1) When Indianapolis incorporated under "Unigov" in the late 60s, most services became county wide. But about 1/2 of Marion County kept its own school districts. That was racially motivated because most of the blacks were in the Indianapolis school district. There was aggressive busing WITHIN the IPS district, but the white folks were able to keep their outlying districts "pure". Nowadays that isn't a significant factor because the entire county is well integrated, but there are another 300,000 in surrounding counties that are almost all white.

2) Republicans have been extremely aggressive at hacking away at the IPS and also the Gary school districts with private school vouchers and public charters. A high percentage of the charters have either failed outright or not delivered any improvement over IPS, but facts don't matter to Republicans. They are still at it. There is now only one "real" high school in IPS. Three were turned over to for-profit charters this year. And the deal was that IPS had to lease the buildings to the charters for $1 per year and IPS still had to pay the cost of maintenance. None of this has to do with education. It is all about grooving public money to private hucksters. Undoubtedly they all make generous campaign contributions and "other assistance" to Republicans.

The political climate in Ft. Wayne is quite a bit different. Ft. Wayne is the most progressive city in Indiana, and mostly Democratic, so the vultures have mostly left them alone.

I'm not sure how your first factor influences things today, since we're still talking about the IPS and the city population itself. There's still a huge mismatch between population and school enrollment. It pretty much guarantees either 1) that there are far fewer children in the Indy city limits than should be, or 2) that huge numbers of Indy residents are sending their kids outside IPS.

Also, from my perspective, Fort Wayne is hardly progressive, least of all the most progressive in the state. I would give that award to Bloomington.

IPS is only about half of the incorporated city, so the IPS district is not that much larger than Ft. Wayne in total. I don't know how many charters there are in Ft. Wayne, but they have been opening about 5 a year in Indy. But it seems like a lot of them fail. This year was huge. They took three of the biggest high schools (Arlington, Howe, and Manual) and gave them to charters. That is why Ft. Wayne would have popped up on top this year. That's probably 4000-5000 students moved to charters in one year.

Of course that Charters can cherry-pick students and send back the ones they don't want. Charters don't have to bear the cost of Special Ed, they get the buildings for free, and the new Indiana laws allow charters to have half of their staff with no teaching credentials at all. The for-profit charters can literally hire dozens of "teachers" at near minimum wage.

What could possibly go wrong?

(I think one of those charters is technically a not-for-profit, but that doesn't really matter. It is still a for-profit business baying handsome salaries to the key execs. Not-for-profit is just an accounting gimmick.)

IPS doesn't cover the entire incorporated city, and they've converted their three largest schools to charters.

There is not a ring of wealthy suburban schools to transfer to (ie: Carmel, Fishers,Greenwood, Whiteland, Center Grove) so FW kids stay put.

That and Bloomington. Most of the rest of the state is Palin country. The big urban centers (Indy and Gary) have never had much of a political voice.

Since when?

There is a reason Bob Morris got elected from Fort Wayne.