Cybercharters, especially the for-profit kind, have proven to be a huge scam. The largest in the nation, ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) in Ohio, went bankrupt last year, not because it wasn’t making money buy because the state uncharacteristically insisted on counting and getting refunds for phantom students.
Cybercharters produce poor results for students, no matter which measure you use, yet they are very profitable. The corporation gets full tuition without the overhead of brick-and-mortar schools.
Great business, lousy schools, with lots of money for advertising and lobbying.
No state has been worse than Pennsylvania when it comes to opening cybercharters and ignoring their poor performance and even criminality. The owner of the state’s largest cyber school, Nicholas Trombetta, was convicted of tax evasion when $8 million went missing but not held liable for the diversion of funds meant for educating students.
The state has authorized some 15 or 16 such virtual schools and none has ever met state standards. Real schools that had such dismal results would have been shuttered long ago. But those millions for lobbying legislators….
peter Greene says there is some hope that the reign of the failing cybercharters may be coming to an end. Maybe.
Ten of the state’s cybers are operating with expired charters.
Amazingly, a Bill was introduced in the legislature to end the scam.
“Several lawmakers in Harrisburg would like to put a stop to that.
”Senate Bill 34‘s prime sponsor is Judith Schwank of Berks County, a former dean at Delaware Valley College who’s been in the Senate since 2011. Her bill’s principle is pretty simple– if a district has its own in-house virtual school, it does not have to pay for a student to attend an outside cyber. If a family pulls a student from Hypothetical High and decides that instead of Hypothetical’s own cyber school they want to send Junior to, say, K12 cyber school, then the family has to pay the bill– not the school district.
““It’s crazy,” said State Sen. Schwank, of the fees districts pay to cyber charters. “It’s not based on actual delivery of educational programming.””
Operators of cybercharters say it’s unfair to hold them accountable for actually delivering educational services. Why not let the scam continue?
We willlearn soon enough whether the Pennsylvania legislature dares to hold the cybercharters accountable. Sadly that probably depends on the operators’ generosity to members of the legislature.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m not sure I understand this. Why wouldn’t the out-of-town cybercharters just be replaced by local, district-run cybercharters and then families and taxpayers would instead be ripped off by their own district instead?
LikeLike
I think the help is that cyber school will be more closely monitored by the local district. At least that is the way my principal explained it. That, of course, depends upon the school district.
What I find crazy is that one of the special ed teachers that I work with had to write an IEP for a kid in cyber that they have never met and And how was the cyber really supposed to meet any accomodations?
LikeLike
The goal is to remove the profit motive.
LikeLike
The cybercharters are entrenched in PA and OH. Both states have huge scandals and prosecutions and it just continues.
The state auditor in PA has been screaming about this for 5 years – report after report- and there’s no real regulation.
Ed reform is market-based. They have an ideological belief that the market will close the schools. Well, “schools”. Markets will close this publicly-funded racket.
I think they’re also stymied by the fact that so many ed reform leaders promoted “online learning”. They never, ever contradict or question Jeb Bush and cheap online learning replacing schools and teachers for lower and middle class students is what he lobbies for. Go look at the Florida “course choice” they all promote. Apparently none of them read what’s offered. It’s the same cheap garbage from the same two companies they sell everywhere.
Interestingly (and hopefully) my son’s public school has pulled back from promoting online courses, despite the lock-step echo chamber marketing campaign, so hopefully the sales pitch is failing, faced with the reality of the thing. If we can’t discredit their bad ideas at least we can limit the spread, and damage.
LikeLike
CREDO is out with a new report on the performance of Ohio charter schools, including on-line schools.
The report is a methodological and conceptual hot mess but it is not kind to on-line schools…surprise, surprise, surprise.
Lots of charts and claims about statistical fictions such as “days of learning” lost or gained.
Click to access Charter_School_Performance_in_Ohio_Final.pdf
LikeLike
Pennsylvania school districts paid $454,000,000 to cyber schools in 2016-2017. Another way to express this is to say that the public school students lost this sum to a failed, fraudulent bunch of cyber schools. Taxpayers should contact their representatives to complain about the waste of public resources on cyber instruction. They should urge representatives to pull the plug on this reckless, wasteful scheme. They should watch the vote very carefully, and any legislators that support the continued fleecing of taxpayers should be voted out at the next election cycle. BTW I sent copies of this post to family members in Pennsylvania including some that are teachers. It is long overdue to stop this charade.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The union should organize a phone bank and call registered voters and urge people to contact representatives. A lot of people complaining about the same issue will help to put public officials on notice that they are being watched.
LikeLike
failed fraudulent fleecing: exactly
LikeLike
Not only close them but take back all the public money that flowed into that scam even if it means confiscating everything the owners of the cyber charters have including their clothing, and if the public money has not been returned 100-percent, put those owners on chain gangs repairing potholes in roads across the country. They can live in tent cities and eat oatmeal and water.
LikeLike
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to leverage a tax incentive championed by President Donald Trump to launch a five-fold expansion of charter schools in the state.
Some 250 Florida communities could be candidates for the new charter schools under the DeSantis plan.”
Last week was the big voucher push, this week is the big charter push.
Too bad none of the publicly-paid employees in state government offer anything to public school families.
Nothing. It’s as if the public schools in the state don’t exist, which I think is deliberate. Completely taken for granted as voters and constituents. The assumption must be we’ll keep paying these people although they return absolutely no value to public school families and students. I think that’s an arrogant assumption, but we’ll see.
They put a HUGE thumb on the scale with the constant promotion of charters and private schools and the complete neglect and contempt for public schools. They can tell themselves this is “markets” but it’s political marketing. They promote their preferred schools over the schools our children are in and that’s why we never see any benefits flow to public schools from ed reform. And we’re paying THOUSANDS of these people. They contribute absolutely nothing of value to the vast majority of students, simply because those students attend the schools they oppose and hope to eradicate.
It’s brutally unfair to public school students and families, but the ideological objective makes just about anything worthwhile. A whole public system privatized! That’s worth throwing every student in an existing public school into the trash.
LikeLike
Privatization is not really a supply and demand relationship. Politicians backed by lots of dark money are a huge thumb on the scale. Florida is a perfect example of how pay to play is used to ignore the interests of those that believe in free, equitable public education.
LikeLike
Wait… if Pennsylvania closed charter schools, there might not be enough of them to receive Betsy’s hundreds of millions of dollars aimed at propping them up like she did in Michigan. Without the schools, the Arnold-funded centers at universities like Tulane’s ERA and MSU’s EPIC, the professors wouldn’t have enough to warrant grants.
LikeLike