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Charter schools fail at astounding rate, report says
October 5, 2022/
“The public school should be a stable institution in every community, always there for children and families,” said education historian Diane Ravitch. “Unfortunately, as this report shows, charter schools are inherently unstable. Charters fail for a variety of reasons, mainly because they are a market mechanism, like shoe stores or restaurants—here today, gone tomorrow.”
More than 850,000 students were displaced during a 28-year period from those schools closing, according to research from the Network for Public Education.
The Network for Public Education released a report on Thursday that shows charter schools across the United States failed half the time during a 28-year stretch and more than one quarter of them folded within the first five years.
The study, Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures from 1999-2017, also shows how initial investment in developing charter schools was often squandereed. Nearly $1 billion of the overall $4 billion given through the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program, “was given to schools that never opened as well as to many that were opened and then closed,” according to the research.
