Private School COVID-19 Permanent Closure Tracker: New Home, New Data

Due to its growing size and increasing visibility of the issue, we have moved the private school permanent closure tracker to its own, permanent page. We will try to update it every weekday by 5:30 pm ET.

The tracker page features summary information about permanent closures at least partially connected to COVID-19, and a link to the full list of schools and some other data we have collected but not summarized largely due to difficulty finding it for many schools.

We will be analyzing the data in further depth soon, but one thing to note right away: It appears to be private schools serving less‐​wealthy communities that tend to be the ones closing. We do not have direct measures of wealth, but these schools have much lower estimated tuition than the average private school: $7,575 versus roughly $12,000. (This is also half of the around $15,000 spent per student in public schools.) They also tend to have smaller shares of white students: 56 percent versus 67 percent.

Learn more by visiting—and bookmarking—the tracker’s new page!