Pennsylvania has 14 Cybercharters, which are very profitable to their owners. A new book reviews the outcomes of Cybercharters as compared to brick-and-mortar schools. Attending a Cybercharter has negative effects.
The following appeared in the Keystone Center for Charter Change, which is sponsored by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.
Cyber versus Brick and Mortar: Achievement, Attainment, and Postsecondary Outcomes in Pennsylvania Charter High Schools
MIT Press by Sarah A. Cordes, Temple University, February 6, 2023 Abstract: The charter school sector has expanded beyond brick-and-mortar schools to cyber schools, where enrollment grew almost tenfold between 2015 and 2020. While a large literature documents the effects of charter schools on test scores, fewer studies explore impacts on attainment or postsecondary outcomes and there is almost no work exploring the consequences of cyber charter enrollment for these outcomes. In this paper, I examine the impacts of Pennsylvania’s charter high schools on student attendance, achievement, graduation, and postsecondary enrollment, distinguishing the impacts of brick-and-mortar from cyber schools. I find that brick-and-mortar charters have no or positive effects across outcomes, and that effects are concentrated in urban districts and among Black and economically disadvantaged students.
Click here for more.
By contrast, attending a cyber charter is associated with almost universally worse outcomes, with little evidence of heterogeneity. Students who enroll in a cyber charter at the beginning of 9th grade are 9.5 percentage points (pps) less likely to graduate, 16.8 pps less likely to enroll in college, and 15.2 pps less likely to persist in a postsecondary institution beyond one semester. These results suggest that additional regulation and oversight of cyber charter schools is warranted and also bring into question the efficacy of online education.
The state’s Cybercharters, as listed on the PA Dept of Education website:
21st Century Cyber CS
Achievement House CS
Agora Cyber CS
ASPIRA Bilingual Cyber CS
Central PA Digital Learning Foundation CS
Commonwealth Charter Academy CS
Esperanza Cyber CS
Insight PA Cyber CS
Pennsylvania Cyber CS
Pennsylvania Distance Learning CS
Pennsylvania Leadership CS
Pennsylvania Virtual CS
Reach Cyber CS
Susq-Cyber CS
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Every year we read about the untenable costs of cyber charter schools with no resolution to the problem because the corrupt state legislature refuses to address it. Cyber charters are grossly overpaid for the poor job they do, and taxpayers must repeatedly pay for the poor outcomes. In 2020-2021 the people of Pennsylvania paid over $1 billion to cyber charters due to pandemic. Cyber charter schools are highly inefficient and ineffective. The commonwealth needs responsible leadership that will finally address what is a rigged fiscal boondoggle. https://www.pacharterchange.org/2022/08/23/the-negative-fiscal-impact-of-cyber-charter-school-expansion-in-pennsylvania-due-to-covid-19
The correct response is to get rid of private contractors except for very niche needs.
Any time there’s a private, for-profit entity, or even a nominally non-profit that can turn around and subcontract with a for-profit, there will be corruption.
Campaign donations will be made to ensure companies get the contracts and once gotten, they make bigger donations to ensure more contracts and minimal oversight.
I teach college English composition, and in my department, there is pretty broad agreement that online ed is not the best for required classes.
My students are aware that even in the online classes that they choose to take and enjoy, they are missing out on a crucial part of the college experience: making friends with all different kinds of people, some who might be friends for life, maybe tilting at some political windmills together, and later, networking for jobs.
The social isolation of online education probably has even more severe consequences for K-12 students.
Even in high school, I could bear to be cut off from meeting with my friends for more than a week or two.
If you want to tell legislators something, tell them to stop letting hedge fund managers and trust fund babies, including through their BS foundations and astroturf groups, dictate public education policy. They are too often working for their own financial gain and their dictates are rarely helpful.
Seems to be the Repub way…keep them uneducated/under-educated, and so, easily to manipulate and control. Just like some of their parents.
So, online education during the pandemic causes “learning loss”, but online education in charter schools causes learning gain? Huh. I think some charter school supporters might need to take a class on basic, common sense logic.
