A reader offers this perspicacious view of Pennsylvania’s cybercharter industry. There are 16 of them in the state. The founders of two of the major cybercharters are currently under indictment for siphoning millions of dollars of public funds:
The reader writes:
“Running a cyber-charter in PA is as good as printing money. No oversight and a system that completely ignores the actual costs of the system. If the Commonwealth of PA went shopping for used cars the same way, it would walk onto the lot and tell the salesman, “Here’s twenty grand. Pick out any car for me that you want, and keep the change.”
Plus one of our State Senator’s wives is a proprietor of one of them located in Central Pennsylvania. As well as some of the members of the Corbett administration have connections to K12 Charter School and the other Virtual Charter Schools. Personally, I think those are conflicts of interest.
The cybercharters look state-specific but they’re really not. It’s more of a multi-state scam. There’s an amazing number of intra-state connections; funding and managers and the various offshoots that are really all the same operators with different divisions where they contract for services inside one set of companies.
If you pull on a string on a PA cybercharter, you end up in Ohio. Joe Biden’s brother’s Florida cybercharter began with White Hat people, in Ohio.
It’s not “PA”- it’s really PA, OH, FL, MI and Arizona. It’s one of the things that’s radically different about charters- the multi-state or national nature of the things. My local school district in OH can’t contract for students in PA, or set up an LLC and call it a “PA school” but charters can.
You could write a book. You’d really have to write a book to unravel the whole thing.
cybercharters… the cronies’ gift that keeps on giving. Money, Money, Money!!!