Charter schools face new political hurdles, longtime advocate Nina Rees says

The public charter school movement has reached a political crossroads where it must overcome wavering support on both sides of the aisle to satisfy growing demand, a longtime advocate says.

Nina Rees, a former Education Department official in the George W. Bush administration, became president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in 2012. On Dec. 31, she stepped down, saying she had taken the advocacy group as far as she could.

In an interview with The Washington Times, Ms. Rees said that while enrollment at charters surged during the pandemic, local and state policies together with shortages of staff and facilities have limited their ability to meet that demand. So has tepid support from the Biden administration and conservatives eager to cut federal education funds.

“When I started doing this work, there was real interest in opening charter schools to end the soft bigotry of low expectations,” Ms. Rees said. “Now, those discussions aren’t taking place in the same way at the national level, and so charters are kind of on their own.”

Charter schools are independently managed public schools that operate under laws that vary from state to state.

The charter movement launched in 1992 in Minnesota with broad bipartisan support from moderate Republicans and Democrats, including then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

“Over time, the center of both parties has thinned, and the polarization is more vocal,” Ms. Rees said. “So, the politics have changed. Interest in opening charter schools has also shifted from inner cities to more diverse suburbs and rural White communities.”

According to the Washington, D.C.-based alliance, 46 states and the District of Columbia allow charter schools. Ms. Rees said that’s up from 41 when she began leading the group.

The alliance says there are about 7,800 charter schools with 3.7 million students nationwide, about 7.5% of all K-12 public school students.

In a report last month, the group found charter schools had enrolled nearly 240,000 more students during the 2020-2021 school year than in 2019-2020. By comparison, traditional public schools lost more than 1.4 million students over the same time, as families also switched to private schools and homeschooling during the pandemic.

Since then, traditional public schools have continued to bleed students while charter enrollment leveled off last year, the report found.

Ms. Rees said charter schools attracted students during pandemic lockdowns by allowing more flexible learning options than traditional public schools.

In some regions, states allowed families to switch their children from overwhelmed school districts to charter schools for remote learning. Some charters let working parents drop their children off on campus to learn remotely with supervision during school hours.

Advocates point to University of Arkansas research showing that charter school students typically outscore their traditional public counterparts on standardized English and math exams, with less funding per pupil.

“Families know what’s best for their children and the best way to ensure their children get the best education is to let them select the school that best fits their needs,” Ms. Rees said.

Lack of equitable funding and access to adequate facilities have been the biggest challenges for the movement, Ms. Rees said.

Looking back, she expressed pride that the alliance successfully lobbied Congress to increase the annual funding for charter schools from $254 million to $440 million during her tenure. That’s adequate to meet current needs, she said.

Charters have nevertheless stirred opposition within the nation’s two leading teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — because of their exemption from hiring unionized employees and reporting to elected school boards.

That tension has mounted amid the growing reluctance of some conservatives and “traditional Democrats” to support charters, Ms. Rees said.

Besides opposing funding increases to any federal program that might impact inflation, some conservatives have become more vocal supporters of private schools and homeschooling.

Meanwhile, while every president since Mr. Clinton has supported federal funding for charter schools, Ms. Rees has noted a dip in enthusiasm from President Biden.

“What’s different with the Biden administration is that COVID has been the center of their attention and he is not as personally focused on education as his predecessors,” she said. “He also happens to be the first president who has risen to power with the support of both leading teachers’ unions. And his wife is a card-carrying member of the NEA.”

First lady Jill Biden has worked as an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College since 2009.

In a statement emailed to The Times, a Department of Education spokesperson defended the administration’s “historic investments in public education to help ensure every student has the resources they need for success.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration supports inclusive, high-quality public charters, and the Department invests in expanding them through the Charter Schools Program, which is one of the largest discretionary grant programs at the Department,” the Education Department said in the statement.

Ms. Rees said that while $440 million in annual federal funding is enough for the current needs of charter schools, they still receive less money than traditional public schools. And she said the pipeline of talent for opening charters has dried up as fewer young people go into teaching.

However, she stressed that charter schools are still growing and Americans still have more educational options than parents in other countries.

At age 14, Ms. Rees moved from Iran to Virginia as her family fled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime. That came after Iran’s 1979 revolution had forced her to enroll in an overcrowded public school that replaced Iranian history with compulsory Islamic religious instruction.

“The introduction of religion into the public sphere was foreign to my parents and they wanted to move to another country with schools that could get me into a great university,” Ms. Rees said. “Parents want their children to have a good education.”