The Students Left Behind: Charter Growth and the Hollowing Out of Texas Public Schools

In Texas cities, roughly 1 in 6 public school students now attends a charter school. Statewide, nearly half a million students have moved into charters over the past 25 years, a 40-fold increase from the 12,000 who enrolled in the first charter campuses in 1998.

Those are the students we can count. Texas does not require private schools to report enrollment to the state. The NCES conducts a voluntary survey every two years, but response rates are spotty and small religious schools often don’t participate. The legislature has pushed Education Savings Account bills in recent sessions that would route public dollars to private institutions with no reporting obligations at all. The charter numbers in this report capture the measurable half of the school-choice picture. The unmeasurable half may be just as large.

What’s clear from the data we do have: traditional public school districts in Texas’s biggest cities are shrinking, the students who remain are increasingly low-income, and the state’s test scores have fallen from among the best in the nation to below average. These trends have multiple causes, and no single policy explains all of them. But they’re all moving in the same direction.

For the funding mechanics behind these enrollment shifts, see Where Did the Money Go?, the companion piece to this report.

Charter enrollment has grown 40-fold in 25 years

When Texas authorized charter schools in 1995, the idea was modest: small, innovative alternatives that would push traditional schools to improve. The first charters opened in 1998 with about 12,000 students statewide. By 2023, that number was nearly 484,000, across more than a thousand campuses.

That 8.7 percent statewide figure understates the reality in cities. In Texas’s large urban centers, charter schools now enroll roughly 1 in 6 students. In Travis County, home to Austin, the charter share hit 16.8 percent in 2023, up from 2.6 percent in 2005. Rural charter penetration remains below 4 percent. Charter schools are overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon, and the cities where they’re growing fastest are the same ones losing the most traditional enrollment.

While charters grow, the traditional districts they draw from are shrinking.

The big city districts are losing students

San Antonio ISD has lost 27 percent of its students since its 1988 peak. Fort Worth ISD, 19 percent since 2016. Austin ISD, 16 percent since its 2012 peak. Houston, down 15 percent since 2016. Dallas, down 15 percent since 2001. These aren’t small fluctuations. For a district the size of Houston ISD, that’s 32,000 fewer students, enough to fill 40 schools.

Texas’s total K-12 enrollment has actually grown over this period, from 4.3 million to 5.5 million. The state’s population is booming. So urban enrollment losses don’t mean fewer students in Texas. They mean students are going somewhere else: suburbs, charters, private schools, neighboring districts. Not all of it is charter competition. Rising housing costs push families out of city centers. Demographic patterns shift. But for the urban ISDs, the cause matters less than the effect. Fewer students means less state funding. Fixed costs for buildings, buses, and administration don’t shrink proportionally.

Who’s choosing charters, and who’s staying behind

Here’s where the data complicates the easy narrative. If charters were siphoning off affluent families, you’d expect their student bodies to be wealthier than traditional schools. The opposite is true. In 2023, 70 percent of Texas charter students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, compared to 61 percent in traditional schools.

Networks like KIPP, IDEA, Harmony, and YES Prep deliberately locate in low-income neighborhoods. The charter sector isn’t pulling wealthy students out of public schools. It’s offering low-income families an alternative, and those families are choosing it in growing numbers.

That doesn’t erase the financial pressure on traditional districts. A student who leaves takes per-pupil funding regardless of income. But the demographic picture is more nuanced than “rich families flee, poor families stay.” Both systems are increasingly serving the same population. The question is which one is resourced to do it well.

Charter quality is strikingly bimodal. Of 178 charter operators rated by TEA in 2023-24, 17.4 percent earned an A, compared to 9.5 percent of 1,020 traditional ISDs. But 16.3 percent of charters earned an F, compared to just 1.2 percent of ISDs. The best charter networks consistently outperform surrounding districts. The long tail of underperforming charters serves some of the most vulnerable students in the state. For families, choosing a charter is less a safe bet than a roll of the dice with unusually high stakes.

The students who remain are increasingly low-income

Three in five Texas public school students now qualify as economically disadvantaged. That’s 3.4 million children.

Some of this reflects demography. Texas’s population growth has been concentrated in lower-income communities, and a 2010 federal eligibility expansion inflated the numbers (which is why both Texas and national rates jump around 2012). But the gap between Texas and the national average has widened from 5.4 points in 2006 to 13.6 points in 2023.

The stakes are highest for the students who stay. In 2023-24, Hispanic students made up 53 percent of Texas’s high school enrollment but accounted for 65 percent of all dropouts. Black students were 13 percent of enrollment and 20 percent of dropouts. White and Asian students dropped out at less than half their proportional rate. The students who face the greatest risk of leaving school without a diploma are the same students the traditional system is supposed to help most.

The scores followed the money down

In 2011, Texas 8th graders scored 290 on the NAEP math exam. That was 7.6 points above the national average, 10th in the country.

By 2024, they scored 269. That’s 2.8 points below the national average. A 21-point drop, roughly two grade levels of learning lost.

The decline isn’t limited to math. Texas 4th graders in reading scored 218.7 in 2005, nearly matching the national average. By 2024, they’d fallen to 211.9, 2.4 points below the national figure and the lowest Texas reading score on record. In 2024, Texas ranked 35th out of 51 jurisdictions in 8th grade math, behind states like Missouri, Kentucky, and Hawaii.

To see how unusual this decline is, compare Texas to peer states with similar size and demographics. In 2011, Texas led every major state by a wide margin. California, Florida, and New York all scored below the national average. By 2024, Texas had converged with the pack, falling 21 points while California gained 1 point and New York dropped only 10.

The national trend is also downward, especially after COVID. But Texas has fallen faster than any comparable state. There’s no single answer. COVID learning loss hit Texas hard, and the state’s inconsistent approach to remote instruction didn’t help. A growing English Language Learner population changes the composition of test-takers. A well-documented teacher shortage, exacerbated post-pandemic, means more classrooms with underqualified instructors.

All of those are real factors. But they don’t fully explain why Texas went from outperforming the national average by 7.6 points to underperforming it by 2.8, a swing of over 10 points relative to the rest of the country. Florida, which has a similar demographic profile and also embraced school choice, shows an even steeper post-2019 decline. Something structural is happening in large states that aggressively expanded choice without proportionally increasing funding.

These trends are all happening at once: rising charter enrollment, shrinking urban districts, an increasingly low-income student body, declining test scores. The data shows correlation, not causation. COVID, teacher shortages, demographic change, and curriculum shifts all contributed independently of school-choice dynamics.

But the structural tension is real. Each student who leaves a traditional district takes per-pupil funding while the district’s fixed costs remain. The students who stay in traditional public schools are disproportionately low-income, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, and disproportionately in need of the services that budget cuts erode first: counselors, special education aides, librarians, after-school programs.

The policy question isn’t whether charters work for the students who attend them. KIPP Houston and IDEA in the Rio Grande Valley have shown they can. The question is whether the system as a whole is designed to serve the 91 percent of Texas students who remain in traditional schools, or whether those students are absorbing the cost of a transition that nobody planned for.

The data can’t prove that school choice caused the decline. But it can show that all the pressures point in the same direction, and that the students with the fewest options are absorbing the most cost.