Is The Charter School Business Cooling?

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It’s just not exciting any more.

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A new study from the Network for Public Education argues that the charter school movement growth has stalled. Part I of Charter School Reckoning was released in July and depicts growth and decline of the movement.

In 1992, City Academy — the nation’s first charter school — opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. The school opened with just 53 students and was launched and run by experienced teachers looking to create an alternative for students who were not succeeding in a traditional setting. That teacher-led model was the original concept supported by union leader Albert Shanker. But within just a few years, Shanker backed away from charters, believing they had become something else.

As his wife Edith later explained, “Al became increasingly critical of charter schools as they moved further from their original intent. He warned that without well-crafted legislation and public oversight, business interests would hijack the charter school concept, ‘whose real aim is to smash public schools.’”

The federal Charter School Program was established under the Clinton administration, directing federal grants to the creation and expansion of charter schools. CSP funding has steadily increased to $440 million. At the same time, charter growth has slowed. Charter growth peaked in 2011-12 at over 750 schools. In the 2022-23 school year, according to the Common Core of Data (CCD) maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), under 200 new charters were opened. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools figures show a leveling of growth in the past seven years, though they also claim 327 new schools in 2022-23.

Charter schools continue to close, sometimes with little notice. According to the U.S. Department of Education, between 2011 and 2022, there were 2,315 charter school closures. The report notes that 50 charter schools closed in the first half of 2025.

The NPE report also addresses the stories of massive waiting lists for charter schools. During the June 6, 2025, Senate budget hearing, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called for a $60 million increase in the Charter Schools Program (CSP) stating, “We’ve got about a million students on charter school waiting lists.” The report replies:

The claim she invoked—a supposed national waiting list of one million students—can be traced back to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) in 2013. But that figure was debunked over a decade ago. In a 2014 policy brief titled Wait, Wait. Don’t Mislead Me, scholars Kevin Welner and Gary Miron of the National Education Policy Center identified at least nine reasons to be skeptical of such numbers. Among them: the absence of standardized data, duplicate counting, and self-reported, unaudited figures from charter operators themselves.

In Texas, where more detailed records of charter enrollment are kept, the 2025 report shows 120,913 seats worth of unfilled capacity in charter schools. One third of Texas charter schools have no waiting list at all.

Back in 2018, the Thomas Fordham Institute raised an alarm about charter school deserts— communities with no charter schools available at all. Charter schools are by and large businesses, and move into areas where there’s market demand for them, and not all areas have a sustainable market for charters. Charter schools also face competition from a new quarter; as voucher programs spread in many states, they pull families away from charter school as well as public schools.

Charter schools are now over thirty years old, not shiny or new, and the kind of explosive growth seen in that industry twenty years ago seems to have cooled.