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Miami-DadeDistrict vs chartereasy

District-run enrollment fell by 60,000 in nine years while charter enrollment rose by 24,000

Thesis

Between October 2016 and October 2025, enrollment in Miami-Dade's district-run regular schools fell from 291,298 to 231,607, a fifth. Charter schools grew from 62,902 to 86,913 over the same years, and their share of all public-school students rose from 17.6% to 27%. These are net changes in sector totals, not tracked transfers: the charter increase offsets about 40% of the district-run decline in the accounting. Other public programs fell by 114, leaving a total public-enrollment decline of 35,794. These totals cannot separate transfers, migration, births or movement into private schools.

Supporting findings

  • All public schools together: 357,288 → 321,494 (−10%). District-run regular: −59,691 (−20.5%). Charter: +24,011 (+38%). Every figure is the state's Survey 2 October membership; the federal CCD copy of the same count agrees exactly at 99% of school-years (1,533 pairs over the three CCD years loaded, 2018-19, 2022-23 and 2023-24).
  • The decline is not evenly spread: among 325 district-run schools open in both 2019-20 and 2025-26, the median school lost 16.7% of its students; 43% lost at least a fifth; 57 grew.
  • Middle schools fell fastest (−23.3% since 2019-20, median school −24.5%); high schools (−9.0%) and the few 6-12 and K-12 schools (−7.4%, −6.3%) least.
  • The kindergarten-to-grade-5 ratio, an indicator of the cohorts still to come, was 0.80 in 2025-26 against 0.85–0.88 in the four years before the pandemic: the entering class is a fifth smaller than the one leaving elementary school.

Reporting directions

  • Get birth, migration, scholarship-enrollment and student-transfer records to investigate the sources of the net enrollment decline.
  • Map charter openings against the district-run schools that lost the most; the events table lists Schools of Hope co-locations approved in 2026.
  • Ask the district for its own enrollment projections (the 2026-27 board book prints one- and two-year projections for 29 targeted schools).

Where the numbers are

Methodology & replication recipe — the queries and sources behind the findings above.