Her announcement last month to leave the position she’s held since 2012 comes as charter schools enter a new era — one marked by dwindling public school enrollment and an explosion of new school choice options. 

 Those who have studied charters see a challenging landscape ahead for the sector, which was born in Minnesota 31 years ago. 

“The coming decade will see an incursion on charters from both the traditional and the new-choice side,” said Macke Raymond, founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. “Nina didn’t have to cope with a double-sided battleground. The next leader will have to.”

Rees, whose family fled Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran when she was 14, was encouraged by Howard Fuller, the Alliance’s founding board chair, to apply for the president and CEO job when the organization launched in 2005. But at the time she was part of the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush, working to get another school choice initiative off the ground. 

She was in pushing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship through Congress. The federally funded , which pays tuition at private schools, served about 1,700 low-income students last year, roughly half those who applied. Republicans want to increase funding for the program, while have long wanted to phase it out.

Rees, however, has left her greatest mark in the charter world. 

Rhonda Dillingham, executive director of the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools, called Rees the movement’s “north star.”

Rees hasn’t wavered in her belief that charter schools are public and have a duty to uphold students’ civil rights — an issue that came before the 4^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last year. A North Carolina charter school argued that it should be able to enforce a strict dress code including skirts for girls just because it was run by a nonprofit. 

And Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said Rees and the Alliance have been “hawks” on the issue of low-performing virtual charter schools, calling on authorizers in 2015 to “dramatically improve oversight of their schools, which, in some cases, will mean closing them.” 

As Raymond noted, whoever replaces Rees at the Alliance will face new obstacles. Education savings accounts, which pay for private school tuition and homeschool expenses, have rapidly expanded in multiple states, giving families more options outside of the public education system. And as the North Carolina case, Peltier v. Charter Day School, raised, there’s an ongoing debate over whether charters are public or private under the law. Those who say charters are private argue there should be no limits on religious organizations running schools. The fate of a virtual Catholic charter in Oklahoma, set to open in the fall of 2024, is now tied up in court. 

“The notion of charters being considered private … is something that we will fight,” Rees said in a recent conversation with ����Ӱ��. 

She’s also persistently fought for increased funding for the federal Charter Schools Program and pushed hard last year against the Biden administration’s efforts to make it more difficult to apply for that money. She argued that the administration didn’t seek input from sector leaders when writing the rules. 

The new regulations call for charters to be more racially balanced and for operators to gain support from traditional schools, which can be difficult when there is competition for students. Organizers also need to avoid opening in neighborhoods where district schools are losing enrollment.

The new rules were also intended to create more transparency when charter funds flow to for-profit companies. They drew support from who argue that the involvement of for-profit businesses in operating charters — especially virtual schools — creates the potential for fraud.

Rees’s leadership of the sector’s principal advocacy organization has coincided with increased quality. CREDO’s most recent report showed students in charters, particularly those in large networks, slightly outperform their peers in traditional schools. 

In the interview, Rees spoke about those findings, the shifting political environment on school choice and her future interest in helping others realize, as she did, opportunity in America. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Why leave now?

Nina Rees: With anyone who’s been working in an organization, after 10 years you start to evaluate if you want to stay for another five or 10 or if it’s time to move on. I have accomplished a lot of the things I set out to do. When I came to this organization the Charter Schools Program was only getting $254 million and different charter groups were fighting with one another to capture a portion of that pie. Increasing the pie united the sector and made sure that everyone receives something from the federal grant. The funding is at $440 million. I was hoping it would hit $500 million, but $440 million is a good place to be.

The other goal was to get charters in 50 states — we are now at 46 — and just to stabilize the organization as a hub of information for the sector. I’ve gone through three different administrations, from President Obama to President Trump and now to President Biden. That’s a lot of turmoil, with the pandemic in between. I think it’s time for some fresh thinking. Post-pandemic, we have some huge opportunities to seize because so many families continue to want options. Charter schools have a role to play in meeting that demand.

You’ve seen political support for charters shift dramatically during your tenure with the Alliance. Without the bipartisan base as strong as it once was, did your job become more difficult? 

It was getting difficult to navigate when I came, but I’d like to answer this question differently. In the latest Democrats for Education Reform poll, and every poll that we’ve seen over time, and charter schools in particular. At the top level, there’s not as much discussion around charter schools in a bipartisan way. The education reform debates are no longer as central as they used to be, with the pandemic shifting attention to other priorities. The Democratic and Republican parties are fraying and the opposite ends are getting more airtime, but the reality is that the center still holds. It’s in the center where policy is made. So regardless of the and the , most of what’s happened over the past decades since I’ve been at the federal level , with the support of Democrats like Cory Booker and Michael Bennet and Republicans like Virginia Foxx.

It seems Republicans are more focused on expanding education savings accounts than they are charters. How do you see that playing out at the state level?

We’re monitoring to see how those ESA laws are being implemented. But there was also a lot of momentum around charter schools. Post pandemic, we saw a slew of legislative activity, from to access to facilities to huge improvements in states like Arkansas. Even found a way to allow for charter school expansion. 

