Good day, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share a Contributor Column from Nina Rees, an education reform advocate well known to CharterFolk and a former senior administration official during the presidency of George W. Bush.
We provide a bio for Nina below.
Nina Rees is an education reform advocate and former senior administration official during the presidency of George W. Bush. She currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the George Bush Institute and as a Senior Advisor to Education Reform Now, and she advises several education innovators, investors, and advocates. Most recently, she was the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement. She also launched and ran the Charter Schools Action Fund and Charter Schools PAC. Before joining the National Alliance, Nina spent 20 years shaping education policy in both the public and private sectors and served as an advisor to five presidential candidates.
She served as the first Deputy Under Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education and previously worked in the White House as Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy to the Vice President. Nina also served as Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at Knowledge Universe, a global education company with investments in early childhood education, before- and after-school programs, and online instruction. In the 1990s, she was the Heritage Foundation’s senior education analyst and chief spokesperson on education. She began her career on Capitol Hill, working for then-Congressman Porter Goss.
Nina has appeared on Bloomberg, CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox News, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and PBS’s NewsHour. Her articles and opinions have been published in The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Washingtonian named her one of Washington DC’s Most Influential People in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Nina currently serves on the board of directors of Building Hope, Oakmont and Verdara as well as the advisory committee of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is a Pahara-Aspen Fellow and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. A native of Iran who immigrated to America at the age of 14, Nina earned her undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech and a master’s degree at George Mason University. She is the proud mom of a Davidson Wildcat.
Virginia’s Charter School Paradox: Local Control as Obstacle – and Opportunity
On a recent trip to Floyd, Virginia, for its famous music festival, I was reminded of what made this state such a welcoming place for my family when we first moved from Iran to Blacksburg. There is something about the warmth and hospitality of Virginians that sticks with you.
I attended the only public high school in Blacksburg. It was a perfectly good school for many students. But looking back, it probably wasn’t the school I would have chosen for myself, for a variety of reasons.
That experience is one reason the fight to expand public charter schools in Virginia became personal for me when I had the opportunity to lead the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Charter schools, after all, are public schools. They are tuition-free, open to all students and designed around a basic bargain: greater flexibility in how they operate in exchange for greater accountability for results.
Virginia enacted its charter school law in 1997. Yet nearly three decades later, the Commonwealth has only seven public charter schools. Its law has consistently ranked among the weakest in the nation: 42nd out of 45 on 2022 by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and in the bottom 10% of the weakest laws in the Center for Education Reform’s 2026 report.
Why so few?
The answer lies largely in Virginia’s cherished tradition of local control. Under current law, local school districts hold the ultimate authority to approve charter schools. In effect, the institutions that would face competition from a new public school get to decide whether that school can exist.
I wasn’t involved in enacting Virginia’s charter law, so I can’t say how many applicants tried to open a school in those early years. But I did spend 18 months recently serving on Virginia’s Public Charter School Standing Committee during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration where I had the privilege of reviewing exactly one charter application.
A whopping one.
Local control, however, does not have to mean no charter schools and one doesn’t have to travel far to see proof points.
Pennsylvania has 162 charter schools (serving over 100,000 students) authorized by local school districts– nearly half are in Philadelphia. Maryland (which ironically is also considered one of the nation’s weakest laws) has 50 charter schools, all authorized by school districts. Ninety charter schools in TN are authorized by school districts. And Washington, D.C. now has 133 charter schools serving nearly half of public-school students. Today, D.C. charters are overseen by an independent authorizer, but in the early days of the movement, DC Public Schools itself authorized a significant number of charter schools (18 before the law gave total control to the DC Public Charter School Board).
Virginia’s districts have been far less receptive.
I live in Fairfax County. When one of the district’s best teachers, Eric Welsh, tried to open a charter school he faced fierce opposition. So much so that when one of the nation’s highest performing charter networks, BASIS, which also runs one of DC’s highest achieving charter schools, decided to move to Virigina, they didn’t even give the charter option a try and opted for a private school instead.
Some might ask: Why does a place like Fairfax County need charter schools when it already has so many excellent public schools? Do a search of the district’s work during the pandemic and you get the answer starting with this story.
But Virginia is bigger than Fairfax County.
Look at Richmond, VA Beach and other communities across the Commonwealth, where stubborn achievement gaps persist. Virginia can boast some of the finest public schools in America while simultaneously acknowledging that too many children are being poorly served. Accepting that reality year after year begins to resemble what President George W. Bush famously called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
We celebrate the extraordinary athletes who come out of the Tidewater region. We should bring that same expectation of excellence to the academic potential of every child who grows up there.
When I led the National Alliance, we tried to find a way through Virginia’s charter-school impasse.
It wasn’t easy. Virginia’s constitution places significant authority over public schools in the hands of local school boards, making the creation of an independent statewide charter authorizer extraordinarily difficult. Changing the constitution itself is no small undertaking: a constitutional amendment must pass the General Assembly twice, with an intervening House election, before going to Virginia voters.
So we pursued another route.
Working with legislators, we developed a modest approach that we believed could withstand constitutional scrutiny. We even secured bipartisan support, including Democratic votes. The legislation passed, but then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed it.
That decision was hard for me to understand. McAuliffe had risen to national prominence during the Clinton era, and President Bill Clinton was one of the Democratic Party’s most important early champions of public charter schools. When I later asked McAuliffe about the veto, he again raised constitutional concerns.
