Remote Learning Reopening Reimagining School

Nina Rees is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement. Since joining the National Alliance in 2013, Nina has enhanced the organization’s stature in Washington, D.C., deepening relationships with members of both parties in Congress, multiple presidential administrations, and across the nonprofit and advocacy spaces. Over the course of her tenure, annual funding for the federal Charter Schools Program has grown from $254 million to $440 million.

Nina has also strengthened the operational health of the National Alliance. She has reshaped the board of directors to better reflect the charter school movement and build important connections with state Charter Support Organizations, leaders of Charter Management Organizations, policymakers, and educational innovators. To ensure the National Alliance’s financial sustainability, Nina has expanded relationships with donors who are passionate about improving opportunities in public education. She also regularly speaks as an authoritative voice for the charter school movement and an education policy expert on news outlets including Bloomberg, CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox News, and PBS’s NewsHour. Her articles and opinions have been published in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Prior to joining the National Alliance, Nina spent 25 years shaping education policy in the public and private sectors. She served as the first Deputy Under Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education. In this capacity, she oversaw the administration of 28 grant programs totaling $2 billion and supporting 1,300 projects. She was also responsible for spearheading innovative federal programs and policies such as school choice, charter schools, and alternative routes to teacher certification and school leadership. Before moving to the Education Department, Nina worked in the White House as Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy to the Vice President of the United States.

As Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at Knowledge Universe, Nina guided the partnerships and expansion strategy for a leading global education company with investments in early childhood education, before- and after-school programs, and online instruction. In the 1990s, Nina was the Heritage Foundation’s senior education analyst and chief spokesperson on education. She began her career on Capitol Hill, where she worked for then-Congressman Porter Goss.

Rees serves on the board of directors of the PIE Network, the advisory committee of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the advisory boards of Honored and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. 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 now lives in McLean, Virginia, with her husband and daughter.

Dr. Michael M. Crow is an educator, knowledge enterprise architect, science and technology policy scholar and higher education leader. He became the sixteenth president of Arizona State University in July 2002 and has spearheaded ASU’s rapid and groundbreaking transformative evolution into one of the world’s best public metropolitan research universities. As a model “New American University,” ASU simultaneously demonstrates comprehensive excellence, inclusivity representative of the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the United States, and consequential societal impact.

Lauded as the ”#1 most innovative” school in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, ASU is a student-centric, technology-enabled university focused on complex global challenges related to sustainability, economic competitiveness, social embeddedness, entrepreneurship and global engagement. Under Dr, Crow’s leadership, ASU has established twenty-four new transdisciplinary schools, including the School of Earth and Space Exploration, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and launched trailblazing multidisciplinary initiatives including the Biodesign Institute, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and important initiatives in the humanities and social sciences.

Beatriz Rendón is currently Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for the Office of Educational Outreach and Student Services at Arizona State University (ASU).  In this role she is focused on resource acquisition to support the Educational Outreach and Student Services portfolio, inclusive of ASU Preparatory Academy charter schools, access initiatives and student support service objectives. Resource acquisition efforts are pursued through the channels of philanthropy, venture capital and strategic partnerships.  Prior to that, Beatriz spent 9 years as the Chief Executive Officer of ASU Preparatory Academy charter schools (ASU Prep) and Vice President of Educational Outreach.

Working in a number of education leadership capacities, Beatriz has advanced transformational strategies that help increase educational outcomes for students from any background and increase the college-going pipeline. She started working in education while she was working on her Masters in Public Policy at the University of Chicago.  This began a career that now spans over two decades later. In her roles at ASU, she has worked with teams to grow, cultivate and develop a continuum of education that integrates PreK-12 with university courses to serve students from diverse ethnic, socio-economic, and geographic communities through full-immersion, blended and digitally-enabled modalities.  When she joined ASU in the summer of 2010, ASU Prep had two full-immersion schools serving approximately 550 students in grades K-8, with one of them being an underperforming school inherited by ASU from a local urban school district.  During her final year working for ASU Prep, it served more than 7,000 students in grades PreK-12, across 12 schools, including ASU Prep Digital, its virtual campus which has a national and international reach. On average, ASU Prep realized 100% high school graduation rate and 100% post-secondary pursuit rate.  

Shavar Jeffries is president of Democrats for Education Reform, and its affiliate organization, Education Reform Now.

Shavar ran an institutional-reform and class-action litigation clinic at Seton Hall Law School's Center for Social Justice in Newark, New Jersey. In this role, he helped numerous clients, in both individual and class actions, defend themselves against consumer fraud, unlawful education policies, and housing inequity, among other matters. 