ESAs are new and more controversial. They get more media attention, and these other measures, which are amendments to existing laws, are not getting as much airtime. Once the history books are written, people are going to look at these years as pivotal for charters.

And how do you see the growth of ESAs affecting the charter sector? 

In most of these states, it looks like they’re just subsidizing the tuition of private schools students already attend. But in those places where the allocation for the ESA is on par or potentially a little bit higher than what students in charter schools get, that’s where we might want to study and see if there are any shifts. 

One of the biggest charter school stories of the year — and in education in general — has been the Catholic virtual charter school application in Oklahoma. What are your predictions for the debate over religious charter schools? 

Let’s go back to where we were about six months ago when the was pending before the Supreme Court. We were questioning whether that case [which asked whether charters were public or private] would pave the way for religious charter schools. The court chose not to take the case and we’re very pleased with that. For charters to be able to teach religion, you need a proactive statement that deems them private, and that is a point of contention. Everyone who has drafted a charter law and everyone involved in conceptualizing charter schools created these schools in order to create better public schools. 

In school choice circles, we sometimes hear the message that parent satisfaction is the most important measure of success. Do you feel that there’s been a shift away from holding charters accountable for results? Did the pandemic play a part there? 

That’s a great question. I do think we need to take stock of the accomplishments before we pivot to the flaws in the equation. The Macke Raymond of CREDO did the study, we weren’t doing that well. The , it was a little bit better. The of her study definitively demonstrates that the longer our school leaders are in this work, the better they do by the students they’re serving. 

There’s always been debate around whether standards-based accountability and standardized tests get in the way of innovation and potentially harm those types of schools that serve special populations. Over time, state accountability systems have adjusted so they’re not inadvertently discouraging the creation of a credit recovery school or a school that serves a student population that is way behind academically. 

Paying attention to what parents want is very important, and I know that the choice movement is talking a lot more about that. But at the end of the day, the compact with the authorizer is very important. That’s where the rubber hits the road. If charters are not performing well or meeting the terms of their contract, they should be closed.

I don’t know any parents who want to send their child to a school that is not going to graduate them and send them to college.

Along with ESAs, we also see more microschools emerging that are responding to very specific needs and preferences for families. Do you see those models impacting charters?

This is an opportunity for charter schools. When you notice that people have an affinity or an interest in smaller settings that are offering a more customized education, this means charter management organizations can create some of these and see how it works without letting go of all the other things that we need to do as public schools. In the private sector, if there’s an interest to buy certain things, companies start to compete. The charter sector can also create models that are just as attractive but keep the core of what is public about public education. 

Charter enrollment saw a big jump during the pandemic and leveled off a bit last year. How do you think the general decline in public school enrollment we’ve seen nationally is affecting charters?

Our enrollment report is coming out in November, so stay tuned. We’re pretty excited about it. That’s the only thing I can say.

There are two things going on. One is that populations are shifting. This is why we’re so excited about having passed a charter law and the fact that in , you can now open a charter school anywhere around the state. States have made changes that allow charters to open in jurisdictions where populations are shifting. 

People are just dispersing more and that presents a challenge. If you have a model in one community, it’s quicker to scale it and add more students. But if you’re going into these more suburban and rural communities, it’s a little bit more challenging to take this work to scale. For me, it’s going back to the basics; charter schools were always supposed to be about giving local community leaders the tools they need to start something new and different. This opens the door to innovation in ways that are good for the sector. 

You’re not sure what you’re doing next, but what would you like to do?

I love this topic of choice and charters, but I also am fascinated with around the American dream. I’d like something that combines what I’ve done here with adding to the hope and the opportunity of the American dream, with education being one of the key pillars. I like this sector because it invites innovation and big-picture thinkers who are willing to overcome the impossible. Whatever I do next hopefully will continue to be with individuals in service to something that’s transformational.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City plans to apply this month to operate a virtual charter, acting on a recent state that says religious organizations shouldn’t be prohibited from doing so. The state’s Virtual Charter School Board could make a decision as soon as mid-February.

Advocates for religious charters said they began planning their strategy over a year ago as the conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court began to flex its judicial muscle. For the second time in two years, the court agreed to hear a school choice case and later sided with Maine families seeking to use tuition vouchers to attend religious schools.

“We’re not idiots. We know how things are going to play out,” said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which focuses on how public policy impacts the church. “We’ve looked at all the [school choice] options out there. Expanding charter options has always been on the short list.”

Even though it’s non-binding, the opinion from now-former state Attorney General John O’Connor and Solicitor General Zach West moves the discussion over religious school choice into a new arena. Recent Supreme Court rulings prohibit states from excluding religious groups from school choice programs. But allowing sectarian instruction in a public school, some legal experts say, goes too far. “Catastrophic” is how Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor, described it in .

With charter leaders expecting similar moves in other states, some advocates worry the new direction could splinter a movement that has already drawn frequent criticism

“Public schools have never been able to, and cannot now, teach religion, require attendance to religious services or condition enrollment or hiring on religious beliefs,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Supreme Court precedent regarding public funding for private schools, she added, “simply does not apply to public charter schools.”

