In 2020, one in three students in the U.S. attended a new public school created during the last three decades. A new Corporation-commissioned report provides a quantitative review of the number, geographic distribution, and characteristics of new public schools with implications for the broader education system
In 2020, one in three students in the U.S. attended a new public school created during the last three decades. The report New Schools in the United States: A Quantitative Review of Public Schools Opened During the Last Three Decades provides a quantitative review of the number, geographic distribution, and characteristics of new public schools, providing insights into the United States’ complex and dynamic education system. It serves as a starting point for future research and as a shared knowledge base for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners around new school creation, innovation, and systems change.
The education landscape today looks very different than it did 30 years ago. Toward the end of the 20th century, it was becoming increasingly clear that the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach to education in the United States was failing to prepare all learners for success in a rapidly changing world. This recognition spurred three decades of innovation, resulting in myriad new school models during that time.
Philanthropy played a catalyzing role in this process, often with the intention of leveraging new school models to demonstrate a new vision for learning, build demand among communities, and drive systems change. This has been the goal of grantmaking at Carnegie Corporation of New York, where support for personalized, student-centered learning models is complemented by a focus on the systemic conditions necessary to sustain them.
To surface comprehensive information about the number, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the new schools that have opened during the last three decades, the Corporation commissioned a report from MarGrady Research to fill that gap. I spoke with Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), to help deepen the field’s understanding of the scope of new school creation, explore the implications for the broader education system, and consider questions that the data raise.
Saskia Levy Thompson: Carnegie Corporation of New York has for more than 20 years invested in reimagining the student learning experience through new schools and new programs. To look at how our work relates to larger trends nationwide, we commissioned MarGrady Research to analyze publicly available data of new school creation over the last three decades, right up to the pandemic. Here is the headline: of the 93,502 public, elementary, and secondary schools that were operating in the 2019–20 school year, when Covid hit, 34 percent of them did not exist 30 years earlier. And those 31,912 new schools are serving nearly 17 million kids, or about a third of all those enrolled in public schools. Here in New York City, more than half of the schools in the 2019–20 school year had opened in the last 30 years.
In 2020, one in three students in the U.S. attended a new public school created during the last three decades. In New York City, 45 percent of all public school students were enrolled in a new school in 2020.
Robin Lake: That is wild! As a country we really need to get serious about finding novel solutions for kids and educators. Data like these represent an important opportunity to take stock of the role new schools have played in delivering innovation and results. It's so important that we keep trying to understand how growth and impact like that was achieved and assess the long-term results.
Levy Thompson: The data don’t indicate whether a school was created intentionally or for other reasons such as in response to student enrollment numbers. But there are some proxies. For example, one in five new schools is a charter school. Because charter schools go through an authorization process to open, we can generally assume they were designed in an intentional way. Across this analysis, a fair estimate is that at least half of the new schools were intentionally designed as an alternative to existing options. Can you unpack what it means to intentionally reimagine the learning experience at the school level as well as zoom out to talk about the implications at the district level?
Lake: Well, the charter movement idea was to focus on a student population that needs a solution, and propose how you will be accountable for results. They were not meant to be all things to all people. Going beyond charters, a lot of the drive from school districts for new schools was coherence. The idea was that schools are going to be better if they are really intentional about what they’re trying to achieve, if everybody in the building knows that is the goal. That meant some trial and error, because we don’t know exactly what kind of school is going to work for every kid. From a district strategy level, the idea was to get some diverse solutions out there — within the district, not within each school — to try them and do more of them if they were working.
Levy Thompson: We looked at school openings and school closures, and most of the schools that seem to track to enrollment growth were opened in the ‘90s. And then there’s this peak period at the very end of the 90s through the end of the 2000s. We start to see that a bigger proportion of new schools are charter schools, while also seeing the highest level of school closures simultaneous to new schools opening. In the last decade of the analysis, the pace of new school creation and of school closures both decrease in tandem and most of the new schools created are charter schools.
Lake: The first charter schools were very community-driven, and it was messy, driven by a burst of enthusiasm: “Hey, we can start our dream school, this is great!” But there was a pivot point where legislators asked about quality. There was a philanthropic decision in the early 2000s to invest most in the schools showing the greatest academic progress, that could prove results and replicate them. There was a lot of bipartisan support for that. People felt that this is a great opportunity for lower-income kids, let’s do more of it, let’s invest in high quality. It was a boom period.
In the early teens, the fast growth was definitely on the decline, for complicated reasons. There was political pushback in cities where there had been a lot of growth. The new schools were competing for space and staff and kids. That was a way to compete with the charter movement, or co-opt, or embrace it, by saying it shouldn’t matter what the school is called, let’s just have more of these autonomous, mission-driven opportunities for kids.
