West Virginia is shuttering its public schools. Seven schools will close in the next few years due to declining enrollment, joining the 53 that closed in the past five years. An additional 25 public schools are proposed or approved to close.
These numbers are not small in the context of West Virginia. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were only 643 public schools with enrollment in the state in 2023-2024.
For a while, the reason for closure was population decline. Between 2015 and 2020, enrollment dropped by 23,522 students—a sharp decline in the tiny state. In 2021, however, the drop seemed to level off—the public schools lost only 1,100 students the next year. It looked as if declines might be slowing down.
And then school privatization began.
In 2019, the legislature passed a charter law. Three charter schools were allowed to open as pilot schools under the control of districts. Greed kicked in before any districts took that option to see if the pilot worked. The for-profit operators, especially Ohio’s ACCEL, swooped in to lobby. In 2021, the legislature expanded the number of charters to ten a year, not including online charter schools, which they also approved. The authority to approve them was shifted from school districts to a politically appointed state board.
Six charter schools were rapidly approved, five of which are open.
Three of those five are run by for-profit corporations. In 2023-2024, those three for-profit-run charters enrolled 87% of the charter school students in the state.
Charter schools in West Virginia operate on the “money follows the child” system, depleting school district budgets. That money accounts for a whopping 99% of state per-pupil funding, even though most charter students (70%) attend low-cost, low-quality online schools run by for-profits. If that were not enough, this fall, the West Virginia legislature passed a law allowing charter schools to access the state building fund—giving them their own privileged funding stream.
To add insult to injury to the state’s struggling public schools, the U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Cardona, awarded $12.2 million to the state’s charter board to open new charter schools or expand existing ones in West Virginia.
Over $905,000 was given to open a “classical” academy run by the notorious for-profit ACCEL. ACCEL already operates two of the state’s five charter schools. The new school will be operated on a sweeps contract, violating 2022 Charter School Program (CSP) regulations. Meanwhile, three existing schools would be given CSP funds to expand. “Sweep contracts,” common in the for-profit operator world, sweep all of the nonprofit charter school’s funding to the for-profit operator, and then the for-profit runs all school operations.
I registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education. There has been no response.
The legislature’s attack on democratically governed public schools did not end with charter schools. In 2022, the same year that the law to expand charter schools was enacted, the state passed a voucher law called the Hope Scholarship, heralded by Ed Choice as one of the most expansive voucher laws in the country. That law gives vouchers to fund homeschooling, private schooling, tutoring, and “enrichment” activities for students who do not attend a public or charter school.
The scholarship is worth 100% of the average per-pupil state funding. There are no income limits. Beginning in 2026, any student, including a private school student or home-schooled student who has never attended public school, can apply.
In 2023-2024, West Virginians used a voucher. In 2024-2025, the number jumped to 10,000.
Let’s do the math.
During the 2021-2022 school year, there were 252,830 students in public schools. That was the year before charters opened and the voucher law was passed. In 2023-2024, that number dropped to 243,560.
Just when West Virginia enrollment had begun to stabilize, 2,277 students were siphoned off along with funding to charter schools, and 6,000 students received vouchers. In West Virginia, privatization through charter schools and vouchers is now the primary source of public school enrollment and funding decline.
As charter schools continue to expand, thanks in part to the federal Charter School Program, and vouchers become accessible to 100% of students in the state, public school closings, especially those in rural areas, will accelerate.
For the right-wing Libertarians who run education policy for the Republican Party, this is not a bug; this is the main feature. As I noted in my recent piece in the Progressive, the “school choice movement “has always been a classic bait-and-switch swindle: Charter schools were the bait for vouchers, and vouchers the lure for public acceptance of market-based schooling.” The ultimate objective is to end district public schools, shifting the responsibility and cost of schooling to parents. West Virginia is well on the path. Your state may be next.
Carol Burris, Ed.D. is the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education and the Network for Public Education Action. She served as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in NY from 2000-2015. Carol received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University.
In 2010, she was recognized by The School Administrators Association of New York State as the Outstanding Educator of the Year, and in 2013 she was recognized by the National Association of Secondary School Principals as the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Carol serves as a Fellow of the National Education Policy Center.
