New Bedford - EdTribune MA - Massachusetts Education Data

One in 19 Massachusetts Students Now Attends a Charter School

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Massachusetts 2025-26 Enrollment.

The pandemic was supposed to be the great equalizer: every school in Massachusetts closed, every family improvised, every district lost students. It was not. Between 2019 and 2021, traditional public schools hemorrhaged 42,840 students, a 4.7% loss concentrated in a single catastrophic year. Charter schools, operating under the same health restrictions in the same communities, gained 2,674 students over the same period, a 6.1% increase.

Five years later, the gap has not closed. It has widened. Charter enrollment in 2025-26 stands at 48,472 students, up 11.0% from its 2019 baseline. Traditional enrollment sits at 852,018, down 6.2% and falling again after four years of fragile stabilization.

The cap that shapes everything

Massachusetts is not a state where charter schools can grow freely. Voters rejected Question 2 in 2016 by a 62-38 margin, preserving a cap that limits how many charter schools can open and how fast existing ones can expand. The sector has operated under that constraint ever since.

The result is visible in the numbers: the state had 66 charter entities in 2016, 71 in 2019, and 72 in 2026. Growth comes almost entirely from existing schools enrolling more students within their authorized limits, not from new schools opening. Charter share has climbed from 3.7% in 2016 to 4.6% in 2019 to 5.4% in 2026. Steady, but slow.

That 0.8 percentage point gain since 2019 is partly arithmetic. When the denominator shrinks (traditional schools losing students) while the numerator grows (charters adding them), share rises even without acceleration. But the charter sector did accelerate: it added 2,674 students during the two COVID years, then another 2,118 from 2021 to 2026, including 967 in 2024-25 alone.

The COVID fault line

The year that cracked the system open was 2020-21. Traditional schools lost 38,608 students in a single year, the largest one-year drop in the dataset. Charter schools gained 1,245 that same year, on top of the 1,429 they added the year before.

The asymmetry is striking because charter schools were subject to the same pandemic restrictions as traditional districts. What they offered was something structural: smaller school communities, more direct communication with families, and, in many cases, faster adaptation to remote instruction. Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has found that Massachusetts charter students gained approximately 41 additional days of learning in both reading and math compared to district school peers annually, according to the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association. That performance record likely gave families confidence to stay enrolled, or to join, even during the disruption.

Traditional schools partially stabilized from 2022 to 2025, clawing back 2,707 students over four years. Then 2025-26 erased it all: traditional enrollment dropped 15,800 in a single year, driven by falling immigration and the impact of federal enforcement actions on immigrant families. Chelsea^↗ Superintendent Almi Abeyta told WBUR she "never could have anticipated" losing 344 students, with families citing "cost of living and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent sightings" as reasons for leaving.

Charter schools, meanwhile, added just 358 students in 2025-26, their smallest annual gain in a decade. Both sectors felt the demographic headwinds. The difference is that charters are still above their pre-pandemic baseline while traditional schools sit 55,933 students below theirs.

Who charter schools serve

The demographic composition of the charter sector complicates the narrative that charters are drawing affluent families away from traditional schools. In 2025-26, 39.7% of charter students are Hispanic and 28.3% are Black. Only 22.2% are white. The traditional sector is the inverse: 52.4% white, 25.4% Hispanic, 9.4% Black.

Charter schools in Massachusetts disproportionately serve students of color, particularly in urban Gateway Cities like Springfield^↗, Lawrence^↗, Lynn^↗, and Boston^↗. Brookings Institution research has found that the charter cap particularly constrains expansion in these communities, where demand is highest and where charter school academic effects are largest: Boston charter middle school students show math gains of roughly 25% of a standard deviation annually, with effects "particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students."

The cap, supported by voters worried about the fiscal impact on traditional districts, most directly limits options for low-income Black and Hispanic families in the cities where charters are clustered.

Winners and losers within the sector

Not every charter school grew. The sector's 4,792-student net gain since 2019 masks considerable internal churn. Community Day Charter Public School - Prospect added 799 students, a 200% increase. Alma del Mar Charter School in New Bedford^↗ grew by 603 students, more than doubling its enrollment. Hampden Charter School of Science East, Benjamin Franklin Classical Charter Public, and Veritas Preparatory each added over 400.

On the other side, Roxbury Preparatory Charter lost 293 students, a 19.3% decline. Prospect Hill Academy Charter fell by 237 students (21.1%), and Foxborough Regional Charter dropped 219 (13.4%). Some of these losses reflect the same demographic pressures hitting traditional schools in the same neighborhoods.

