Is the charter sector in decline? Jan Resseger looks at a new report from the Network for Public Education. Reposted with permission.
What’s going on with the charter school sector now that traditional public schools are no longer troubled by the COVID plague and now that states—and even the federal government—are diverting more tax dollars to private school tuition vouchers?
In a new publication, the Network for Public Education has launched the first in a three-part series of reports to address these questions: “Today, the charter sector stands at a reckoning point. Growth has slowed. For-profit models are expanding. The push to create religious charter schools has fractured the movement from within. Meanwhile, charters are now competing not just with public schools and each other, but with a growing network of voucher-funded private schools and publicly subsidized home-schools.”
Future updates will examine the public’s growing disillusionment with charter schools along with the outrageous diversion of tax dollars to cover the expense of funding an additional education sector. This initial analysis, Charter School Reckoning, tracks three primary indicators that the charter school sector is in decline.
The first is the acceleration of charter school closures: “In the first half of 2025, 50 charter schools announced plans to shut down. Some would close immediately, while others would remain open through the end of the school year. These closures added to those that occurred without warning (later) during the fall.”
Second: “At the same time as closures accelerate, the pace of new school openings slows to a crawl. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the 2023-24 school year saw just 12 more open charter schools than during the previous year—a dramatic departure from the sector’s rapid growth during the preceding decades.”
Third, the new report rejects the myth, promoted by Education Secretary Linda MacMahon, that there are long waiting lists of children trying to find a place at a charter school: “The claim she invoked… can be traced back to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in 2013. But that figure was debunked over a decade ago. In… 2014… scholars Kevin Welner and Gary Miron of the National Education Policy Center identified at least nine reasons to be skeptical of such numbers. Among them: the absence of standardized data, duplicate counting, and self-reported, unaudited figures from charter operators themselves. Most states do not track charter vacancies, and even in those that do, the numbers often contradict the narrative of overwhelming demand.”
Even as public support for the charter school sector seems to be waning, the Charter School Reckoning report identifies two primary sources of support for the past growth of charter schools and for aggressive and ongoing promotion of the charter school sector.
Besides the state governments, which authorize privately operated charters and divert tax dollars to fund them, the primary underwriter for the growth of charter schools has been the federal government. Established in 1994, the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has progressively increased grant funding. “In its first year, just $4.54 million was awarded to nine state education agencies. Since then, driven by pressure from the powerful charter school lobby, the program’s budget has swelled, reaching half a billion taxpayer dollars annually under the Trump administration.”
At the same time, federal oversight and accountability of the Charter Schools Program has been negligible: “As CSP funding grew, so did the opportunity for abuse of public funding, as would-be-charter operators scrambled to get pre-planning funds. Grant applications, not checked for accuracy… led to spurious claims and undelivered promises.” “In 2012, The New York Times exposed a New Jersey charter school that had been denied approval three times by the state but received an $800,000 CSP grant. A quick check would have revealed misrepresentations by the real estate agent behind the application. When contacted, U.S. Department of Education officials revealed that applications reviewed by outside consultants were limited to the contents of the applications themselves—a practice that journalist Mike Winerip called an invitation to ‘fiction writing.’ ”
A second group of charter school enablers are the organizations that frame ideological advocacy and promote charter schools to state legislators and members of Congress: “Today, more than 50 charter trade associations—some state-based, others national—lobby aggressively to block charter school oversight and resist any legislative reform. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported over $26.5 million in income in 2023, with more than $28 million in assets. The California Charter Schools Association reported nearly $14 million in revenue that same year. These organizations are not only advocates but powerful lobbyists, intent on protecting all existing charters and promoting unlimited growth.”
The Network for Public Education identifies one additional reason for the decline of the charter sector: the growing dominance of cyber-charters that are “too big to succeed for students” and too impersonal. These are “schools with thousands of students and a seemingly limitless capacity to expand. Of the 50 largest charter schools in the U.S., only six are traditional brick-and-mortar institutions. The rest are cyber charters, credit recovery programs for at-risk students or dropouts, or home-school umbrellas—each with low overhead, minimal regulation, little accountability, and nearly unlimited capacity to grow. And these factors make them ripe for scandal.” The report profiles Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Charter Academy “with an enrollment of 23,589 students,” and Sacramento California’s Highlands, which was caught charging the state for more students than the school was serving and is currently under court order to pay the state back the money.
The Network for Public Education concludes: “Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity… (the charter school sector) is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures—often sudden and disruptive—are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.”