The top reported proficiency rate is 6% in English language arts. The lowest is 0% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Urban Act Academy
Urban ACT Academy was a public charter school in Indianapolis serving middle grades. It operated under an innovation agreement with Indianapolis Public Schools, a model that gave the school autonomy in exchange for performance accountability. As of the most recent data available, the school is closed, and the circumstances surrounding that closure are directly relevant to understanding what this place was.
The school’s academic performance, as measured by Indiana’s ILEARN assessments in the final year of operation, was very low. In math, the share of students scoring proficient or above was in the low single digits. In English language arts it was only modestly higher, still below one in ten students. Science results showed no students reaching proficiency, and social studies results were similarly minimal. These were not outlier grades or a single cohort; the pattern held across subjects and across the tested grade levels. More than two hundred students took the math and ELA tests, so the results reflect a sizable tested population, not a tiny one. The district brief, drawing on publicly reported news coverage, indicates that Indianapolis Public Schools cited declining test scores as a key reason for not renewing the innovation agreement, effectively ending the school’s autonomous operation and returning the building to direct district control.
What cannot be said from the available data is anything about the student body that might help explain those outcomes. The enrollment count, free-or-reduced-price lunch share, racial and ethnic breakdown, special education rate, and English learner share are all missing from the source data. There is also no information on staff qualifications, class size, discipline, attendance, or program offerings. Those are significant gaps. A parent or resident reading this profile cannot determine from this record whether the school served a particularly challenged population, whether it offered any specialized programs, or what the learning environment was like day to day. The data simply does not include those fields.
The school’s grade band — middle school only — means there is no high school graduation rate to report, no advanced placement or dual-credit pathway data, and no college-going metrics. The academic story is entirely in those state test results, and they are stark.
The closure itself was part of a larger reorganization by Indianapolis Public Schools. Publicly reported plans called for moving the students and staff from a different school into the Urban Act building to create a new school, and current Urban Act staff would have needed to reapply for positions. That process effectively ended the school’s identity.
Housing context for the area shows that the typical home value in the surrounding zip code is above the state median, and rents are modestly below year-over-year national trends, but since the school is closed and not currently operating, those figures are not directly tied to the school’s enrollment or community. They simply describe the neighborhood where the building sits.
For a parent or resident today, Urban ACT Academy is not a present choice. It is a case study in how innovation charters in Indianapolis could be dissolved when performance did not meet district expectations. The available evidence shows a school that, in its final year, produced extremely low proficiency rates across every tested subject, and the district responded by ending the arrangement. Without more data on student demographics and supports, it is impossible to know what specific challenges the school faced, but the outcomes themselves are unambiguous. A family looking at this record would see a school that closed under circumstances directly tied to academic performance.
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