Where we are right now and where we might go is really interesting. Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve seen big demographic shifts starting to happen, and I don’t know where those are going. I think we are going to see a lot of new school growth by necessity in rural and suburban areas, as people are moving out of cities. We have already seen that enrollment decline in urban areas, and that is just death to new schools if we don’t think about it creatively, because it puts such financial strain on districts and makes the politics even harder.
Levy Thompson: Starting a new school is a massive undertaking. The thousands of new schools identified in this analysis represent a huge output of entrepreneurial energy on the part of educators across the country and a lot of lessons learned. Can those be marshaled to address some of the contracting enrollment trends we are seeing now that might require the merging and collapsing of schools?
Lake: Oh, absolutely. We actually know a lot about what works when you are opening new schools, how you build culture over time, and how you decrease the learning curve fast. But we also know that the key to a successful new school is a great leader, a great entrepreneurial thinker, somebody who can find the talent they need and pull off a vision. That is where I worry. Things are so hard in education right now. Superintendents are stressed, they are leaving the field, and that is going to trickle down to the principal level if we are not careful. I hear a lot of talk about people moving from education to other sectors, such as criminal justice or climate change, where they see opportunity to be entrepreneurial and put their talents to use.
Levy Thompson: The three years we’ve lived through have pushed people to think about how they can have the greatest impact for students. It strikes me that a lot of them are landing at narrow solutions rather than operating in this intersectional space that new school design represented. We weren’t trying to address curriculum, culture, capacity, assessment, and so on individually –– we saw it as an opportunity to braid all those things together and design backward.
Lake: I think there is a unique window coming out of the pandemic where people feel that replicating high-performing schools wasn’t always right, and that we can do better. The pandemic reminded us that teacher and student welfare really matter –– there is a real groundswell around mental health, racial healing and identity, and measures of academic success that are more connected to individualized pathways for kids to careers. Parents want it, there is demand for it, and teachers want to teach it. Let’s play with that and see where it takes us.
Levy Thompson: The data does show that new school creation is down at this moment when we face profoundly complex challenges, and where preexisting inequities have gone from yawning to gaping. We need transformation strategies. The data suggest that kind of work seems more likely within existing schools, not in something brand new. You are among the people looking at innovation in existing schools, with CRPE’s Canopy project. Do you have recommendations for how we can think about creating the conditions where change can happen at the school level?
Lake: Yes, but it is going to be tough. With the pods movement, teachers loved having smaller learning spaces, being more responsive to student needs, and focusing on relationship building. Parents and students loved the agency and ability to craft their own thing. One superintendent told me that he and his district want to continue that, but he is in this self-sealing inertia right now, constantly putting out fires. It is hard enough to just do the basics these days, much less innovate.
But the will is there, and that’s great. They just need a lot of help –– not only money, but in stabilizing staff to settle the constant churning. They also need ideas, and that is where Canopy and similar resources are helpful, pointing to exciting, innovative models that are happening right now in our public school system, documenting what’s making them work and their outcomes. The work of innovation is really about change management, after all, where districts and schools often struggle to shift something they have already embraced and solidified. It is a big deal.
Levy Thompson: What other research should we be thinking about?
Lake: Sometimes we have stopped researching when an idea wasn’t hot anymore. For example, with small schools in New York City, foundations stopped investing in that and we moved on. But one project showed that small schools were actually producing big results. I think we need to keep researching new schools. What kinds of muscle did they build, how did they behave during the pandemic? Were they quick to respond to needs because they were mission oriented, or not? Looking backward will help us look forward. We have now adopted an expanded vision of student success, and we can look for examples among new schools, designed with intentionality, where they are moving the needle on academic outcomes and much more.
What conditions allow a new school to be successful? There should be networks of innovative schools, of innovative superintendents, who want to do things differently, so that they can share information, see what they are missing, and push each other. We need new visions for what schools could look like that stretch us all beyond our prior aspirations. Of course, new measures of accountability need to go hand-in-hand with that.
Levy Thompson: Amazing. This conversation is clearly just the beginning. I can’t wait to see how this work might provoke other thoughts. Thanks so much.
To learn more about new school creation, read the report New Schools in the United States: A Quantitative Review of Public Schools Opened During the Last Three Decades and visit MarGrady Research to access the full data, explore new school creation in your local community with an interactive map, and more.
Saskia Levy Thompson is a program director within the Corporation's Education program, where she manages the New Designs to Advance Learning portfolio.
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