By Harry Jaffe
When Tom Nida took over as chairman of the District’s Public Charter School Board six years ago, many public school zealots cast him as the devil. They said: Charters are taking public funds and public students! They are out of control! They will lead to the ruination of public education!
Today, on his last official day as chairman, Nida looks more like a benevolent angel, even if he’s a burly guy with a handlebar mustache who stands well over 6-foot-2.
Charter schools are funded with taxpayer dollars, but they are independent of the public school system. Each runs as a nonprofit, with a board of directors, a business plan, its own building and curriculum and teaching staff. It’s up to charter school boards, like the one Nida ran, to make sure these hybrid schools use tax dollars well and educate children.
Charters in the nation’s capital are a model for the country in part because of Nida’s leadership — which, by the way, is voluntary. When he first joined the board in 2003, there were 40 schools teaching 14,000 students; now there are 57 schools on 99 campuses serving 28,000 students, or more than a third of D.C.’s public school children.
As Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the public schools and dissolved the school board, Nida’s board thrived. It absorbed schools chartered by the old school board, monitored existing charters and authorized new ones. He and his board members and staff accomplished this with scant bureaucracy.
“We held people accountable,” he says. If schools failed to perform, he closed them down.
Nida is a D.C. native. He graduated from Anacostia High. He became a banker. In 1999, he started lending to charter schools so they could get off the ground and buy buildings. He joined the charter board and was voted chairman.
“I brought a different perspective,” says Nida, 61. “I’m interested in education, but I am not an educator in a classic sense. I was interested in the big picture: How would a school meet the larger community needs? Then I would drill down to its operations and governance.”
D.C. has proven charter stars: seven KIPP schools, Capital City, E.L. Haynes, to name a few. “The best ones,” Nida says, “are all about constantly improving — never kick back and relax.”
Nida expects to pay more attention to his real job, banking. He’s also starting a nonprofit that he hopes will serve as a guide to chartering boards nationwide. Brian Jones, appointed to the board by Fenty, will take over as chairman.
Does Nida think he left D.C. schools in better shape?
“I hope so,” he says. “What we’ve done, if nothing else, is raise expectations. People didn’t give D.C. schools any credit. Now students are performing better, and expectations are rising. It has to be that way for all kids.”
One measure of the charter’s success: Nida’s alma mater, Anacostia High, is run by a charter.
“There is a certain irony to that,” he says.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