20,900 on the outside

The most telling number in the charter story is not enrollment. It is the waitlist. As of March 2025, 64 of 72 charter schools reported waitlists totaling 32,024 entries, representing 20,900 unique students. Brooke Charter School alone had 3,016 applications for a school that enrolls 2,230.

Those 20,900 students represent unmet demand that the cap prevents from being filled. Whether the cap is good policy is a separate question from whether the demand is real. It is. The 2024-25 waitlist showed 21,120 unique students, essentially flat year over year, even as the state's overall enrollment fell.

What the traditional sector faces

The 245 traditional districts that lost enrollment between 2019 and 2026, out of 322 total, are not losing students primarily to charters. Charter enrollment grew by 4,792 over that period. Traditional enrollment fell by 55,933. The charter sector could not have absorbed that loss even if every waitlisted student had been admitted. The bulk of the decline reflects lower birth rates, outmigration from the state, shifting enrollment to private schools, and, most recently, the impact of federal immigration enforcement on immigrant families.

Boston alone accounts for 7,017 of the traditional sector's losses, a 13.6% decline that has prompted plans to close 14 school buildings by 2030. Only 77 of 322 traditional districts have recovered to their 2019 enrollment levels.

The charter divergence matters not because it caused the traditional sector's decline, but because it reveals something about the nature of that decline. Families with the strongest demand for alternatives found ways to access them. Families without options, in communities where the cap prevents new charters from opening, did not.

Meanwhile, 20,900 students sit on waitlists. Brooke Charter has 3,016 applications for 2,230 seats. Whatever Massachusetts decides about the cap, those families have already made their choice.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Four Years of Recovery, Gone in One

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Massachusetts 2025-26 Enrollment.

Massachusetts spent four years clawing back from the pandemic. The state added 4,467 students between 2021 and 2025, a recovery so slow it barely registered against a loss of 37,363. Then 2025-26 arrived and wiped out every one of those gains, dropping enrollment by 15,442 students to 900,490. The state now sits 10,975 students below even the COVID trough, at its lowest enrollment since 1995.

The second-largest single-year loss in 33 years of data did not land evenly. It concentrated in the state's gateway cities, where immigrant families have been leaving amid heightened federal enforcement. English learner enrollment, which had been growing by thousands per year, reversed course and fell by 6,889 students. Districts that had recovered are back underwater. Districts that never recovered sank deeper.

Below the floor

The trajectory is best understood in two acts. From 2015 through 2020, Massachusetts enrollment drifted downward at a rate of roughly 1,400 students per year, a gentle decline driven by falling birth rates and an aging population. COVID shattered that pattern, pulling 37,363 students out of the system in a single year and establishing a new floor at 911,465.

The recovery that followed was tepid. In 2022, the state added just 64 students. The next three years brought modest gains of 2,206, then 1,224, then 973, each smaller than the last. By 2025, the state had recovered only 12% of its COVID losses, one of the weakest recovery rates in New England.

The 2026 collapse of 15,442 is not just larger than the entire four-year recovery. It is 3.5 times the size of that recovery, leaving the state 10,975 students below a trough that was itself a generational low. Before 2021, Massachusetts had not enrolled fewer than 948,000 students since the mid-1990s. Now it is below 901,000.

Where 15,000 students went

The loss has two distinct signatures, and they point to different forces.

The first is an English learner exodus. The state lost 6,889 English learners in 2025-26, a 5.4% drop that reversed four years of post-COVID growth. EL enrollment had risen from 105,775 in 2021 to 127,673 in 2025, fueled by immigration and expanded identification. That trajectory broke sharply in 2026.

The districts where EL enrollment fell fastest are the same ones reporting the steepest overall losses. Boston^↗ lost 1,059 English learners, accounting for 63% of its total decline of 1,678 students. Framingham^↗ lost 380 EL students and 642 total. Brockton^↗ lost 304 EL students and 638 total. Chelsea^↗, Everett^↗, Lynn^↗, Lawrence^↗, Revere^↗, Marlborough^↗, and Milford^↗ all saw EL declines exceeding 200 students.

The second signature is broader. White enrollment fell by 14,256 students, a 3.0% decline that cannot be attributed to immigration enforcement. Affluent suburbs like Newton^↗ (-562), Wellesley^↗ (-510), and Lexington^↗ (-377) lost hundreds of students each, consistent with a longer-running contraction driven by declining birth rates and, in some communities, a post-pandemic shift toward private schools.

