The Broken Promise of the Charter School

The National Center for Charter School Accountability released a report detailing the broken promises and failures of the charter school idea. This report revealed that in only the first 6 months of 2025, 50 charter schools announced closures. All this while federal funding for charter schools has risen to $500 million every year. Most of the funding for charter schools from the federal government goes to schools that “later fail, misuse funds, or never open at all.” The report also expands on how the original promise of charter schools has been co-opted and then broken by for-profit interests and greed.

Charter schools siphon money from the public school system and have a myriad of flaws. Often they have opaque oversight protocols. The ways in which students are selected for or pushed out of charter schools is inequitable. And when they have been transparently reviewed, many of them have been discovered to have mismanaged funds. At the same time, when students enroll in charter schools, it diverts funding away from the public school system, which does have oversight protocols and can be democratically held accountable by the people. The same cannot be said for charter schools. As our public school system is suffering from lack of funding, it is important to assess that charter schools are part of the reason for that suffering.

NCCSA

Charter School Reckoning: Decline

By National Center for Charter School Accountability | via Network for Public Education