With the addition of 104 schools and 49,174 students this fall, California’s charter schools grew 10 percent to serve 519,000 students, or 8.4 percent of the state’s 6.2 million K-12 students, the California Charter Schools Association announced Thursday. The Los Angeles region had the largest growth, with 45 new charters opening.
The 1,130 charter schools are the most in the nation. Despite the substantial growth in schools this year, the charter schools association said that 50,000 students statewide were on a wait list for a charter school. Last year, 29 charter schools closed.
Jed Wallace, president and CEO of the association, predicted that the equalization of funding between school districts and charter schools under the state’s new school finance system, the Local Control Funding Formula, will spur further expansion of charter schools (see previous EdSource Today analysis of the impact).
“Over the next several years, I think we will continue to see significant additional momentum to what has already been a very robust growth picture for charter schools in California,” Wallace said in a statement.
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