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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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More Americans have enrolled their children in charter schools in the years since the coronavirus pandemic upended education, according to new data—at a time when enrollment at traditional public schools is continuing to decline.
Enrollment at charter schools increased by 492,210 students (14.69 percent) nationwide from the 2019-2020 school year to the 2024-2025 school year, according to preliminary data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools that was provided to Newsweek. The nonprofit describes itself as "committed to advancing the charter school movement."
Charter schools are allowed to operate in almost all states and the District of Columbia. Like traditional public schools, they are tuition-free and publicly funded. However, they operate independently of other public schools under a contract, or charter, with the state or local government. This allows flexibility when it comes to curriculum and other standards.
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The data about the rise in enrollment at charter schools comes as public schools have seen enrollment figures decline since the pandemic, while school choice programs allowing families to use taxpayer-funded education money to send their children to private schools have proliferated in Republican-led states.
Enrollment at public schools fell from 50.8 million students in the fall of 2020 to 49.4 million in the falls of 2020 and 2021 before rising to 49.6 million in 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Total enrollment at public schools is projected to decrease by 5 percent by 2031, to 46.9 million students.
But enrollment at charter schools reached an all-time high this year, with 3.8 million students, according to the data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. It said the growth has been widespread, with 41 out of 43 states reporting an increase in enrollment at charter schools.
Starlee Coleman, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told Newsweek that the rise in enrollment at charter schools is down to several factors, including parents wanting a choice in their children's educational environment.
"Parents just have an expectation that they will have options in where their kid goes to school," Coleman said.
She said that other top reasons include safety and parents believing that public schools aren't challenging their children academically.
"For many families, when you ask them why they're choosing charter schools, the number one thing that they will tell you is safety," she said. "That happens across demographics. It happens across income, across race. Parents just do not view public schools as safe."
The second reason parents cite "is rigor, or academic standards," Coleman said. "They don't view their public school as rigorous enough."
Charter schools "hold kids to higher standards," she added. "You see that in outcomes, in terms of kids graduating from high school, going to college, being accepted into college, and then showing up and actually going to college."
But Carol Corbett Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education (NPE), an advocacy group seeking to preserve and strengthen the U.S. public school system, told Newsweek that the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools "continues to incorporate the enrollment surge in low-quality charter schools during the COVID years, when they report growth."
She said that "post-COVID, growth in charters has dramatically slowed. When measuring enrollment growth, we use the reliable and unbiased numbers provided by the National Center for Education Statistics. If you exclude the COVID surge, U.S charter enrollment between 2020-21 and 2023-24 (the last year for which we have official NCES data) has slowed to a 171,000 increase (PreK-12), a far cry from the significant increases in the past."
According to the NCES, enrollment at charter schools had more than doubled between 2010 and 2021, from 1.8 million to 3.7 million students.
She added: "We also worry that we are seeing most of that growth in mega-charters and experimental homeschool charters, which have accounted for California's growth.
"At a time of decreasing enrollment, shouldn't we focus on improving the schools we have, both district and charter, rather than opening and expanding charter schools that result in the closure of existing charter schools?"
A recently published report from the National Center for Charter School Accountability (NCCSA), a project of the NPE, said underperformance, low enrollment and issues with oversight has led to fewer charter schools opening and more closing even as federal funding for charter schools has increased significantly over the years, to $500 million annually.
A 2024 report from the NCCSA found almost half of the charter schools that closed from 2022 and 2024 did so because of insufficient enrollment. The latest report said that trend has continued into 2025, with more than half of the 50 charter schools that have closed this year citing low enrollment as the primary reason for their closure.
Go Deeper: Q&A with Starlee Coleman
What's the difference between a charter school and a traditional public school
Charter schools are public schools. So almost every state in the U.S. now allows charter schools. Charter schools are created as public school options within the public school setting that are managed by independent boards. So the main difference between a public charter school and a public school district school, which is what most people think of in the U.S. when they think of a public school, is who manages them. A school district always has an elected school board. Charter schools are overseen by independent boards, overwhelmingly, like nonprofit boards of directors that manage the oversight and then follow all or most of the same government rules related to public schools. So the financial transparency and accountability laws are the same, and it's in many cases stronger.
For charter schools, they follow the same academic rules and requirements. They follow good government rules, like open meetings, public records, all of those kinds of things. Think of the things that make a public school a public school: free, open to any student who wants to come, good government rules, graduation standards and requirements, curriculum requirements. All of that applies to charters.
What are the reasons that parents are sending their children to charter schools?
I think there's a cultural factor, and then I think there are practical factors. So I think the overriding cultural change that we have had, that has happened, and is currently happening still, is parents just have an expectation that they will have options in where their kid goes to school, right?
The old idea that we had was that your kid goes to school at the neighborhood school that the government assigns to you based on where you live. Parents today, especially parents of young children who are enrolling in school for the first time, they're not down with that. They don't agree with that. That's not the way they think about raising their kids.
If I had to pick an overriding reason why, that's why. People just expect choices now.
And then practical reasons. For many families, when you ask them why they're choosing charter schools, the number one thing that they will tell you is safety, that the school that their children is assigned to is just not safe. That happens across demographics. It happens across income, across race. Parents just do not view public schools as safe.
And then the second thing that they say is rigor, academic standards. They don't view their public school as rigorous enough. Or preparing their kid for what is next in life. So those are the two reasons. When parents are asked, that's what they say. So we believe them, and charters deliver on both of those points. Charters are objectively safer schools. When you look at data across the country, there are fewer behavior issues or unsafe situations happening on charter school campuses.
Charters are using nearly across the board, more rigorous curriculum. They hold kids to higher standards, and you see that both in outcomes, in terms of kids graduating from high school, going to college, you know, being accepted into college, and then showing up and actually going to college.
How many charter schools are there in the country at the moment? How has that number increased in recent years and what do you think the future holds?
Right now, there's a little over 8,150 campuses across the country. We see dozens, hundreds in some years, of new campuses open every school year. Obviously growth will not continue exponentially all the time, because there are fewer babies being born, and so at some point, growth for everyone will will level out because children will be settled in a place, but we don't see a slowdown, really, in the future.
The states where we're seeing more rapid growth right now for charters are the states that are experiencing an influx of population growth also. So like Florida, Texas, Arizona, those states continue to lead, and have been leading over the last many years in charter enrollment growth, and that's where the student population continues to grow.
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