“Broken Promises’: A Chronicle of Charter School Failures

Given the recent approvals of four new charter schools by the State Board of Education this summer, we want to revisit the important research that has informed Texas AFT's continued insistence on a charter school moratorium in this state.

First, let's start with the national education policy think tank Network for Public Education (NPE), which has released many relevant and upsetting reports on charter school corruption scandals, as well as their subpar academic outcomes. In 2020, NPE released a report that comprehensively documented nearly twenty years of charter school closures across the country.

The report, Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter Schools from 1999-2017, was the first of its kind and examines not only the failure of the campuses but the number of students displaced by these closures. NPE was founded by Diane Ravitch, who was Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush and is an outspoken critic of education reform.

This report roughly parallels our almost 30-year experiment with charter schools in Texas. Charter schools began with the promise of being incubators for innovation that would positively inform policy for the state, but the data does not live up to this lofty claim. Instead, what has been created is a shadow system of semi-public education. These campuses have drawn away thousands of students and millions in funding from our local public schools.

We see frequent headlines of public school campus closures or consolidation due to under enrollment, and 20 percent of all state aid now flows to 8 percent of students on nearly 900 campuses. This is to say nothing of the lack of transparency and accountability of many charter operators to the communities they occupy.

Part of this public accountability is the relative ability of a campus to remain open and serve the students in its charge. The research shows that within the first three years, 18% of charters had closed, with many of those closures occurring within the first year. By the end of five years, 25% of charters had closed. By the ten-year mark, 40% of charters had closed.

Texas, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, features in the report. Our state makes the top ten lists of states with the highest percentage of closures in under five years and under ten years. The rate of closure was highest in states with some of the highest poverty cities, such as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Tuscon, Arizona.

A school closure can be deeply upsetting to students and parents and can create significant disruption in the lives of these communities. NPE reports that 867,000 students across the country have been left stranded due to a charter school closure. Lack of stability in the learning environment can negatively impact student success.

As mentioned above, we know the negative impacts are not just academic and emotional, there is a systems-level fiscal impact to supporting these campuses despite their failures to students. In one 2019 report, NPE estimates that the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program invested $1 billion of federal money in charters that never opened or failed. In Texas we know that all the taxpayer dollars that flow to the state as part of "recapture" flow straight back out to a charter school.

Charters supporters might argue that these closures are simply a part of the natural order of business in an education "market." But this is cold comfort to a parent who must seek out a new place for their student during the middle of the school year.

In 2023, the SBOE approved four new charter applications with an anticipated opening of 2024-2025. Two of those awardees, Heritage Classical Academy and NextGen Academy, have applied for a one-year extension before opening, possibly indicating a lack of preparedness

At a time when public school funding is woefully short of adequate in Texas, it is imperative that we ask whether we can afford to expand an expensive, parallel school system with such a high rate of failure.

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