Farley said he expected that kind of opposition, but also sees “green lights all around for the movement to press ahead.” 

In Louisiana, for example, charter leaders are watching to see what unfolds in Oklahoma.

“We’ve got large Catholic schools. We’ve got Pentecostals. We’ve got Baptists. We’ve got it all going on,” said Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools. “Absolutely, we’ll see some applicants that lean in on that opportunity.” 

In Oklahoma, Farley said the archdiocese was further encouraged last year when it looked like voters would re-elect Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, a fervent proponent of school choice. Farley consulted Nicole Stelle Garnett, a University of Notre Dame law professor and leading voice for religious charter schools. She is also a colleague of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who taught at the law school.

That sparked the Oklahoma City archbishop’s November 2021 letter to the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, asking if it would consider an application from the archdiocese. The board then sought the attorney general’s opinion.

While some Catholic schools around the country previously converted to charters, they only provide a secular education. For example, Barrett, a conservative Catholic, is affiliated with a church group that has helped . And some Hebrew language charter schools in their afterschool programs. But Black said there’s a big difference between a faith-based organization running a secular charter — likely allowed under the Supreme Court’s rulings in and — and one that would, as Farley said, weave Catholicism into its entire curriculum.

What Farley describes, Black said, “does not involve discrimination based on religious status. Rather, it involves someone who wants to change public education into religious education.”

The U.S. Department of Education did not comment on the potential application.

says a charter school must be “nonsectarian in its programs, admissions policies, employment practices, and all other operations” and “not affiliated with a sectarian school or religious institution.” 

Black said that, if approved, the archdiocese’s school would violate the Constitution’s ban on government support of religion. 

“I don’t believe even this [Supreme Court] would say that is OK,” he said.

Farley countered there’s no such thing as a “values-free” education and that parents should be able to choose a religious or secular education for their child. A virtual charter, he said, would satisfy a growing demand for Catholic education, particularly in rural areas where parishes lack sufficient students to open brick-and-mortar schools.

‘In the name of the state’

The debate elevates the importance of a recent 4th Circuit Court of Appeals case that focuses on whether charter schools are public or private.

The that charter schools — even those run by nonprofits — act on behalf of the state, just like traditional schools. But Charter Day School in Leland, North Carolina, unsuccessfully argued that it had the flexibility to adopt its own dress code requiring girls to wear skirts. Families sued, saying the rule violated girls’ civil rights.

The school has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, and on Monday, the for an opinion from the U.S. solicitor general, who would argue the case for the Biden administration if the court accepts it.

Regardless of whether charter managers and employees work for nonprofit or religious organizations, the organization authorizing the charter is still “acting in the name of the state,” said Black, who sees the potential for “massive constitutional violations” if states allow charters that explicitly endorse religious instruction.

Oklahoma’s charter association said it is still reviewing the state’s opinion to determine its impact. The national Alliance, meanwhile, has a “legitimate concern” about backlash from blue states, where support for charters is already tenuous, Farley acknowledged. In fact, Black said if courts allow religious charters, states that don’t want them would have no recourse but to eliminate their charter laws.

“You could see states like Massachusetts, California or New York saying, ‘If courts are going to force religious charters on us, we will get rid of them,’ ” he said.

The report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General — focusing on more than $963 million in awards made from 2013 through 2016 — notes that while the law doesn’t require officials to track how many schools open after grants expire, reporting that information would make it easier to gauge the program’s effectiveness.

The report said that without such information, the department, Congress and the public “cannot reach conclusions on whether the [program] increased the number of high-quality charter schools in operation and taxpayers received a worthwhile return on their investments.”

The report comes as the department prepares to announce a new round of funding for applicants under a controversial revision of the program’s guidelines designed to increase transparency and diversity. Opponents say the new rule will limit growth.

The inspector general’s office recommends that the department monitor whether schools remain open after federal funding runs out and improve data collection. Department officials and charter school supporters agreed with some, but not all, of the findings. 

Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said as the charter sector continues to grow, it is important for the department “to have high-quality data on how its grants are supporting it and to support the program in the future where the demand is the greatest.”

The department disagreed with the recommendation that it follow whether schools stay open for two years after grants expire, but said it has already taken steps to improve oversight of grants and hosts “office hours” to help grantees complete performance reports. 

Both the department and Rees noted that the grant program substantially changed during the time period reviewed. Under No Child Left Behind, only states received charter grant funds. The Every Student Succeeds Act,  which included changes that didn’t fully take effect until 2017, expanded the range of agencies and organizations eligible to receive funding, such as governors’ offices and school boards. 

The report noted that as of March 2, 29 of the 94 grantees that received funds during the four-year period still had extensions to spend the money — which means more schools could still open. The report did not reflect that some grantees applied for additional funds to open more schools than originally planned, Rees said.

Critics of charter schools, meanwhile, said the findings back up their concerns about quality control. The Network for Public Education issued that concluded roughly 867,000 students were “displaced when their charter schools closed.”

Carol Burris, executive director of the group, said the Inspector General’s report “exposes the sloppy record-keeping, inaccurate reporting and exaggerated claims made by grantee states and charter management organizations.”