From 2008 to 2010, Shavar was counsel to New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram. Shavar oversaw all multi-state investigations, ranging from securities and consumer fraud to environmental protection and products liability. He also supervised the Division on Civil Rights, the Juvenile Justice Commission, and the Victims of Crime Compensation Organization. 

Earlier in his career, Shavar was counsel to the firm and Deputy Director of the Gibbons Fellowship in Public Interest and Constitutional Litigation at Gibbons P.C., where he worked on a variety of complex-litigation and class-action matters, including cases involving consumer fraud, voting rights, affordable housing, and special education. He clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and worked as an associate at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, where he defended the University of Michigan in affirmative-action litigation challenging its admissions policies, and represented large institutional clients in class-action employment cases. He currently is a partner at Lowenstein Sandler LLP. Shavar graduated from Duke University and Columbia Law School.

An advocate for social justice for 20 years, Shavar is deeply involved in community and board service. He is on the boards of several organizations that focus on developing young people, including the National Mentoring Partnership, New Classrooms, KIPP New Jersey, and Seton Hall Preparatory School, and also sits on the advisory boards for NextWork and One Love. He has served in elected office, serving a term on the Newark Public Schools advisory board, including a term as president, and ran for mayor of Newark, receiving over 46% of the vote, a historic total for a first-time run for municipal office. 

Shavar has been recognized broadly for his social-justice work—to name a few, he’s been honored by the NAACP, the National Bar Association, the Garden State Bar Association, the Congressional Black Caucus, KIPP New Jersey, and the Essex County Family Justice Center, among others.

Margaret Fortune is changing what’s possible when you create excellent educational options for Black children. As the President/CEO of seven K-12 public charter schools in Sacramento and San Bernardino counties with a combined enrollment of more than 1,800 students, Fortune’s work is pointed towards one North star—to close the African American achievement gap. Fortune has founded some of the top majority African American public schools in the state of California. Fortune founded an early college high school in partnership with Cosumnes River College and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo focused on science, technology, engineering, art and math. Students are able to earn a high school diploma and associate’s degree upon graduation.

Fortune also operates Rex & Margaret Fortune School of Education, a graduate school that credentials teachers and school administrators for over 60 public school systems with the goal of addressing the state’s teacher shortage.

A nationally sought-after education expert, Fortune is often invited to participate in or lead conversations detailing the Fortune School approach to successfully educating Black children. She was a catalyst for efforts that resulted in the State of California budgeting a new $300 million block grant in 2018 for the lowest-performing students. A graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Fortune served as education adviser to two California governors. Fortune is a Trustee Emerita of the California State University, a Pahara-Aspen Fellow and board chair of the California Charter Schools Association. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for her substantial contributions to the field of education.

Most recently, Fortune was inducted into the National Charter School Hall of Fame for pioneering the development and growth of charter schools, implementing innovative ideas, and inspiring others in the movement. Fortune continues to increase her national footprint through her work as a steering committee member of the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools, a national organization founded to protect the right of “self-determination” for parent choice for Black and Latino families.

Layla Avila serves as CEO/Executive Director of Education Leaders of Color. Along with Kaya Henderson and Aimée Eubanks Davis, Layla convened eighteen prominent African-American and Latino education leaders to discuss whether a new entity of education leaders of color was necessary to expand the faces, voices and emphases of education efforts and build the bridges needed to sustain and expand its success. This group became EdLoC’s Leadership Committee.

Previously, as Executive Vice President, Layla led TNTP’s efforts to broaden TNTP’s impact through strategic partnerships. She also served as Chief of Staff for CEO Dan Weisberg, and oversaw TNTP’s new business development and federal grant strategy, external research and evaluation, and organizational accountability. Layla also oversaw all of TNTP’s work to recruit and train new teachers where TNTP’s Teaching Fellows Programs pioneered new ways of preparing teachers to be effective in the classroom. Before that, as Vice President and Partner for TNTP’s Teaching Fellows programs, Layla managed the design and implementation of projects across the Southwest.

Layla started her career with Teach For America in 1997, working as a bilingual and ESL teacher at August A. Mayo Elementary School in Compton, CA, and serving on the school's Leadership Team. She also served as an analyst for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence For Hispanic Americans, an interagency working group to increase educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans.

Layla holds a BA in Economics from Columbia University and an MA in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Layla was elected to the South Whittier School District Board of Trustees in 2005.