Years later, Glenn Youngkin ran for governor promising to create at least 20 new charter schools. We saw another opening. But his administration was unable to persuade the legislature to enact the kind of charter legislation we had previously advanced, and the alternative “lab school” initiative never became the robust alternative some of us had hoped it might be.
But Youngkin did leave behind something that could prove important to the next chapter of this fight: a tougher and more transparent school accountability system.
Under Virginia’s new School Performance and Support Framework, the state has separated accreditation from school performance and created four straightforward categories: Distinguished, On Track, Off Track and Needs Intensive Support. Schools are evaluated on measures including academic mastery, student growth and readiness.
That matters far beyond the question of school ratings.
One of the oldest arguments against giving schools more autonomy is that policymakers need to know they will be held accountable for what they produce. Virginia now has a much stronger tool for doing exactly that.
So perhaps this is the moment to revive the original charter bargain: greater freedom in exchange for greater accountability.
If the state is going to measure school performance more rigorously, it should also be more willing to let educators try different ways of producing results.
And the early results from Virginia’s tiny charter sector make that argument even more interesting.
Five of the Commonwealth’s seven public charter schools received the state’s highest rating of Distinguished. Another, Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts in Richmond, is a Title I school that earned an On Track rating while performing among the city’s stronger elementary schools. The remaining school serves such a specialized and small population that its results are difficult to compare meaningfully with a traditional school.
Those results do not prove that every charter school Virginia might open will succeed.
Nor should they.
Chartering was never supposed to mean approving schools and leaving them alone forever. The entire point is to give schools room to innovate and then judge them honestly based on what they accomplish.
Schools that perform should be allowed to grow. Schools that do not should improve or close.
That is accountability.
And it raises an obvious question:
If the charter schools Virginia already has are performing this well under a tougher accountability system, why aren’t we trying to create more of them?
School districts, of course, have legitimate concerns. A new charter can affect enrollment, facilities and funding. District leaders also have a responsibility to ensure that any new school is academically sound, financially responsible and capable of serving students well.
But the answer to those concerns should be rigorous applications, transparent oversight and consequences for schools that fail.
It should not be refusing to let new schools exist in the first place.
Now, with Gov. Abigail Spanberger in office, the legislative path to major charter reform appears even narrower.
But that doesn’t mean the fight is over.
In fact, there is another path—ironically, the most traditional Virginia path of all: local control.
And this time, Virginia has something it has not really had before: an organization focused specifically on building a charter-school sector.
The Virginia Charter Schools Association, led by Katie Charnley, is positioning itself to strategically advance charter growth within the constraints of the law as it exists today while also preparing for broader reform when the political winds shift.
That is exactly the right strategy.
Rather than waiting for Richmond to rewrite the charter law, the association can help cultivate strong school leaders and operators, support applicants through Virginia’s local approval process, educate school-board members about what high-quality chartering looks like, and help communities identify where new public-school models could add value.
It can also document what happens.
Which districts entertain serious proposals? Which reject them? Why? What arguments are made? What kinds of schools are communities asking for? What do existing charter-school results tell us?
That record matters.
Because over time, it can turn an abstract political debate into something much more concrete: actual applications, actual community demand, actual local decisions and actual evidence about how Virginia’s charter law works, or fails to work, in practice.
Philanthropy has a role here, too.
For years, national funders and charter advocates have largely written off states like Virginia because changing the law proved too difficult. Instead of pouring millions of dollars into another legislative campaign with little chance of succeeding in the current political environment, funders could help build the conditions for future reform.
They could support the VA Charter Association, fund parental engagement and education efforts, educate lawmakers by taking them to visit charter schools in nearby states, and help existing charter schools tell their stories.
That may sound naïve. But the timing could not be more important.
We are entering an era in which enormous political and financial energy is flowing toward private-school choice, education savings accounts, homeschooling and the new federal scholarship tax credit, which Virginia has opted to participate in.
Families increasingly have choices outside the traditional public-school system.
Public education needs to respond by offering families more choices within it.
And charter schools remain one of the best tools we have to do that.
Districts can use charter schools to retain and attract families. They can create schools built around different instructional models. They can establish specialized hubs for STEM, literacy, career and technical education, special education and other areas where students need something different.
They can give talented teachers and school leaders room to experiment while keeping those innovations firmly within public education.
Most importantly, charter schools can give families another public option before they conclude that their only alternatives are private school or homeschooling.
That is especially important now. If public education wants to remain the option families actively choose, not simply the system they are assigned to, it has to become more responsive to what families are asking for.
Virginia already has the educators, parents, civic leaders and communities capable of creating extraordinary schools.
It now has a stronger accountability system capable of telling us whether those schools are actually working.
And it has a charter association that can help turn scattered interest into an actual strategy.
The Commonwealth’s deep tradition of local control has long been viewed as the obstacle to charter schools.
Maybe it can become their greatest opportunity.
Let local communities propose the schools their children need. Let educators create something different. Let districts demonstrate that public education can compete for families rather than simply assume they will always have them.
And then let Virginia’s accountability system tell us which schools are delivering.
Virginia doesn’t need hundreds of charter schools overnight.
It needs a handful more great ones.
This would give the next governor and General Assembly something they do not have today: real demand, real proposals, real data and a real record of how the current system works in practice.