Scott Pearson, the executive director of D.C.’s Public Charter School Board, announced on Tuesday that he will be resigning from his post after more than eight years on the job.

“I have always lived my professional life in chapters, and this has been the longest one yet,” Pearson said Tuesday on The Kojo Nnamdi Show. “Change is good for me, but I also think it will be healthy for the PCSB to have new leadership.”

Pearson said there’s no motive for his resignation other than a desire for change, and that he actually made the decision about two years ago, after his youngest son’s graduation from high school. “I just thought, ‘What’s the right arc for my life?'” he said on the show.

Pearson was selected as the head of the entity that oversees all of the city’s charter schools at the end of 2011, after a months-long search that started and stalled several times. He was previously an Obama appointee in the Education Department, and before that, he co-founded a charter school management organization in the Bay Area called Leadership Public Schools.

Pearson joined the PCSB at a time that the city’s charters were facing several challenges and criticisms, including questions of quality and accessibility to special needs students.

Over the last eight years under his leadership, Pearson contends, charter schools across the city have improved in quality and accessibility, not just to special needs students but to all students in the District.

“I’m proud of the work we’ve done. In the past 8 and a half years, the Washington D.C. charter sector has become higher quality, more equitable, and a true partner across the city,” Pearson said in a statement announcing his decision to resign. “We have demonstrated that public charter schools can realize their potential of improving public education, and, in the process, helping to revitalize the city.”

When Pearson came to the job, there were 98 charter school campuses in the city, and 40 percent of all public school students in the District attended a charter. Now, there are 123 charter schools in the District, and about 50 percent of public school students (43,556) attend them.

Since 2011, when Pearson got the job, D.C. charters have improved in federal assessments on reading and math faster than every other state and every other large school District except for D.C. Public Schools, according to his office.

The PCSB launched and expanded a new open enrollment policy under Pearson, and created a common lottery with DCPS, meaning that families can apply charters and regular public schools on the same website and via the same lottery. Pearson says he also worked to make charters more accessible—they now serve more special needs students than DCPS, per numbers from the PCSB. Expulsions are down 80 percent below the national average, and suspensions have been reduced by half since 2011, per the office.

But Pearson’s tenure hasn’t been free of snags or scrutiny.

For the first time since these publicly-funded, privately-run schools were founded in the District in 1996, charter school enrollment dipped this year. Five charter schools open during the last academic years could not reopen this fall, due either to poor academic performance or other logistical hurdles. (The city has approved five new charters that will open next year).

Pearson has taken a particularly active advocacy role as the head of PCSB, more so than his predecessor, Josephine Baker. Critics have suggested that he has tried to shield charter schools and related entities from transparency and accountability measures brought forth at the D.C. Council.

In 2017, David Grosso, an at-large councilmember and the chair of the education committee, proposed legislation to ban most school suspensions up to the eighth grade, and to place strict limits on them through high school. Pearson took an active role in opposing that measure, sending an email urging representatives from each charter school to take action against it, per the Washington City Paper.

“As drafted, this bill would substantially interfere with your exclusive control over school operations, and would create major reporting burdens for your school,” Pearson wrote in the email, which was obtained by City Paper. “We hope you can join the discipline discussion so that we can protect the foundations of the School Reform Act.” (The School Reform Act is federal legislation from 1996 that allowed the creation of charter schools in D.C.).

Grosso’s measure ended up passing the Council in 2018.

Pearson has also fought against more recent transparency measures brought forth by Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, which would require individual charter schools to comply with public records requests through the Freedom of Information Act. In early October, Pearson testified before the D.C. Council against such measures.

“I have noticed that many have been conflating ‘transparency,’ with FOIA. FOIA is a tool of transparency, one which we believe is inappropriate to apply towards small, independent 501(c)(3) organizations,” Pearson said in that testimony. “It is a blunt instrument that will do little to provide families with the information they need and want while having the potential, through its cost and time demands, to take resources away from the school quality goals we all share.”

Pearson argued again on the Kojo Show on Tuesday that such a law would create too much work for individual schools with limited resources. “Our concern is that the specific way that the bill as drafted in the city council would put a lot of burden on schools and it would not actually increase transparency,” he said.

Pearson has also strongly supported a charter consulting company called TenSquare that has faced criticism for a lack of transparency and questions about effectiveness.

He will step down from his post in May of 2020, at the end of the current school year. The charter board will conduct a nationwide search for his replacement.

Pearson said on Kojo that, while the charter school system has made a great deal of progress, he knows there is more work to be done, particularly in closing the achievement gap between black and white students in the District. “Progress has been frustratingly slow for me,” he said. “We still have so far to go to make sure that all of our students have an equal shot at going to college and succeeding in college.”