Charter School Enrollment & Performance Before, During, and After the COVID19 Pandemic

Abstract Traditionally, across the United States, most students enroll in their neighborhood school. However, in recent decades, with the advent of a greater array of school options including charter schools and other forms of school choice, a growing share of students are pursuing alternative school options. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend. For instance, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, during the 2020-21 school year, charter school enrollment grew by seven percent which was the largest increase in the last decade.1 Few places are more emblematic of this growth than Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) and more generally the state of Tennessee which has seen the charter school landscape grow from a handful of charter schools in the early 2000s to 30 Nashville charter schools and about 120 charter schools statewide for the current academic year of 2022-23.2 Despite this growth, little is known about how families made enrollment choices either nationally or locally during the pandemic. Further, while it is clear students have generally experienced learning loss during the pandemic (Sass and Goldring, 2022),3,4 it is unknown whether this has differed for students across various school types, including charter schools, and how strategies to address the learning loss varied across school types. Finally, due to changing enrollment patterns during the pandemic, it is unclear whether the demographic makeup of the student populations across school types has changed in recent years. In this study, we propose a set of analyses of enrollment and performance trends of schools before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on differences across school sectors and student subgroups.