Archived Information
The State of Charter Schools 2000 - Fourth-Year Report, January 2000
School Size
As in past years, charter schools continued to be small schools. In fact, a high percentage of charter schools enrolled fewer than 200 students. Newly created charter schools especially continued to enroll, on average, fewer students than other public schools. This tendency towards small school size may reflect a desire on the part of charter school founders and parents for structuring their schools in a way that enables them to provide intimate, nurturing school communities.
- Charter schools tend to enroll, on average, fewer students than all public schools. During the 1998-99 school year, the median number of students in charter schools was 137, compared to a median of 475 in all public schools.
- Similar to data reported in previous years, in 1998-99 more than 3 times as many charter schools as compared to other public schools enrolled fewer than 200 students (65 percent and 17 percent respectively). Nearly 4 times as many charter schools as compared to other public schools enrolled fewer than 100 students (35 percent and 9 percent respectively).
- Newly created charter schools were especially likely to be smaller schools than other public schools, with a median enrollment of 128. Charter schools that were pre-existing public schools had a median enrollment of 368, much closer to the median enrollment of all public schools.
- Only 8 percent of charter schools enrolled more than 600 students, as opposed to 35 percent of all public schools. And only 1 percent of charter schools enrolled more than 1,000 students, as compared to 11 percent of all public schools.
- Few newly created schools enrolled large numbers of students, with only 10 schools, slightly more than 1 percent, enrolling more than 1,000. Pre-existing public and all public schools each had approximately 10 percent of their schools enrolling more than 1,000 students. Since the Study's last report, the median size of newly created charter schools increased from 111 to 128.
Estimated School Scize for Charter Schools and All Public Schools in the 27 Charter States
NOTE: The third column called "Charter school sites" includes data for 1,046 charter schools and is based on 2 sources of data: (1) responses from 1,010 open charter schools and individual branches that responded to the survey and (2) enrollment data for 36 charter schools from state-level sources. The percentages in columns 4,5, and 6 for the different types of charter schools includes data on all 975 charter schools that respond to the survey; we were unable to obtain information on charter school creation status for the 36 charter schools for whom enrollment data was obtained from state-level sources.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data Survey, 1997-98.
Estimated Distribution of School Size for Charter Schools and All Public Schools
Student enrollment
Distribution of School Size
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