Separately, the number of students classified as economically disadvantaged fell by 15,252, a 4.0% drop. Because this category overlaps substantially with both EL and racial/ethnic groups, it reflects the same underlying departures rather than an independent trend.

The immigration enforcement factor

School leaders across Massachusetts have directly linked the enrollment drop to intensified federal immigration enforcement that began in January 2025.

"I never could have anticipated that we were going to lose 344 students." -- Chelsea Superintendent Almi Abeyta, WBUR, January 2026

Abeyta attributed departures to "cost of living and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent sightings," noting that families were seeking "states where there's less attention, in terms of less presence of ICE."

Framingham, which lost 642 students (7.0% of enrollment), eliminated 84 staff positions including a dozen ESL teachers. Superintendent Bob Tremblay told WBUR that the losses stemmed from "the fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, in the community...families that have left the country...to seek refuge elsewhere for fear of being deported."

"There is a level of fear that is hard to quantify but impossible to ignore." -- Lynn Superintendent Molly Cohen, Dorchester Reporter, March 2026

Lynn lost more than 600 students between January 2025 and January 2026, according to GBH reporting. The district faces a budget gap exceeding $7 million for fiscal year 2027.

The enrollment data alone cannot distinguish between families who left the country, families who moved to other states, families who pulled children from school out of fear, and students who were reclassified as English-proficient. Multiple patterns appear to be occurring simultaneously. What the data can confirm is that the sharpest losses are geographically concentrated in districts with the largest immigrant populations.

Gateway cities bear the weight

Massachusetts designates 26 midsize cities as "gateway cities," urban centers that have historically absorbed new immigrant populations. Fifteen of these cities appear in the enrollment data, and together they account for 36.1% of the statewide loss despite enrolling roughly a quarter of the state's students.

Boston^↗ alone lost 1,678 students, the largest absolute loss of any district and 10.9% of the statewide decline. Boston is now at an all-time low of 44,416 students across 33 years of data, down 3,696 from its 2021 count. The district has voted to close three additional schools by summer 2027 and plans to reduce its total building count to 95 by 2030.

Only Fall River^↗, among the 15 gateway cities tracked, gained students in 2026 (+95).

The majority that never came back

Of 379 districts with data in both 2021 and 2026, 215 now enroll fewer students than they did at the pandemic trough, 56.7% of the total. Another 43 districts had recovered above their 2021 levels by 2025 but fell back below in 2026, meaning the recovery they had achieved was entirely temporary.

One hundred districts never recovered at all. They have been below their 2021 trough in every year since, and 2026 pushed them further down. Eighty-five districts are at their all-time enrollment low in 2026, including Boston, Springfield^↗, New Bedford^↗, Plymouth^↗, Chicopee^↗, and Pittsfield^↗, all with 27 years of data.

The traditional public school sector absorbed nearly the entire loss. Traditional districts lost 15,800 students in 2026 while charter schools gained 358. The divergence is not new, but this year's magnitude is. Charter enrollment has grown steadily from 45,109 in 2020 to 48,472 in 2026, adding students every year while the traditional sector contracted.

The fiscal cascade

The enrollment drop translates directly into budget pressure. Massachusetts distributes state education aid through the Chapter 70 formula, which is driven in part by enrollment counts. Districts that lose students face reduced state allocations, even as fixed costs for facilities, transportation, and administration remain.

Chelsea, where 75% of the $150 million budget comes from state funding, faces a combined $14 million shortfall from underfunding and enrollment-driven cuts, according to school committee member Sarah Neville. Framingham anticipates a $9 million budget cut from losing 700 students. Boston Teachers Union President Erik Berg told the Dorchester Reporter that "it's not really possible for Massachusetts municipalities to make up this sudden, precipitous drop."

School leaders are requesting emergency funding from the state's $3 billion Fair Share Amendment fund to offset enrollment-driven losses, citing the precedent set during the pandemic.

Two clocks, one enrollment office

The 2026 enrollment drop has at least two components that operate on different timelines. The immigration-driven losses could stabilize or reverse depending on federal enforcement policy, the political climate, and whether departed families return. The birth-rate-driven decline is structural: Massachusetts kindergarten enrollment has fallen from 65,288 in 2020 to 60,871 in 2026, a 6.8% drop that reflects children who were never born. Those smaller cohorts will age through the system for the next 12 years.

Framingham is already cutting ESL teachers it spent years hiring. Chelsea is budgeting for 70 fewer educators. Boston plans to shutter three more schools by 2027. These are not projections. They are decisions being made right now in buildings that already feel half-empty. The four-year recovery narrative is over. The pandemic trough was not the bottom.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.