Doomed to Fail: An Analysis of Charter School Closures from 1998 to 2022
Parents seek a caring, consistent, and dependable learning environment for their children in an increasingly unstable world. At the same time, they are being lured from their neighborhood public school by school choice.
DR. CAROL BURRIS & THE NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION [GUEST AUTHOR]
This article is an excerpt of a full report by the Network of Public Education, of which Saphron Initiative is a member. Read the full report here.
Between 1999 and 2022, more than 1.1 million students were affected by charter school closures, often with less than one month’s notice. At times, the closures were so abrupt that families showed up to find a shuttered school, receiving no notice at all. Sometimes, a charter school that promises to open does not, leaving families scrambling and public schools overwhelmed with last-minute enrollees. The broken promise of better or more innovative education is shattered time and time again as charters fail to achieve viable enrollment or are mired in mismanagement and even outright fraud that forces them to close their doors. In state after state, we have created a wild west of charter expansion, resulting in schools starting with the best intentions but are doomed to fail.
In 2020, the Network for Public Education, of which Saphron Initiative is a member, issued its first report on charter school closures. Rather than measure annual closure rates, we used an innovative approach — a cohort design to measure the lifespan of charter schools. Researcher Ryan Pfleger, Ph.D., used the Department of Education’s Common Core of Data (CCD), the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine student displacement and charter school closure rates. Unique school identifiers, school-type designations, and enrollment data allowed Pfleger to determine the failure rates for cohorts of charter schools at the three, five, ten, and, in some cases, the fifteen-year mark. Dr. Pfleger determined those rates for all charter schools that opened between 1998 and 2017. The results were startling — more than a quarter of all charter schools closed by year five, and about half were gone by year fifteen.
To determine whether closure rates have improved since our first report, Dr. Pfleger added additional data from the 2018-19 to the 2022-23 school years, thus doubling the number of cohorts at the fifteen-year mark and providing us data for a first look at year 20.
Again, he analyzed cohorts of charter schools — schools that opened in the same year — over time. Few differences were found between our earlier study and this expanded one.
More than one in four charter schools still closed by the five-year mark. With Based on the theory that only the best will survive and the worst fall away, blind allegiance to the model is stronger than allegiance to families whose lives are disrupted by school failures. With minimal improvements in closure rates, the number of displaced students is increasing, with about 295,000 more students displaced between the 2017-18 and 2022-23 school years.
Only five cohorts of schools had 15 years of data available at the time of our 2020 report. For this update, Pfleger analyzed 10 cohorts at year 15, including schools opened and financed during the Race to the Top years when charter schools rapidly expanded and funding increased. Nevertheless, including the additional, better-resourced cohorts had a minimal effect on 15-year closure rates, which dropped from 50 percent to 49 percent. The same negligible one percent rate drop was repeated in all benchmark years. And for the five cohorts that made the 20-year mark, 55 percent are gone.
Some charter schools quietly shutter without media attention. Others close amidst scandal or parent protests. Some give parents ample warning, while others provide no warning at all. To better understand why charters close and what notice families have, we analyzed news reports on closures during 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years.
More often than not, we found patterns of decreasing enrollment or other warning signs that school officials ignored or failed to share with the families they served. We found the commonly held belief that charters are more academically accountable and close because of academic performance to be true only in a minority of cases. More than half closed because they could not sustain their enrollment or due to corruption or mismanagement of funding.
This report summarizes what we learned while highlighting cases that illustrate the effects of school closures on the families and communities they serve. We also show that school closures are more voluntary than forced, with 40 percent of closures giving parents little, if any, advance warning. For charter advocates, school closures are just a natural consequence of the marketplace model. Those who embrace choice brush aside the instability for families and the disruption that charter churn inflicts on neighborhood public schools. Studies on school closures, including those focusing on charter schools, show little to no benefit to students, with many showing both long and short-term adverse effects.
Public school parents have the security of knowing that their public school is unlikely to close and that if it does, the district must guarantee them a seat in another nearby school. This is not the case with charter schools. School closure is not a bug but rather a feature of the system, and as private school vouchers expand and K-12 enrollment continues to drop, 7 closures will only accelerate. Despite the evidence, charter expansion continues, aided by the federal Charter School Program grants. This report makes the case that it is time to rethink charter expansion and the oversight that should be in place. Students and taxpayers no longer deserve broken promises or schools doomed to fail.
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About the author
Carol Corbett Burris is the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education Foundation. A former Principal, she received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and received the 2003 National Association of Secondary Schools’ Principals Middle Level Dissertation of the Year Award. In 2010, she was named Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, she was named SAANYS New York State High School Principal of the Year. Dr. Burris co-authored Detracking for Excellence and Equity (2008) and Opening the Common Core: How to Bring ALL Students to College and Career Readiness (2012), and authored On the Same Track: How Schools Can Join the 21st Century Struggle against Re-segregation (2014). Her articles have appeared in Educational Leadership, Kappan, American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Theory into Practice, School Administrator, American School Board Journal and Education Week. She regularly expresses her concerns about the misuse and unintended consequences of high-stakes testing in the Washington Post, The Answer Sheet blog.
