Don Soifer

Don Soifer is Chief Executive Officer of the National Microschooling Center, America’s comprehensive resource center, movement-builder and authority for the most exciting new education movement in a generation. He co-created and co-directed the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy, the nation’s first public–private partnership microschool with the City of North Las Vegas, delivering unprecedented academic growth with a previously underserved population of families under pandemic operating conditions. Prior to co-founding the Center with his wife Ashley, Soifer has been President of Nevada Action for School Options, an award-winning nonpartisan “action tank,” and Executive Vice President of the Lexington Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Arlington, VA he cofounded in 1998. Soifer directed the institute’s education and other domestic-policy research programs, and his research has been published and discussed in many of the nation’s most influential news publications and policy journals, and cited by policy decisionmakers at all levels of government, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Soifer earned a record as one of the nation’s most accomplished charter school authorizers, serving an unprecedented three mayor-appointed, Council-confirmed terms on the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board beginning in 2008. He was widely regarded as a driving force transforming one of the nation’s most successful charter authorizers as it instituted systems for prioritizing quality for the 120+ schools oversee. He subsequently served as a board member on the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority from 2019-2021, where he was instrumental in shaping essential board policies. Soifer has been an Aspen/Pahara Institute education fellow since 2018.