Part I: Decline, the first installment of a three-part report, Charter School Reckoning, presents sobering findings on the stagnation, retrenchment, and accelerating closures plaguing the charter school sector as it enters its fourth decade.
The report, published by the National Center for Charter School Accountability, documents that in the first half of 2025 alone, 50 charter schools announced closures, many without warning, adding to the 218 charter schools that closed or never opened between 2022 and 2024. Meanwhile, new school openings have slowed to a crawl, with only 11 more charter schools opening nationwide during the 2023–24 school year — a stark contrast to the hundreds added annually during the Obama-era Race to the Top initiative.
Despite the decline, federal funding for charter schools has increased to $500 million annually, much of which is awarded to schools that later fail, misuse funds, or never open at all. Nearly half of the 50 schools that closed in 2025 had received a combined $102 million from the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP).
The report also conducts an in-depth analysis using NCES data on the expansion of the low-quality, scandal-ridden mega-charter sector and breaks the myth of the “one million student waiting list.”
“For-profit interests and lax oversight have hijacked the original promise of charter schools,” said Diane Ravitch, President of the Network for Public Education. “It’s time to stop pouring public money into a broken experiment and reinvest in accountable, transparent, and equitable public schools.”
Part II of the report, Disillusionment, will be released in the fall of 2025.
To read Part 1, Decline, click the image below.
Methodology
The primary source of data for this report is the Common Core of Data (CCD) maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). NCES regularly publishes summary tables detailing the number of charter schools and enrollment figures over time. One such table used in this report can be found here. This table is a download of charter schools with their enrollment from the 2023-24 school year. It can be used to verify schools with no enrollment, low enrollment, and mega charters. This table shows the number of charter schools by state across the years.
This table provides enrollment data for charter schools and public schools.
In cases where the published tables did not meet our specific data needs, we used the NCES Elementary/Secondary Information System (ELSi) Table Generator, available here. This tool allows users to apply filters by year, school type, and other characteristics to build customized datasets. Using this tool, we identified charter schools that closed or no longer reported enrollment by comparing year-to-year data.
To further refine and automate this process, Ryan Pfleger, Ph.D., developed a custom application for our project. His tool enables us to track individual schools’ classifications and enrollment histories over multiple years. We are grateful for Dr. Pfleger’s ongoing support.
Data on federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) funding by year was gathered through searches of publicly available records on the U.S. Department of Education website: www.ed.gov.
Finally, information on charter school closures in the first half of the year—including reasons for those closures—was obtained through media reports, particularly from local newspapers. As not all closures are publicly reported, this dataset likely underestimates the true number of charter school closures. You can find closure stories here. Filter for closures.
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