This morning the Network for Public Education released a new study called “Doomed to Fail” that examines charter school closures from 1998-2022. This is the first time that anyone has performed a comprehensive study of charter school failures.
The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?
Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools.
While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.
Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive.
Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.
Here are some of the key findings of the report:
-By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed
-By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.
-More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures
-Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%.
-The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.
-The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.
-Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.
-School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth..
The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And then there are the Charters who do not shutter but use their financially lucrative authority & arrangement to HARM students. Harming them developmentally, psychologically, intellectually & spiritually goes hand-in-hand with the greed, corruption & mismanagement.
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Kids In Prison Programs = KIPP…what a horrible “school”.
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Charter school fail for a variety of reasons. Part of the reason is that the market based assumptions on which they are based are flawed. They do not offer better service. In fact, the service they offer is generally redundant, not unique. Charter schools tend to be reductive since they often offer fewer options for students than most comprehensive public schools. The profit motive corrupts, and charter schools generally will not expand services to students in order to squeeze out more profit for investors. Charter schools unlike public schools have little attachment to the communities they serve. Public schools serve the needs of students of a given community, and they are transparent and accountable. An important mission of public schools is to teach civics and help prepare our young people to be responsible citizens. Charter schools bear no such responsibility. Young people and their needs are the main focus of public education, not investors.
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I hate to belabor a point, but here is yet another reason to provide financial support to the Network for Public Education.
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Thank you, Mark!!
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In the private for-profit sector, the failure rate for startups applies to charter schools.
I asked Google: Here’s the AI Overview answer.
The failure rate for startups is around 90%:
Some reasons why startups fail include:
And even private sector nonprofit charter schools, like all non-profits in the private sector have a high failure rate. I asked Google that too.
The failure rate for nonprofits varies depending on how you define failure, but generally, around 30% of nonprofits fail to exist after 10 years:
Nonprofits can fail for many reasons, including a lack of funding, structure, and strategies. Even well-funded nonprofits can fail due to unexpected events, like the COVID pandemic.
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