She applauded the Biden administration for its efforts to increase accountability. 

The Inspector General noted that it did not set out to identify issues that may contribute to charter growth or closures. The department addressed the issue, noting that state caps on the number of new charters, limited access to facilities or grantees receiving fewer applications from operators than expected are important to consider.

The report, wrote Mark Washington, deputy assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education,, “does not acknowledge national trends concerning barriers that have constrained charter school growth and expansion.”

The proposed rule would allow “federal reviewers to ignore state and local decisions to authorize new public charter schools,” Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Diane Feinstein of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey wrote in a to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. 

Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Richard Burr of North Carolina also signed the letter. The proposed requirements, they wrote, “would make it difficult, if not impossible, for new public charter schools start-ups, and for high-performing public charter schools seeking to replicate or expand, to access [Charter Schools Program] funding.”

The $440 million competitive grant program, now almost 30 years old, supports schools’ start-up costs, from facility needs to staffing. Department officials say the revisions, which would require potential grantees to demonstrate “sufficient demand,” would encourage more racially balanced schools that don’t compete with traditional districts losing enrollment. Provisions would also require charters to be transparent about any contracts they have with for-profit organizations, which would increase accountability. But charter advocates argue the plan would make it harder for applicants to win approval, even if there’s demand from families. 

After backlash from the field and six in the Senate, the department last month extended the comment period on the rule for five days. Over 26,000 , both for and against the plan, have been submitted. 

Ranking Republicans on the House and Senate education committees have also threatened to repeal the rule if the administration doesn’t change it. They’ve asked the department to confirm by May 12 that it will submit the final rule to Congress for review.

In the recent letter, the senators said the proposal would “add significant burdens and time to an already complex application process, with little time for technical assistance, particularly for the upcoming 2022 grant cycle.”

Under the current schedule, the department is due to award grants to states by Sept. 30, which means the department has less than four months to finalize its rule, post the grant application and review submissions. New and expanding charter schools depend on the grant program because they don’t receive funding until after they begin serving students.

The senators want the department to allow charter operators to apply for the program under existing rules released in 2020.

“The time frame is definitely very tight, which is why it’s better to stick to the old rule this year,” said Nina Rees, CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The Alliance is opposed to the department’s major revisions to the rule and argues it would hurt charters at a time when the sector has seen record growth. 

The department didn’t directly respond to the bipartisan letter, but said in a statement that the proposed rule is intended to “improve the quality and accountability of charter schools.”

Bennet, Feinstein and Booker advocate for funding for the Charter Schools Program every year, Rees said, but added it’s significant that they’re “expressing their views publicly.”

“We hope the department takes them seriously,” she said. “The three are not just any Democrats. They come from … states with a rich history of chartering.”

Offered the job by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, Carvalho in private, then presided over a televised school board meeting that featured three hours of supporters all but begging him to stay. In the end, Carvalho remained.

greeted the move in Miami, but it didn’t go over so well in New York, home to the nation’s largest school district: Eric Phillips, de Blasio’s press secretary, , “Who would ever hire this guy again?”

Four years later, Phillips has his answer: Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system.

The drama of the hire was underscored by Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, who likened the move to “LeBron coming to the Lakers.” But Los Angeles offers only the most recent example of an oversize personality with huge ambitions taking over a district’s top job. Right now, all three of the nation’s largest school systems are run by energetic reformers, a rarity even in big-city schools circles.

All of them greet Spring 2022 full of promise — and problems. Over the next few years, they’ll enjoy unprecedented funding as taxpayers throw billions of dollars at schools to scrub away deficits caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But all three districts are rapidly losing students. And unions, emboldened by 2021 victories around remote instruction and, in recent years, high-profile strikes, could be formidable obstacles to their priorities. In Chicago, new schools CEO has already faced down a citywide teacher walkout.

In addition to Carvalho and Martinez, who are both immigrants, New York City Mayor Eric Adams in December named , the founder of a small network of public boys’ schools, as the new school chancellor. Banks’s schools have stood out for, among other reasons, employing many male teachers of color.

All three “definitely seem reform minded, which I think is super exciting and a real breath of fresh air,” said , superintendent of the Catholic independent Partnership Schools network. 

“I think it really speaks to the moment we’re at as we’re coming out of COVID,” she said. The pandemic “provided an uncomfortable reminder” of the need for leaders who will put children’s needs first. 

Billions in new funding … until 2024

Martinez, Chicago’s new schools CEO, is of Chiefs for Change, a group that advocates for increased school choice, effective teacher preparation, and standards-aligned curricula. But it also rails against “onerous bureaucracy” in schools. That credo will certainly be challenged by the sheer scale of federal intervention: some in COVID-related relief since 2020.

In New York, state lawmakers in 2021 increased funding to New York City by nearly half a billion dollars. By next year, a lawsuit settled last year to equalize urban school funding could bring that to $1 billion, said president of Bank Street College and New York City’s former senior deputy chancellor. “So there is a significant infusion of new dollars into the school system that can be used to dig into systemic issues. And that’s very rare.”

