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A new report by the Network For Public Education looks at the rate of charter school closures across the country. Researchers for the group, which advocates for traditional public schools, identified what they described as an alarmingly high rate of closures among charter schools. In North Carolina, that rate was much lower than the country’s average.
Charter schools are publicly funded. They’re authorized by the state and run by nonprofit boards instead of school districts. Their advocates say closures can have some good outcomes — low-performing or poorly run schools are shut down, instead of being allowed to carry on.
I recently spoke to Carol Burris, executive director of the Network For Public Education and the author of the Network’s report on charter school closures. She says that frequent school closures pose challenges — school closures are often chaotic and abrupt and can disrupt learning for students.
Rather than look at the annual rate of charter closures across the country, the researchers tried to show the lifespan of the average charter school by grouping them into cohorts based on the year they opened, covering charters that opened between 1998 and 2022.
The researchers then looked at each cohort to see how many were still standing at the three-year mark, five-year mark, etc. They then took an average across all those cohorts to try and identify “failure rates.” Here’s what they found:
The researchers found that, on average, more than one in four charter schools close before year five. Looking out even more long-term, nearly half close before year 15 and around 55% close before year 20.
The results largely mirrored a similar report the group put out in 2020 — though it notes a few small decreases in the closure rates since then. Burris told me the decrease was too small to tell if it hints at a larger pattern. She noted many charter schools were able to benefit from pandemic emergency funding that may have helped them stay afloat longer during the COVID years.
So let’s talk about North Carolina — charter schools attract a lot of families. North Carolina now has 210 charter schools, with almost 145,000 students enrolled last year. A recent report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows growth in enrollment at North Carolina charter schools far outpaced the national average in the last five years — 24.3% compared to 11.6% nationally. That report showed a decline in North Carolina public school enrollment in that same period by about 3%. The report found Black and Hispanic students drove that charter school growth.
But are those schools staying open? Burris was able to pull the data for me. To compare that, she looked at the total percentage of charter schools that opened in North Carolina between 1998 and 2022 that wound up closing. That number was 22%. That’s far less than the national average — by comparison, 12,000 charter schools opened nationwide between 1998 and 2022, with 36% closed by 2022. Some states had closure rates as high as 50%, Burris said.
But, she also noted that schools that did close often closed early — 51% of the charter schools that closed by 2022 did so in the first five years.
North Carolina’s General Assembly lifted the 100-school limit on charter schools in 2011. Burris speculated that the lower overall rate might be because, while North Carolina has seen rapid growth in its charter schools, much of that growth has occurred later than in other states.
Charter school advocates say closures are often a sign that the oversight system works. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction reported last year that there was a smaller proportion of lower-performing charter schools compared to public schools. As EdNC reported, the state’s Office of Charter Schools Director Ashley Baquero attributed that in part to the state forcing the closure of lower-performing charters. The state has also closed charters because of management and/or financial problems.
The Network’s report finds a majority of closures nationwide are not academic-related. Additionally, the researchers tried to pinpoint how often charter schools closed abruptly — midyear or during the summer. They estimate the number to be roughly four in 10.
Not every nonprofit is allowed to start a school in North Carolina. The state’s charter school review board vets the academic and financial plans of groups wanting to start schools as part of the authorization process.
Burris argues that there are real consequences for what she calls taking a free-market approach to schools.
“The market works great for a Starbucks. It works great for, you know, a Walmart or, or as CVS,” she said. “But parents expect permanence when they enroll their child in school. Schools are human enterprises in which community is very important. Children make friends, children develop attachments to teachers and principals and bus drivers, and to have that suddenly yanked away from them is very disruptive.”
