expensive one built to last a century, once you actually run that math over time.

It comes down to a harder question underneath the spreadsheet: what a community actually wants out of a school building, and what it’s willing and able to pay for. The commission’s final recommendations specifically included item 20: Consider the “Optimal Useful Life of a School.”

The pattern underneath

IPEC is that same instinct, choosing what’s right for kids over what’s comfortable for institutions, except now the facilities and transportation pieces are being unbundled entirely rather than negotiated school by school.

IPEC is not an authorizer, and it would be a mistake, and a dangerous one, for it to start acting like one. Authorizing is a gatekeeping function: approve, renew, intervene, close. If IPEC drifts toward layering its own approvals and conditions on top of decisions schools and their existing authorizers have already made, it becomes just another bureaucratic checkpoint.

But it’s also not simply a facilities and logistics optimization problem. Optimal bus routes and right-sized buildings are necessary, but a spreadsheet that minimizes cost per seat doesn’t know which building closure will devastate a neighborhood that already lost its anchor institution once, or which transportation change will quietly make a good school inaccessible to the families who need it most.

What IPEC actually is sits in between those two failure modes: a body that holds real authority over shared physical and logistical infrastructure, without the gatekeeping power of an authorizer, and without the luxury of treating its decisions as pure optimization.

Why Rausch specifically

None of this really turns on whether IPEC’s board is elected. It isn’t, but the mayor who appoints it is, and Hogsett chose both the board and Rausch as executive director.

What matters more is who Rausch actually is. He’s lived in Indianapolis since 2000. He ran charter policy for two different mayors before ever leading NACSA nationally. He knows this city’s schools, families, and politics from the inside, not as a national expert parachuting in to run an unfamiliar agency.

That combination, deep local roots plus a genuine track record on community engagement, is probably the single biggest variable in whether IPEC ends up working for kids, families, and taxpayers, or simply happening to them.

How much excess capacity is enough?

During CES, if the only hotel room left on the Strip is a bad one, you don’t really have a choice of where to stay, you have an obligation. Real choice requires some rooms sitting empty most of the year, held in reserve for the weeks demand spikes.

Public education carries the same tension, just slower-moving, but with much higher stakes than a REIT’s return on investment. A portfolio of schools running at full capacity everywhere, all the time, offers no real choice: no room for a family to leave a struggling school for a better one and no slack into which a stronger operator can grow.

But a portfolio carrying too much excess capacity is exactly what produces a school bleeding enrollment, a facility nobody can quite justify, and debt that outpaces revenue because the revenue was built on an enrollment number the market never delivered. Somewhere between those two failure modes is the amount of slack a public system actually needs to make choice real without making it wasteful, and nobody has a clean formula for finding it.

The same pressure, a different tool

A few days ago, Nevada’s State Public Charter School Authority terminated the charter contract of FuturEdge Charter Academy, a K–8 school in North Las Vegas carrying more than fourteen million dollars in debt. The board approved Academies of Math and Science, an out-of-state charter network, as a proven provider to restart the campus under new ownership and a new name.

I ran the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority, and I not only know this playbook, I wrote it. I drafted the law and the enabling regulations that gave Nevada its proven-provider restart authority, borrowing from Massachusetts DESE’s work and from the legacy built at the DC Public Charter School Board by Nelson Smith, Josephine Baker and Scott Pearson.

I had a line I used repeatedly with the legislature to explain why this mattered: the adults may have to go away, but the kids get to stay.

That’s what a real proven-provider restart is supposed to do: accountability that doesn’t turn the lives of kids and families upside down, preserves public investment, and makes clear that the accountability follows the school, not the paperwork.

Different tools, same underlying problem

Three things, all happening within weeks of each other: a joint governance body being built from scratch to strip facilities and transportation out of individual schools’ control across an entire city; a charter network approved to restart a fourteen-million-dollar failure under a rule designed to prevent accountability from resetting; and, underneath both, the same structural fact I keep coming back to in my own writing, that enrollment decline is forcing decisions no single school board, and increasingly no single authorizer, can make alone.

A merger is one tool. A restart under a proven provider is another. Disintermediating facilities and transportation into a separate, cross-sector entity is a third, and probably the most ambitious, because it doesn’t wait for the next failure. It tries to remove the conditions that produce them in the first place.

I don’t know if IPEC will work. Pulling facilities and transportation out of the school system and handing them to a body that answers to neither sector alone is genuinely new territory. But I know why it exists, and I know the person running it understands better than almost anyone what happens when a body like this loses sight of the communities it’s supposed to serve.

The question I keep coming back to: how many more Indianapolises, and how many more FuturEdges, before disintermediating facilities and transportation from the school system stops being the exception and starts being what good stewardship requires?