Education Next, the pro-charter, Pro-Choice publication, reports that the growth of charter schools fell to an all-time low of only 1% between 2017 and 2018.
Despite the $200 Million the Waltons give annually for charters, despite the hundreds of millions of federal dollars for new charters, the rate of growth has slowed. How is this possible?
“Despite educating more than 3.2 million students, the annual rate of charter school growth has reached an all-time low: a 1 percent increase in charter schools during the 2017-18 school year. This represents the fourth consecutive year that charter growth has slowed. In an article in our Summer 2018 issue of Education Next, Robin J. Lake, Trey Cobb, Roohi Sharma and Alice Opalka discuss barriers to charter-school growth in the San Francisco Bay Area and explore what charter leaders, policymakers, and communities can do to regain momentum and keep pace with demand. Derrell Bradford also addresses the slowing growth-rate of charter schools in our Summer 2018 issue, asking: what is the future role of single-site schools, given that charter management organizations (CMOs) and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) are increasingly crowding the field? Finally, Adam Peshek proposes a way to tackle some of the obstacles to charter-school growth through the Opportunity Zone program (part of the 2017 tax reform package)—and hopefully create more high-quality public school options for children along the way.
—Education Next”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Keep in mind that a slower rate of growth means that the charter sector is still growing, only more slowly. It’s the nature of growth. It’s relatively easy to go from small to big, but big to huge is more difficult, and after huge it’s really hard, as Amazon is discovering
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Charter schools are growing like lobsters do and that is basically about one inch per year
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If you browse through some the links in the short piece, their framing is misleading. Growth is slowing because it’s “the price of success.” Really? Perhaps it’s because markets are oversaturated and the so-called “charter deserts” are deserts because there is little to no demand for these profiteers.
Also, they claim demand is not being met. Really, again? If demand isn’t being met, perhaps backfilling would alleviate some of that. Or maybe they could stop counting the same kid on three waiting lists as three kids. The mythology they’ve created for themselves is delusional.
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Why that’s a crying shame. . . .
. . . that the sector hasn’t started contracting yet.
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Yep. Expansions are not dead. They are being planned to encompass suburbs. See some of my earlier posts this month about the invention of “charter school deserts” as a concept to pursue new markets while claiming to offer choices to the underserved. The first phase of the marketing campaign is mapping where charter school deserts are using census tract data, then encouraging charter operators to move in.
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Yes. What happened is that charters learned that unless they have high suspension and attrition rates of at-risk kids in urban areas, they don’t do any better than publics. They can’t “expand” in poor neighborhood when they don’t actually want to teach the vast majority of students in those poor neighborhoods. They are delighted to welcome those of the poor students who will do well academically and count on the racism of their overseers to believe them when they say “we teach 10% of the poorest kids so we’re done, give us many more schools in affluent districts and we promise to teach 20% or even 30% of those kids!” What a “charitable” bunch of greedy liars.
So now they pretend that a community that is “30% poor” needs charters, too, so they can cherry pick a more affluent population and help undermine public schools which will now have to teach more at-risk kids.
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Thank you to Diane and all the other researchers and practitioners for slowing the privatization plague.
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Agree with you, lance hill. I concur. “Thank you, Diane and all the other researchers and practitioners for slowing the privatization plague.” And IT SURE IS A PLAGUE.
Too bad the deformers weren’t standing on Pele when she erupted. But wait, there’s still time … there will be more HUGE eruptions and lava flows. Far too many who are politicians are too arrogant and too stupid to understand the forces of nature. They really think they can push Pele back. LOL.
Hope Zuckerberg is choking on the VOG. No one escapes Pele.
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Encouraging. Maybe the public is become more aware, but the threat to public education remains. The folks pushing privatization will not be deterred by an enrollment growth dip.
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Word of mouth and that six degrees of separation thing explains what is happening. The word is spreading and people are learning how horrible the majority of these for-profit corporate charter schemes really are and that the traditional public school teachers care more about their children.
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Reasons not considered in the Article- maybe it has something to do with the professed love of the most hated Cabinet Secretary in this Administration for their schools of choice (pun intended). The solutions proposed are doozies – on the one hand take school sites away and increase crowding in traditional schools, on the other generous tax credits so even less revenue is available to fund traditional schools. The equivalent of “Why are you mad at me for taking your sandwich? I was hungry.”
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Chalkbeat the fake news charter publication is reporting that Michigan and specifically the city of Detroit is about to layoff hundreds of principals and …way to go Devos
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