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Exclusive Interview with Tom Nida: Part 1
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I had the tremendous honor of sitting down the other day with Tom Nida for his first interview since the Washington Post ran their investigative stories on our city’s charter school movement. Although one might have excused the Chairman of the D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB) for being a little reticent in speaking with someone who was going to publish his words, this was exactly the opposite of what I found. In fact, Mr. Nida sounded as I did over 10 years ago when I discovered that there was this almost magical world of charter entrepreneurs founding schools to fix public education in the District of Columbia.
We covered many subjects in our freewheeling discussion. One of the things I was interested in was what Mr. Nida thought were his three greatest accomplishments since becoming chair in 2005. He did not hesitate in his response:
- Refinement of school financial reporting. He informed me that the board utilizes a financial grid that Mr. Nida developed in order to obtain a real-time snapshot of the fiscal health of schools. He said that this grid was one of the reasons that the board was able to determine that Washington Academy was failing.
- Maintain the quality of board staff. Mr. Nida revealed that there has been almost no turnover which has allowed for growing people from within their organization. The result has been the development of the best leaders of charter authorizers in the country, which was reinforced by the board winning a prestigious Practice Award from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA).
- Organizational Flexibility. Mr. Nida pointed out that in the face of 25% growth annually in the number of students attending charter schools the PCSB has remained extraordinarily lean. He said that his board operates on one-half of one percent of the total budget allocated from the city for charters plus another one-half of one percent of each school’s revenue. This one percent budget, according to Mr. Nida, is much smaller than the five percent most school authorizers spend. In addition, he is proud of the fact that the PCSB has only 21 staff members. This number of employees equates to about 1,250 students per staff member. By comparison, if DCPS had the same ratio of employees to students then they would have to reduce their 600 person central office staff by 568 individuals. Mr. Nida also reminded me that board members, unlike in some other cities, are not paid for their work and he has never asked for their status to be anything other than volunteers.
Next week Mr. Nida’s subject will be school governance.
