1. How Many Charter Schools and Students Are There?

Public charter schools currently serve 3.7 million students in 8,000 schools and campuses. During the 2021-22 school year, charter schools enrolled 7.4% of all public school students, up from 6.8% in 2019-20. Since the 2005-06 school year, the number of charter schools and campuses has more than doubled, and charter school enrollment has more than tripled.

Although the charter sector continues to grow steadily, the growth rate for both schools and students began to slow during the 2015-16 school year, except for the 2018-19 and 2020-21 school years (Table 1.1). The lower growth rate is in part the result of having more charter schools in operation while having roughly the same number of new schools opening every year. Mathematically speaking, a consistent growth rate becomes more difficult when the number of schools increases. The 2020-21 school year was an important exception, where we saw a significant increase in enrollment driven in part by an increase in virtual school enrollment. Specifically, charter school enrollment saw a 7% increase from 2019-20 to 2020-21, the largest since the 2015-16 school year. Table 1.4 demonstrates this pandemic-related shift. The National Alliance's two enrollment reports, “Voting with Their Feet: A State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends” and "Changing Course: Public School Enrollment Shifts During the Pandemic," analyzed student enrollment trends during the pandemic in more details.

At the end of the 2020-21 school year, 118 schools had closed for a closure rate of 1.5%. Over the last decade, the average rate of charter school closures per year is 4%. During this period, only 5% of new schools closed in their first year of operation, typically because of facility issues or low enrollment. The National Alliance reviews charter school records and examines them to determine whether any changes were a result of changes to administrative reporting, school consolidation, or an actual school closure. In 2020-2021, we conducted an analysis of the reasons charter schools closed in 2018-19. With 69% of recent closures accounted for, the main reasons for school closings are low academic performance, low enrollment, or financial issues, which are usually closely related to enrollment.

According to the 2021-22 school year data, 43 states, as well as the District of Columbia (DC), Puerto Rico (PR), and Guam (GU) have open charter schools, while forty-five states (plus DC, PR, GU) have charter school laws. (West Virginia and Kentucky had laws but no charter schools.) Between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, the number of charter schools and campuses increased in 25 states and jurisdictions (54%), decreased in 4 (9%), and remained the same in 17 (37%).

The number of school openings dipped slightly from 328 in 2020-21 to 291 in 2021-22. Notably, Texas saw a large bump in openings, with 58 new charter schools or campus openings in 2021-22 – 20 percent of all openings.

A handful of states dominate the charter sector when it comes to student enrollment. Five of them—California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and New York—account for more than half of all charter school enrollment nationwide. California has the largest charter school sector—almost 1 in 5 charter school students in the United States attend a charter school in California. Arizona, however, is the state with the largest share of charter school enrollment relative to its overall population. One in 5 public school students in Arizona attends a charter school.

Given that charter school enrollment declined for the first time for the 2021-22 school year, we examined potential reasons for this. Table 1.4 makes a compelling case that the drop in overall enrollment may be attributable to virtual charter school enrollment changes. First, the 2020-21 school year saw a major jump in charter enrollment, which was due to an influx of virtual charter school students in a few states during the pandemic. However, as schools began to reopen in the 2021-22 school year, more than 40,000 students, mostly in Oklahoma, left the virtual charter school sector. Even though the brick-and-mortar charter school enrollment increased, this virtual shift was enough to decrease charter school enrollment for this year. The National Alliance's newest enrollment report, "Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends," found that, in the 42 states studied, charter school enrollment is increasing again from 2021-22 to 2022-23 by 2%, accounting for more than 72,000 students, while district school enrollment remained flat.

As a reporting standard, the National Alliance typically uses the nuanced “schools and campuses” language to capture the on-the-ground experiences of students, families, and educators more accurately. This language allows us to depict the growing charter community more accurately. When calculating new or closed schools, it is important to include new or closed campuses to capture the growth or contraction in the charter movement, but it may also complicate the accounting of individual schools. To understand why this might be the case, please check out the 2020 Charter School Campus Report.