As in districts large and small elsewhere, the three leaders are “all drinking from a firehose” of funding, said of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. But that also places extra responsibility on them: “No one can blame lack of funding as their excuse for not getting things done,” she said.

But unless Congress acts, all that extra funding will run out in 2024. None of the three new leaders agreed to be interviewed for this piece.

, who leads the AASA, the nation’s school superintendent’s association, said many leaders are using the cash to upgrade facilities. But spending it on generous raises or new instructional positions could actually put them at odds with unions, since those jobs won’t be sustainable.

“The financial cliff is only two years away,” he said.

A ‘friend of charters back at the helm’

A product of New York City’s public schools, Banks cut his teeth founding and the network of five unionized Eagle Academy public schools in New York City and Newark.

While the schools aren’t charters, Banks has said he supports charter schools. He told in December that families “are desperate for quality seats, quality schools … And if the traditional public schools were offering that, you wouldn’t see such a mass rush to the charter schools.”

Banks created the Eagle Academy schools to serve academically struggling boys of color in grades six through 12 who often face harsh discipline. As chancellor, he said, his first priorities are to expand early childhood education, improve career pathways for older students, and to combat students’ trauma.

, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s union, has known Banks for years. “I’ve been at his schools and I found them to be quite well-run,” he said. All the same, running the largest school district in the nation will force him to tame the city schools’ “mammoth bureaucracy.” 

The last two mayors have restructured the school system six times, Mulgrew said. “And every time, all they did was add another layer.”

In his , Banks on March 2 acknowledged that many families have “decided to vote with their feet, and to say, ‘We’re going to find other alternatives and other choices for our children.’” 

He promised an overhaul of the bureaucracy, including requiring district superintendents to reapply for their jobs. And he took direct aim at the way many schools teach reading, criticizing a method developed by a Columbia University Teachers College professor that “has not worked” with many children. He promised to shift to a method that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, among other changes.

Banks has also said he’d like to transform city schools from the bottom up by handing to “principals who know what they’re doing,” according to the speech. He also wants to tweak how standardized tests are used, allowing students to show they’ve mastered content in other ways.

His ascendance stands in contrast to previous leaders who have looked suspiciously on the charter sector. New York actually caps the number of charter schools statewide at 460, with just 290 allowed for nearly 1 million students in New York City. While it’d take a state-level change to allow more, choice advocates said Banks can eloquently make the case.

“It feels to me like this is the moment where we can really see that there is a friend of charters back at the helm of New York City schools, which I think is really great to see, and I know is probably sending some shockwaves,” said Porter-Magee.

So far, at least, Banks hasn’t forcefully pushed to lift the cap, in December, “We want to scale excellence. So if that means opening a few more charter schools, that’s what we’re going to do … if we can get the state to approve it.” But he said he’s also encouraging the philanthropic community “to lean in on the traditional public school system, because at the end of the day, most of our children will continue to go to our traditional public schools.”

Enrollment downturns

Carvalho, who led Miami-Dade schools for 14 years, has been able to compete with charters by creating centralized data systems that allowed him to keep track of students’ academic progress better than most big-city leaders during the pandemic, Rees said. 

A Portuguese immigrant, Carvalho grew up in Miami and worked restaurant and construction jobs early on. He came up through the ranks in Miami-Dade, starting out as a high school science teacher and becoming a new breed of area leader: one who sticks around. Before he took the top job in 2008, Miami-Dade “was a revolving door for superintendents coming and going,” Domenech said.

Sticking around paid off. In 2012, the district won the coveted $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, which recognizes school districts that have shown academic improvement while narrowing the achievement gap. More recent findings from the district’s Office of Academics and Transformation paint a : While Black students’ graduation rates rose from 62.4 percent in 2011 to 85.6 percent in 2020, just 40 percent of Black students in 2019 were proficient in reading; 44 percent were proficient in math. 

With parents clamoring to remediate lost instructional time during the pandemic, Domenech said Carvalho brought in “a very creative” program that contracted with camps to provide summer school.

Carvalho’s long tenure — the average big-city leader sticks around — is “a testament to his savvy in terms of the politics, in dealing with the board, in dealing with the community, in dealing with employee groups,” Domenech said.

He’ll need that savvy in Los Angeles, which also has recently featured a revolving door of superintendents, a strong union and an outspoken, ever-shifting school board — it currently has three seats open in the next election. In Los Angeles, Carvalho will work at the pleasure of the school board. Meanwhile, Banks and Martinez will work for the mayors of their respective cities.

During his second week at LAUSD, Carvalho unveiled a that includes expanded preschool, year-round learning and a “Parent Academy” offering coursework to help parents understand their children’s education. He’d also lengthen the school year and offer teachers more professional development. He acknowledged that he’d have to negotiate with the city’s teachers union about those last two ideas.

Carvalho last month told ����Ӱ�� the district must expand school choice if it wants to keep from “bleeding out students” from a system that, while much bigger than Miami, has fewer than one-third as many school choice options.

