Same Sector, 54 Points Apart

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Academy of Dover Charter School^↗ posted a 1.1% chronic absenteeism rate in 2024-25. Five students out of 461 missed more than 10% of the school year. Across Wilmington, Great Oaks Charter School^↗ posted 54.9%. More than half its students were chronically absent.

Both are Delaware charter schools. Both draw from the same state accountability framework, where chronic absenteeism is tracked as a reporting metric, according to The Education Trust's Delaware chronic absenteeism policy scan. The 53.8 percentage-point gap between them is larger than the entire range of chronic absenteeism across Delaware's 22 traditional districts, where the spread from lowest to highest is 22.6 points.

This is not a sector that performs well or poorly. It is a sector that performs both, simultaneously, at extremes that traditional districts never reach in either direction.

The measurement problem

How you summarize this bifurcation determines the conclusion.

The unweighted mean chronic absenteeism rate across Delaware's 16 charter schools with 2025 data is 17.6%, compared to 15.3% for 22 traditional districts. By that measure, charters perform worse.

The median tells the opposite story. The charter median is 11.5%. The traditional district median is 15.7%. The typical charter school has lower chronic absenteeism than the typical traditional district.

Weight by enrollment and the gap widens further. The student-weighted charter rate is 11.2%, because the largest charters, Newark Charter^↗ (3,114 students, 7.0% rate), Odyssey Charter^↗ (2,375 students, 7.9%), and MOT Charter^↗ (1,414 students, 6.6%), are among the best-attended schools in the state. The student-weighted traditional rate is 17.2%. On a per-student basis, a randomly chosen charter school student is substantially less likely to be chronically absent than a randomly chosen traditional district student.

The mean is distorted by four small schools that enroll 1,317 students combined, less than 10% of charter enrollment, but post rates above 30%.

Who the extremes serve

Eight charter schools posted chronic absenteeism rates below 10% in 2025, including five below 8%. Their combined enrollment is 10,043 students.

At the other end, four charters exceeded 30%: East Side Charter^↗ (35.1%, 484 students), Freire Charter School Wilmington^↗ (36.6%, 522 students), Positive Outcomes Charter School^↗ (44.1%, 127 students), and Great Oaks^↗ (54.9%, 184 students). These four schools enroll 1,317 students.

The demographics are not subtle. Great Oaks serves 157 Black students out of 184 total, with 113 classified as economically disadvantaged. Its Black students posted a 59.2% chronic absenteeism rate. Its economically disadvantaged students: 61.1%. The school also reports that 36% of students receive special education services, 15% were previously incarcerated, 10% are current or expecting parents, and 5% are in foster care or experiencing homelessness, according to testimony during the school's 2023 charter renewal hearing.

Edison Charter^↗, by contrast, enrolls 563 Black students out of 588 total and posted a 2.5% rate. East Side Charter enrolls 454 Black students out of 484 and posted 35.1%. The charters with the worst attendance rates are not distinguished by the demographics of their students. They are distinguished by the intensity of needs their students bring through the door.

The charter sector is usually about twice as dispersed

The volatility is not new. Since 2015, the standard deviation of chronic absenteeism rates across charter schools has averaged 13.8 percentage points. Among traditional districts, it has averaged 6.8. The charter sector was more dispersed in nine of the 10 years with data, and the gap widened during and after COVID.

In 2025, charter SD stood at 16.6 percentage points versus 6.1 for traditional districts. The interquartile range tells a similar story: 21 points for charters versus 8 for traditional districts. This is not a pattern that emerged from COVID. It is a structural feature of a sector where individual school missions, enrollment practices, and student populations vary far more than they do across geographically bounded districts. That mechanism is suggestive context: the data show the spread, but do not by themselves prove which school-level factors caused it.

Great Oaks: accountability, attrition, and a 55% rate

Great Oaks opened in 2016 with 232 students and grew to 467 by 2018. Chronic absenteeism never dropped below 25%. The state placed the school on formal review in September 2022, when its rate hit 65.7%.

By the time the Charter School Accountability Committee considered renewal in December 2023, Great Oaks had reduced chronic absenteeism to 38.8% and cut its enrollment to 258. The committee voted to renew with 16 conditions, including minimum enrollment targets and biweekly meetings with the Department of Education. Executive Director LaRetha Odumosu told Delaware Public Media: "Last year, there were 22 conditions and we were an entirely new team. This year, I don't think there's [any condition] that we won't be able to meet."

