shutterstock_cyber school.jpg
(Shutterstock)
By Lawrence Feinberg
If it sometimes seems like "tuition-free" cyber charter ads are running non-stop, consider that in just one year your tax dollars paid for 19,298 local TV commercials for Agora Cyber Charter, just one of Pennsylvania's 13 cyber charters.
And far from being tuition-free, total cyber tuition paid by Pennsylvania taxpayers from 500 school districts for 2013, 2014 and 2015 was $393.5 million, $398.8 million and $436.1 million respectively.
Those commercials were very effective, especially if you were an executive at K12, Inc., a for-profit company contracted to manage the cyberschool. According to Agora's 2013 IRS filing, it paid $69.5 million that year to K12, Inc.
According to Morningstar, total executive compensation at K12 in 2013 was $21.37 million.
Not so effective for kids or taxpayers, though. What the ads don't tell you is that they are paid for using your school tax dollars instead of those funds being spent in classrooms, and that academic performance at every one of Pennsylvania's cyber charters has been consistently dismal.
While the state Department of Education considers a score of 70 to be passing, Agora's Pennsylvania School Performance Profile scores for 2013, 2014 and 2015 were 48.3, 42.4 & 46.4.
In fact, not one of Pennsylvania's cyber charters has achieved a passing score of 70 in any of the three years that the test has been in effect.
Additionally, most Pennsylvania cyber-charter schools never made adequate yearly progress during all the years (2005-2012) that the federal No Child Left Behind law was in effect.
While cyber-schools may be a great fit for some kids, overall they have been an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars drawn from all 500 school districts without any authorization by those districts.
Unlike brick-and-mortar charter schools which must be authorized by their local school district, cyber-charters were authorized, and are ostensibly overseen by the state Department of Education.
Even if the cyber's performance profile score is 50 points less than a school district, locally elected school boards have virtually no discretion when it comes to paying cyber tuition bills.
If they don't pay the cyber-school the Department of Education will draft their account.
These poor results are reflected in national studies. Stanford University reported that online schools have an "overwhelming negative impact," showing severe shortfalls in reading and math achievement.
The shortfall for most cyber students, they said, was equal to losing 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days in math during the typical 180-day school year.
In math it is as if they did not go to school at all.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a charter advocacy group based in Washington, said the findings were so troubling that the report should be "a call to action for authorizers and policymakers."
What can Pennsylvania policymakers do to improve the performance and accountability of our cyber charters?
Here are some possibilities for our legislators to consider as they return from summer break.
They could consider:
- Charter reform separately from brick and mortar charter school reform legislation. Charter reform has proven to be a very tough nut to crack. There seems to be increasing agreement that cyber education as presently configured is not working for most of our students or our taxpayers.
- Closing some of the most persistently underperforming cybers with scores in the 20s, 30s and 40s and have their students transfer to one of the better performing schools. One of the tenets of school choice is supposed to be that failing schools would be closed.
- Funding cyber education via a separate dedicated budget line instead of tuition payments from school districts. These schools are already authorized by the Department of Education, not by school boards.
- Providing the Department of Education with the staffing and resources needed to effectively oversee the cyber charters that they have authorized.
- Taking into account the recommendations of state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale's June 2012 special report
- Taking into account the recommendations of the Pennsylvania Special Education Funding Commission's December 2013 report that calls for using three funding categories based upon the intensity of services required to meet special education students' needs. In 2014-15 cyber charters reportedly
- Requiring all ads for cyber charters to clearly state that the ads are paid for using school tax dollars and to clearly state the cyber charter's SPP score and the fact that a score of 70 is considered passing.
- Creating a centralized marketing website at the Department of Education instead of having cyber charters spend tax dollars on ads. This site would link to the websites for each of the state's cyber schools.
A blog posting entitled "Can-policymakers-fix-what-ails-online-charter-schools? by Dara Zeehandelaar and Michael J. Petrilli recommended three strategies for improving online schools:
- Consider adopting performance-based funding for e-schools. When students complete courses successfully and demonstrate that they have mastered the expected competencies, cybers schools would get paid. This creates incentives for cybers to focus on what matters most--academic progress--while tempering their appetite for enrollment growth and the dollars tied to it. It would also encourage them to recruit students likely to succeed in an online environment.
- Policy makers should seek ways to improve the fit between students and e-schools. It seems that students selecting cyber-schools may be those least likely to succeed in a school format that requires independent learning, self-motivation, and self-regulation. Lawmakers could explore rules that exempt cyber schools from policies requiring all charters, virtual ones included, to accept every student who applies and instead allow cybers to operate more like magnet schools with admissions procedures and priorities.
- Policy makers should support online course choice, so that students interested in web-based learning can avail themselves of online options without enrolling full-time in a cyber charter. This might include encouraging students to use their own school districts' programs if their school district or intermediate unit offers cyber education.
Cyber-charters were intended to be a better alternative to traditional schools that were deemed as failing.
More than 10 years later, that has consistently proven not to be the case. We have spent over $1 billion in tax dollars on cyber tuition in Pennsylvania in just the past three years. Our students and taxpayers deserve better.
Lawrence A. Feinberg, of Ardmore, Pa., is serving in his seventeenth year as a school director in Haverford Township. He is the founder and a co-chairman of the Keystone State Education Coalition.