Los Angeles students, he said, basically have two choices at the moment: magnet schools and charter schools. “Whoever decided to restrict choice on the basis of those parameters?” he asked. “Where are the programs in L.A. where we see long waiting lists of parents? Why aren’t we expanding more of those programs to where the demand is?”

He has the district consider an “explosion of offerings” for students, including dual-enrollment programs, International Baccalaureate programs, fine and performing arts magnet schools, and single-gender schools, among others. “I’m less concerned about the dynamic of dialogue that usually separates people into two camps: charter versus non-charter. I’m more interested in programmatic offerings that benefit kids — period.”

Carvalho suggested that the district analyze which programs motivate students to travel long distances from their neighborhoods and offer more of these. “I can fill an entire wall with a repertoire of options for parents. Why aren’t we offering all of that?”

Throughout the pandemic, all three cities have struggled to retain and, in some cases, even find their students. All have seen in .

of the California Charter Schools Association said a crashing birth rate across California is a cause for concern. And net migration has actually dipped “into the negatives” as home due to anti-immigration policies and economic uncertainty.

“This is not about ‘The affluent went to Tahoe during the pandemic to hunker down,’” she said. “This is real and it’s permanent and it’s creating challenges across the state.”

An ‘innovative and data-informed’ school integration experiment

Born in Mexico, Martinez emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 5. He is in a family of 12 children with deep ties to Chicago’s public school system — three of his sisters and some 28 nieces and nephews attend local public schools. 

Martinez was working in finance for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2003 when then-Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan hired him as chief financial officer. He remained there until 2009 — Duncan moved on to serve as U.S. Education Secretary under President Obama. Martinez made a name for himself leading the San Antonio Independent School District through a redesign, beginning in 2015, that ����Ӱ�� dubbed “one of America’s most innovative and data-informed school integration experiments.”

Using family income data, he mapped poverty levels for each city block. Then he integrated schools not by race but by income and, among other factors, by parents’ education levels. Three years later, San Antonio’s 90 schools and 47,000 students were among the fastest-improving in Texas.

In Chicago, he faces something entirely different: a 330,000-student system that’s as families leave the city. Recent enrollment data show that while 43,500 new students enrolled for the first time this year, 54,000 left between the last school year and this one.

On the job in Chicago for seven months, Martinez has already his first major crisis: the city’s teachers in early January voted to not show up for work until COVID-19 safety demands were met. 

Martinez proposed a host of measures, including building-level testing to determine when to close schools. But the union, with memories of an that ended with millions in extra spending, insisted on more strict measures, including negative PCR tests for all staff, students, and volunteers in order to keep schools open. 

The strike lasted just under a week after the district agreed to increase testing options, allow remote learning on a case-by-case basis, and secure more KN95 masks. Despite the agreement, union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “unfit to lead our city. She’s on a one-woman kamikaze mission to destroy our public schools.”

‘This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest’

, a school consultant and occasional columnist for ����Ӱ��, said the political climate in all three cities reflects a desire by voters more broadly and parents specifically, to pull back from “super-progressive” policies, such as the Defund the Police movement, to more centrist strategies that simply ensure a solid education for all. Parents “just want a school system they can count on, that’s reliable, that is just serving their kids.”

, president of the education advocacy group 50CAN, said Adams, the New York mayor, campaigned on not just a return to moderation but normalcy: “The schools are open, the subways are safe. The restaurants work. People are back in their offices. That’s almost nostalgia now, and people crave that. And I think these candidates got that. And their education choices reflect that too.”

At the same time, unions are on the ascent. With their to in-person instruction amid COVID-19 spikes and a handful of recent in recent years, they’ve seen their and influence grow after years of declining membership. 

“This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest,” said , a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a libertarian Washington, D.C., think tank. “This is a health crisis, and unions are designed to make sure that they’re protecting the health and safety of their members.”

But over the past few years, he said, unions in many places have “overplayed their hands” by demanding that instruction stay remote. The arrival of these new leaders may signal something different altogether: The new leaders are by no means union supporters, even if voters in each of their solidly blue cities are.

Rees, of the charter schools group, noted that Banks hired Dan Weisberg as first deputy chancellor. Since 2015, Weisberg has served as , a national nonprofit (formerly called The New Teacher Project) that has trained thousands of teachers outside of traditional teachers colleges. Since its founding in 1997, it has had a complicated relationship with unions. 

In 2018, after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt unions a blow by making a portion of members’ dues optional, Weisberg wrote that he disagreed with the decision, calling it “a matter of basic fairness that teachers who reap the benefits of collective bargaining should also share in the costs.”

But Weisberg also called the decision “a blessing in disguise” for unions, which he said “are now forced to finally confront an existential threat that’s been brewing for years: They’re losing touch with more and more of their members.”

Rees said Weisberg’s hiring “gives us confidence that there’s a new sheriff in town and that things are going to be a little bit different, or at least that the reform community and the charter school community will have a seat at the table.”

Students had to address adults with “sir” or “ma’am,” couldn’t have “radical” hairstyles and girls were required to wear jumpers, skirts or skorts — skirts with shorts attached underneath. The requirements were meant to promote respect and chivalry, but according to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of three families at the school, the skirt rule invited teasing from boys and reprimands from teachers when the girls’ underwear or shorts would show.

