Recently, Republicans in Pennsylvania lambasted public schools for wasting money by setting up reserve funds for a rainy day. Meanwhile the State throws away hundreds of millions every year to pay for low-performing, unaccountable, profitable cyber charters.
Two Democratic legislators—Rep. Ismail “Izzy” Smith-Wade-El and Rep. Mike Sturla—wrote a rebuttal to the Republicans:
Republicans have criticized 12 school districts — including the School District of Lancaster, Penn Manor and Hempfield — for following normal procedures by making sure their general funds are healthy and able to support the many projects and upgrades all districts must contend with, especially in these difficult times.
The attack was inspired by an audit conducted by Pennsylvania Auditor General Timothy DeFoor….
In an interview with WITF, Auditor DeFoor questioned the need for school districts to maintain reserves at all, stating, “As far as putting money away for a rainy day, that’s great for a private individual such as ourselves, but not necessarily for a governmental entity.”
To embrace this view would be highly irresponsible. Fund balances are not recurring, so it would be inappropriate to use them for recurring expenses like salaries. This would lead many school districts to quickly go into the red. Additionally, any school district chief financial officer would attest to how one-time expenses come up all the time — and school districts must always be prepared for the worst. To suggest that districts should only be able to raise taxes if they have no fund balance goes against any solid financial principles.
The commonwealth itself, with the assistance of the GOP, recently added money into its rainy day fund, which at nearly $5 billion is the largest in state history. To turn around and criticize our local schools for saving for rainy days is simply hypocritical…
Currently, 447 out of 500 school districts have signed a resolution demanding commonsense charter school funding reform to ease some of the burden, yet none of the proposed bills to address the situation were ever brought up for a vote in the last legislative session when our colleagues across the aisle controlled the state House.
In the 2020-21 school year, Pennsylvanians spent more than $1 billion on students enrolled in cybercharter schools.
Tuition for an independent cybercharter is considerably higher than for an online education program offered by a school district. And these cybercharter schools charge highly inflated tuition rates for students who have special needs — allowing them to profit from students with disabilities at the cost of local taxpayers. What are these cybercharter companies doing with that extra taxpayer money? Research suggests that the money is spent on advertising, executive salaries, other administrative costs — and, according to Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based education research group, carrying high fund balances. This all comes at the expense of our friends and neighbors struggling to afford their homes. This is wrong.
We encourage our fellow state House members to join us in fighting for more accountability from our state’s charter and cybercharter schools by ensuring that there is a single statewide tuition rate for regular and special education students that matches tuition to the actual costs of educating students at home on a computer. We need to ensure that cyberschools — which do not have the same operating costs of our local brick-and-mortar public schools — are especially held accountable when it comes to matching tuition fees with the actual cost of educating their students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hear at Bob n Darlenes Real Good Flor-uh-duh School, we believe in putting away lots and lots of taxpayer money for Bob n Darlenes recreashunal expenses. We dont wont to be cawt short at a casino in Cabo, do we?
No matter what changes are recommended to alter the overpayments to cyber charters, the proposals hit a wall when they reach the legislature. People in Pennsylvania should understand that many GOP state legislators are not working for the betterment of Pennsylvania and its citizens. They are working for the charter lobby and in some cases themselves as some of them are invested in charter schools. Pennsylvanians need to vote out these consistently corrupt politicians in order to restore fiscal sanity to the commonwealth. Once charter schools get established, they become like ‘welfare queens’ that act as though they are entitled to their regular government handout. This attitude is not about improving education. It is about fleecing the taxpayers of Pennsylvania.
Welfare queens indeed!
Michigan is another state that makes the colossal mistake of funding online cyber schools at the same level as brick-and-mortar schools. But that may change. For the first time in 40 years, Democrats have majorities in both the House and Senate. They will likely support Governor Whitmer’s recommendation to lower state aid payments to these online operations. They may also support the State Board of Education’s call for greater financial disclosure by charter schools, including cybers.
It’s crystal clear that the “full funding” of charter cybers has no educational or fiscal justification. It is merely an offshoot of the libertarian dogma spouted by opponents of public education. With new political leadership in Michigan, the cyber school scam may come to a welcomed end.
Unfortunately, while Michigan may be headed in the right direction on cybers and other issues (including the withdrawal of a petition for vouchers), too many states continue to push cybers, vouchers (often disguised as “scholarships”), and other privatization schemes. Here’s hoping Pennsylvania and other states properly support their real public schools and teachers.
California has laws in place that require its more than 1,000 public school districts to hold money back in reserve for economic uncertainties. The public school districts have no choice. I don’t know about the other states.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4216
I should have added: Rich people don’t think about economic uncertainties and most of them never have enough wealth. Their greed will destory all of us if they are not stopped.
Apparently the Republican legislators in PA either don’t know or don’t care about the billion dollars Ohio wasted over ten years on the ECOT cyber charter experiment that was a total failure by every measure. The corrupt practices of ECOT finally resulted in Ohio trying to claw back money from them at which point they declared bankruptcy and just kept it anyway.
All the Cybercharters in Pa are very low performing.
As far as I know, there are no cyber charters that even rise to the level of being mediocre, let alone approach average. One would think that after seeing how “remote learning” went during the Covid epidemic they would have figured this out. Obviously, it’s all about diverting as much money as possible away from real public schools to burden them as much as possible, and, no surprise, using that for kickbacks to politicians in the form of campaign contributions. Talk about quid pro quo!