Why did enrollment numbers at Arizona charter schools stop growing?

After a decade of significant growth, Arizona charter school enrollment hit a plateau in recent years, a trend experts attribute to a variety of factors.

Arizona’s publicly funded charter school system nearly doubled in size from 2010 to 2020, mostly by siphoning kids away from district public schools. Charter school enrollment grew by around 100,000 during that span while and public schools shrunk by 100,000, according to the Arizona Department of Education.

Glenn Farley, director of policy and research for the Arizona chapter of the Common Sense Institute, a nonpartisan free-enterprise think tank, said charter schools were appealing to parents largely because of academic success. However, charter school enrollment peaked in 2021 and has remained relatively flat since then.

Farley explained that the landscape changed after schools went to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and parents started looking at other learning models.

“We also saw sort of a pursuit and a growth of really novel instructional options that didn’t exist, frankly, prior to 2020. Microschools, homeschooling pods were irregular and for a small percentage of the population, but they grew very, very rapidly. And I think parents became reliant on them during the pandemic because those were really the only in-person options,” Farley said.

Farley said the stagnation in charter school enrollment is reflective of a larger trend.

“The largest district school class size was 2008. And district classrooms have shrunk ever since. All [public school] growth has come from the charter system … [but] charter classes in Arizona stopped growing after 2020,” he said.

Jake Logan, CEO of the Arizona Charter Schools Association, said declining birth rates have been a major factor in enrollment trends.

“Nationally, people are having less kids, and that means less kids in schools. And so, I think that’s probably the single biggest factor in a declining enrollment across the nation,” he said.

Why aren’t charter schools closing like public schools are?

Still, charter schools have been faring better than their district counterparts when it comes to enrollment numbers. With state funding tied to enrollment, many districts have been closing schools as they lose students.

Farley explained that charter schools are not facing the same challenges because district schools miscalculated their future infrastructure needs.

“Going back to that 2010 period, the state did not foresee that all future growth was going to be on the charter side. It anticipated that its traditional school systems were going to continue growing … so the result is that over the last decade and a half, going on two decades now, we’ve been building schools in space anticipating enrollment growth that has never materialized,” he said of district schools.

Are ESAs having an impact on charter school enrollment?

Farley said while some people may blame the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program on the charter school enrollment trend, the timing doesn’t add up. The program was started in 2011 for children with special needs and became universal in 2023, allowing any Arizona family to use taxpayer-funded vouchers for private school or homeschooling expenses if they don’t send their kids to public schools.

“The big decline in district enrollment and the end of growth in the charter system is about 2020-2021. Universal ESAs passed in Arizona in 2022 and became law effectively in Arizona around 2023. So, why does that timing matter? Look at how it all lines up. I don’t see ESAs as the cause of this. They’re really a response to this,” he said.

Data from the Center for the Future of Arizona appears to support Farley’s position. In the 2024-25 school year, public enrollment consisted of 86.1% of the state’s school-age children. In 2014-15, that percentage was 85.2%. This shows only a slight increase in the percentage of school-age students who aren’t enrolled in the public school system since ESAs were made universal.

How can Arizona charter school enrollment growth resume?

Farley said if Arizona charter schools want to grow, they have to make traditional schooling options look appealing and competitive.

Logan said Arizona has the largest percentage of charter schools in the country, which could be a pathway to reigniting growth.

“I think that we’ve really been innovators and really have offered a lot of different choices for families, whether it’s a low-income student or a student that really wants to focus on science. And I think that choice really resonated with families,” Logan said.

Funding for this journalism is made possible by the Arizona Local News Foundation.

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