The girls and their parents argue the dress code is discriminatory and that students at charters should have the same constitutional rights as their peers attending traditional schools. The issue before the full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear oral arguments Dec. 10, is whether charters can operate with a degree of flexibility more akin to private schools — freedom that some say could put the rights of charter school students at risk. Some observers argue a decision in favor of the school could also pave the way for religious organizations to run charters.

The plaintiffs in asked for the “en banc” hearing after a three-judge panel ruled 2 to 1 in August that the school was not a “state actor” when it created its uniform policy.  Since 2019, when a U.S. District Court the school has allowed girls to wear pants or shorts, pending the outcome of the appeal. The rules on student hairstyles and addressing adults remain unchanged.

This is the first time an appellate court has considered whether a student can sue a charter school under the federal equal protection clause. Past cases that hinge on the state actor issue have focused on employee-related disputes. Since Minnesota passed the first charter school law in 1991, lower courts have widely held that charters are public schools and students have the same civil rights protections as their peers in traditional schools. Charter school advocates say state laws already make this clear.

“Every state charter statute recognizes charter schools as part of the state’s public education ecosystem,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which submitted to the court. If the current ruling stands, she added, “it would be in conflict with the clear intent of state statutes and set a legal precedent that could call into question the public status of charter schools in other states.”

Last month, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division , noting the fact Charter Day School sees its dress code as an essential part of its educational model demonstrates the tight connection between the school and the state.

Defendants in the case — the nonprofit organization that founded the school and its board members — say the plaintiffs’ argument undermines the reason charter schools were created.

“The purpose of charter schools was to differentiate them from traditional public schools and to remove them in important respects from state oversight,” said Aaron Streett, an attorney representing the defendants. They’re looking to a past , in which the court ruled a charter school was not a state actor, to support their argument.

The claim that students’ rights were violated, he said, is a “red herring” because charter schools agree to uphold students’ constitutional rights when they receive a charter.

The students complained of being cold in the winter and having to sit uncomfortably, “like a lady,” with their legs to the side on the floor, according to court documents. They stopped doing flips and cartwheels at recess to keep from exposing the shorts under their skirts. 

Such claims, however, are evidence that girls were treated differently than boys, not unfairly burdened by the uniform policy, according to the defendants.

Not forced to attend 

If the ruling by the initial 4th Circuit panel — which included two Trump appointees — stands, it could strengthen the position that faith-based organizations should be able to open charter schools.

“If they are private schools, then I would argue that they can be religious,” said Nicole Stelle Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.

The outcome of another federal lawsuit, scheduled for oral arguments before the Supreme Court Wednesday, could also back up that argument. In , plaintiffs argue that religious schools should be able to participate in school choice programs even if they teach religion.  

Preston Green, an education professor at the University of Connecticut, said a Supreme Court opinion in favor of the plaintiffs in Carson would strengthen the case for religious charters.

Defense attorney Streett, however, said that debates over whether an entity is a state actor are case-specific and don’t suggest that the organization in question is “wholly in the public sphere or wholly in the private sphere.” He rejected the possibility of religious charter schools because nonprofits would then be violating the terms of their charter. 

In his majority 4th circuit opinion in Peltier, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. noted that students weren’t forced to attend Charter Day School — and still had the option of attending a traditional public school.

Noting charter schools’ “wide latitude to experiment with pedagogical methods,” Quattlebaum wrote that they are not “state actors” and therefore not governed by the First Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The school’s skirt requirement, therefore, was not “fairly  attributable” to the state, he wrote. Judge Allison Jones Rushing agreed. 

Quattlebaum’s opinion leaned heavily on , a 1982 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a private school that received state funds for educating “maladjusted” high school students was not acting under the “color of state law” when it fired a counselor and five teachers. 

States could ‘remove all doubt’

That’s where Quattlebaum’s argument “jumps off the rails,” Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, an Obama appointee, wrote in her dissent. Rendell-Baker, she said, focuses on a private school, while Charter Day School is a “public school created under North Carolina law and funded almost entirely by governmental sources.”

She added that the school’s skirt rule, “with its many attendant harms to girls, denies these girls at this public school their constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.” 

Green, at the University of Connecticut, said there’s more at stake than the rights of students attending charter schools, which have continued to experience growth through the pandemic. If charters are not state actors, it would be easier for them to exclude some students, he said. 

Even though the charter alliance argues the laws are already clear, Green added that states could “remove all doubt” by adding language that charter schools can’t discriminate against students based on their sex, gender, race, disability or religious preference. They could take steps to reinforce charters’ status as public schools, perhaps by having elected boards, or by strengthening oversight, he added. 

But Streett said if charters don’t fulfill their obligations, accountability is already built into state laws. “Revoking the charter,” he said, “is one way the state can deal with this.”

In contrast to traditional public schools, which saw a significant, 1.4 million drop in student enrollment during the tumultuous year, charter schools in 39 states saw an influx of 240,000 new students — a 7 percent increase over last year, the Alliance’s review showed.