The 2025 data complicates that narrative. Great Oaks' rate rebounded to 54.9%, its second-highest ever, even as enrollment fell further to 184, a 60.6% decline from its 2018 peak. With fewer students, each absence carries more statistical weight. But the absolute picture is stark: roughly 101 of 184 students were chronically absent.

Three cliffs that need scrutiny

Academy of Dover fell from 23.9% to 1.1% in a single year. Early College High School at Del State^↗ went from 18.4% to 2.2%. Edison fell from 18.5% to 2.6%. These are not incremental improvements. They are collapses in the chronic rate, each larger than the total improvement most districts achieved over three years of recovery.

One-year drops of that magnitude at small schools raise a measurement question. At Academy of Dover, the shift from 23.9% to 1.1% means roughly 105 students who would have been classified as chronically absent at the prior year's rate were not. A change in how absences are counted, a shift in the school calendar, or a new attendance-tracking system could produce that pattern. So could a genuine breakthrough in student engagement. Those are competing explanations; the data cannot distinguish among them. Academy of Dover's rate had been declining steadily from its COVID peak of 33.3% in 2021, so the direction of the trend is consistent, even if the final year's magnitude is unusual.

Edison's trajectory shows a similar pattern: 33.9% in 2023, 18.5% in 2024, then 2.6% in 2025. The improvement accelerated each year, but the final drop, from nearly one in five to fewer than one in 40, is extraordinary for a school that still enrolls 588 students.

What reporting from renewal hearings reveals

The charter renewal process in Delaware provides an unusual window into these schools. Delaware law allows charter schools to be renewed for successive five-year terms, and renewal reviews examine academic and operational performance; chronic absenteeism is part of the public accountability context tracked for Delaware schools. 14 Del. C. §514 describes the five-year renewal cycle, and The Education Trust's Delaware scan notes the state's chronic-absenteeism reporting metric.

"When we talk about charter schools being put together for the underserved, that's what you're doing." Kendall Massett, Delaware Charter Schools Network, at the Great Oaks renewal hearing

That framing captures the tension. The charter schools with the worst attendance data are often the ones most explicitly designed to serve students who struggled in traditional settings. Positive Outcomes Charter School in Camden serves 127 students in grades 7-12 with a 9:1 student-teacher ratio. Its chronic absenteeism rate has exceeded 20% every year since 2016 and topped 40% in four of the last five years. The school's stated mission is to serve students whose individuality and individual needs must be addressed, according to its 2022-23 annual report. The link between that mission and absenteeism is suggestive context, not direct proof of why students missed school.

Freire Charter School Wilmington, a Philadelphia-based network school serving predominantly Black students in Wilmington, hit 70.1% chronic absenteeism in 2022. The school's 2023-24 annual report acknowledges that attendance had dropped sharply since COVID and notes that only 40 students attended 90% or more of school that year. In response, the board approved a lower threshold of 20 absences for retaining students, a policy that ties continued enrollment to attendance.

The sector-level number is real. It is also useless.

Eleven of 16 charter schools, enrolling 11,620 students, post chronic absenteeism rates below the state average. Five, enrolling 1,760 students, are above it. The five above-average charters include three schools explicitly designed to serve students with high barriers to attendance: Great Oaks (special education, justice-involved), Positive Outcomes (alternative setting), and East Side (high-poverty Wilmington).

The charter sector's mean rate of 17.6% is an arithmetic fact. It captures a real thing: the simple average across entities. But as a description of charter school performance, it obscures more than it reveals. It treats a 3,114-student school with a 7.0% rate the same as a 127-student school with a 44.1% rate. It collapses a 53.8-point range into a single number.

The student-weighted rate of 11.2% is equally real. It says that a student who happens to attend a charter school in Delaware is, on average, attending at a far higher rate than a student in a traditional district. That finding holds in every year since 2015. Whether it reflects selection effects, school culture, enrollment practices, or some combination is unresourced by attendance data alone.

Delaware's charter sector does not have one chronic absenteeism pattern. It has four schools with severe chronic absenteeism problems, eight schools below 10%, and four more in between. Sector-level statistics flatten that distinction into a talking point, whichever direction you want the talking point to go.

The next renewal cycle will test the state's accountability framework directly. It approved Great Oaks with 16 conditions at a 38.8% rate, then watched it rebound to 54.9%. The framework needs to distinguish between schools that need more time and schools that need a fundamentally different approach. So far, it has not shown it can.

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

Freire Charter School Wilmington - EdTribune DE - Delaware Education Data