In a paper released in August, Boston College professor Shaun Dougherty offered persuasive evidence that charter expansion had indeed come at the expense of the Catholic sector. Relying on data collected from over 25,000 K–12 institutions, the study calculated that between 1998 and 2020, an average of 3.5 percent of Catholic school students disenrolled within two years of a charter opening in the vicinity. Given the thin margins in Catholic education, those declines made full-on closures significantly more likely.