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Of the 42 states covered in the report, only Illinois, Iowa and Wyoming saw declines in the charter school population. While ​​Tennessee, Kansas, Puerto Rico and Guam also have charters, data was unavailable for those states and territories.

The analysis further confirms that a large segment of the nation’s students changed where they attended school last year, prompted by school closures, job loss and dissatisfaction with remote learning. Parents looking for in-person learning, however, weren’t the only ones driving the shift toward charters. In a few states, such as Oklahoma, enrollment increases in full-time virtual schools — those that operated remotely even before the pandemic — accounted for much of the nearly 78 percent growth.

It’s too soon to know whether some families have returned to traditional public schools this year, but Nina Rees, president and CEO of the Alliance, predicted the trend is not a blip.

“Families are sending a clear message. They want more public school options,” she said. “From the Pacific Northwest to the Deep South, the pandemic forced families to rethink where and how education could be delivered to their children. And now that they know what’s available, why would they go back to an option that never really worked for them in the first place?”

Growth in the charter sector ranged from less than 1 percent in Washington, D.C. and Louisiana — cities that already have a strong charter presence — to the 78 percent jump in Oklahoma. Alabama saw a 65 percent jump in enrollment. The state only had five charter schools in the 2020-21 school year, one of which was new, enrolling 413 students and increasing charter enrollment from 1,115 students in 2019-20 to 1,841.

The report, however, doesn’t offer further details on whether overall growth nationally was due to students leaving district schools or new schools opening. Some, such as Gem Prep in Idaho, added more grade levels, which contributed to a 24 percent increase in that state.

The authors, who draw on data from state education agencies, also provided some additional context from a few states, such as Arizona, where 20 percent of public school students now attend charters, and California, which saw growth in charter enrollment among nearly all racial and ethnic groups.

In 2019, the state passed a law — considered a compromise between charters and the teachers union — that gave local districts the authority to consider whether the opening of a new charter would negatively impact their own schools. Lawmakers attempted earlier this year to impose additional financial and enrollment restrictions on virtual charters in California — known as nonclassroom-based — but parents lobbied against and the sponsor withdrew it. There is already a moratorium on new virtual charters in the state.

Navigator Schools, with 1,405 students at three sites in central California, is among those that saw growth at the network’s newest campus in Watsonville last year. The others were already at capacity, with waiting lists. Kirsten Carr, director of engagement and partnerships, believes the on-site distance learning program — for families that didn’t have internet service and needed child care — was one feature contributing to the growth. The schools serve a large farmworker community.

“Our families went back to work before a lot of other industries,” Carr said. “They had to have a place for their kids to go to school.”

She added, however, that growth for charters can be a “double-edged sword.”

“We do have pressure from our families to grow,” she said, but added that districts, which have lost enrollment, are increasing efforts to hold on to their students.

Some charters might have experienced growth last year even without the pandemic. In the Seattle area, Rainier Valley Leadership Academy — formerly part of Green Dot Public Schools network — has done an “about-face” since 2020, said CEO Baionne Coleman. The school has gone from a predominantly white leadership team under Green Dot to having a mostly Black administration and a racially diverse teaching staff as an independent charter. Its target enrollment for 2020-21 was 125 students; they hit 159 and are now at 176.

“Families were actually coming from all across Seattle, some as far as Olympia,” she said. “They were looking for teachers who looked like their kids, being able to learn their own histories along with the history of America.”

‘Didn’t have much choice’

Parents have generally given charter schools — which are publicly funded, but independently run — higher marks than district schools during the pandemic. One showed charters were quicker than district schools to set up a regular class schedule during school closures and stay in close contact with students and parents. A recent found that charter school parents were less likely to report negative effects of COVID-19 mitigation measures on their children’s education.

Parent satisfaction, however, seems to contrast with data in that poll showing declining public support for charter schools — from 48 percent in 2019 to 41 percent now. Brian Gill, a senior fellow with Mathematica who has conducted research on charter schools, said both can be true.

“The fact that [parents] have a more favorable impression is consistent with the well-known finding from polling that people give their own community’s schools better reviews than they give to schools nationwide,” he said, adding that school quality doesn’t necessarily influence opinions about charter schools. “Opposition to charter schools usually is motivated less by concerns about their quality than by concerns about whether their existence and growth might harm conventional public schools and the students and communities they serve.”

Some observers suggest that when given the choice between a virtual charter and a district school shifting to online teaching for the first time, many parents opted for schools with an established virtual program.

“Parents looking for remote learning options didn’t have much choice in big chunks of the country,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Despite the low quality of a lot of virtual charter schools, at least they had experience in providing remote instruction and weren’t figuring it out on the fly.”

Virtual charters, many of which operate as for-profits, have suffered from scandals over enrollment and financial practices in the past, with students than their counterparts in district schools. But of over 10,000 parents published in January this year showed strong satisfaction with how virtual charters responded at the onset of the pandemic, and some argue states and local charter authorizers should support virtual charters instead of seeking to cap their number.

Petrilli said he suspects many of the families who opted for virtual charter schools will find their way back to district schools — “once things return to ‘normal,’ whenever the heck that is.”