I was present in the very beginnings of the charter school movement. I advocated on their behalf. I and many others said that charter schools would be better than public schools because they would be more successful (because they would be free of bureaucracy), they would be more accountable (because their charter would be revoked if they weren’t successful), they would “save” the neediest students, and they would save money (because they wouldn’t have all that administrative bloat).

That was the mid-1980s. Now, more than 35 years later, we know that none of those promises were kept. The charter lobby has fought to avoid accountability; charters pay their administrators more than public schools; charters demand the same funding as public schools; the most successful charters avoid the neediest students; and–aside from charters that choose their students with care–charters are not more successful than public schools, and many are far worse. Charters open and close like day lilies.

This week, the National Center of Charter School Accountability, a project of NPE, published Charter School Reckoning: Part II Disillusionment, written by Carol Burris. This is the second part in a three-part comprehensive report on charter schools entitled Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Dissolution, and Cost.

Its central argument is that a once-promising idea—charter schools as laboratories of innovation—has been steadily weakened by state laws that prioritize rapid expansion and less regulation over school quality and necessary oversight. Those policy and legislative shifts have produced predictable results: fraud, mismanagement, profiteering, abrupt closures, and significant charter churn. The report connects the above instances with the weaknesses in state charter laws and regulations that enable both bad practices and criminal activity. 

As part of the investigation, the NPE team scanned news reports and government investigative audits published between September 2023 and September 2025 and identified $858,000,000 in tax dollars lost due to theft, fraud, and/or gross mismanagement.

The report contrasts the original aspirations of the charter movement with today’s reality, shaped in large part by the intense lobbying of powerful corporate charter chains and trade organizations. It also examines areas that have received far too little attention, including the role of authorizers and the structure and accountability of charter-school governing boards.

It concludes with ten recommendations that, taken together, would bring democratic governance to the schools, open schools based on need and community input, and restore the founding vision of charter schools as nimble, community-driven, teacher-led laboratories grounded in equity and public purpose.

This new report can be found here.

Part I of Charter Reckoning: Decline can be found here.