The funny thing is (not really) during the pandemic regular brick & mortar teachers were forced to “go cyber”. Many teachers found this to be very frustrating. Teacher rightly thought they had to hold students to the same “brick & mortar” standards. The brick & mortar administrators expected the same high standards. But this reality is unattainable in online format and at a flip of the switch. That is why many teacher burned out or were completely overwhelmed. Cyber teaching is difficult. The expectations demand more than there are hours in the day. It takes a special person to tackle the challenge. There are concessions that need to be made. The biggest realization is that students don’t show up and don’t do the work. With that being said some students do thrive. But most students fail and fall behind quickly. Only about 10% really benefit from the experience. So of the millions ($)being spent only help 10% of students and the wasted remainder is pulled from the real public schools that actually educate students.
And do parents know best? No not in many cases. I’ve seen some parents do all the students work. Are they wacky at times? Yes, one even accused me of witchcraft.
July 31, 2013
Online learning can provide many benefits, but it is not of service to all who enroll. In Pennsylvania online learning finds itself at the intersection of education reform, societal changes, economic realities and political extremism. Specific problem areas are cyber charter school funding, approval, oversight and accountability.
The following essay, a work of opinion, is submitted by the author in response to a letter from cyber school teacher Pat Parris, titled “Support cyber schools, or Internet learners will be made second-class students,” published June 17.
Online learning can provide many benefits, but it is not of service to all who enroll. In Pennsylvania online learning finds itself at the intersection of education reform, societal changes, economic realities and political extremism. Specific problem areas are cyber charter school funding, approval, oversight and accountability.
State funding of cyber schools
The current funding process is devoid of any evaluation of value or quality. For example, regardless of the education services provided, but based on the cost of education in a student’s home district, taxpayers may pay from $6,405 to $16,390 for a non-special education student and $12,152 to $41,595 for a special education student to attend any of the cyber charter schools in the state. [Source: Pennsylvania Department of Education]
At the same time, the quality and value of education varies wildly from cyber charter school to cyber charter school.
Cyber charter schools vary in quality
The money that follows a student is the same regardless of the quality of education provided by the student’s school of choice. So a large school like Commonwealth Connections Cyber School costs the taxpayer in the home district the same as a small cyber charter school startup. Programs vary considerably from one cyber charter school to another. The current system does not take into consideration these substantial quality differences. In the current funding system, both of these cyber schools would receive the same funding. What incentive is there to innovate?
The goal is financial — to find ways to enroll more students by any means rather than to deliver an innovative, high-quality education. A slow-growth model develops a better-quality education for students that saves time and money in the long run. It is more difficult and costly to innovate during periods of rapid expansion.
It is puzzling that most cyber charter applications predict rapid growth. So success is not achieved through increased quality, but through growth in enrollment numbers alone. In many cyber charter schools, the focus morning, noon and night is “more students…more students” — except when the state’s Department of Education visits, and it is temporarily replaced by the school’s mission statement and goals.
Even more puzzling, there have been excellent cyber charter school startups that could not get the enrollment numbers they needed to remain sustainable. Allegheny IU’s STREAM Academy found itself in this situation. Based on background information, it took years in planning, research and innovation to develop its model even before enrolling any students. It had a solid core curriculum, but because it was created by educators (not entrepreneurs) quality education was deemed paramount to profits, and it is currently struggling to survive.
Cyber school enrollment incentives
One of the differences between a cyber charter school and a brick-and-mortar school is that the first person you encounter at a cyber school probably has a personal financial incentive to get you enrolled. You definitely don’t have that conflict of interest in any interactions with traditional public school employees. Who is looking out for the best interests of the child?
Another major problem is that prospective school choice candidates don’t have a good way to compare cyber school programs. They can look at the Adequate Yearly Progress report cards on the PDE site, but this is not widely known. All 16 cyber schools appear to be performing poorly, based on AYP data that shows none of the cyber charter schools making their annual goals.
Because there is no good way to evaluate the quality of instruction before choosing a cyber school, parents are left to rely on marketing and propaganda to persuade them. As competition for students gets more intense, more money is needed to sustain enrollment. This leads to deceptive advertising, but it also has a profound effect on the quality of teaching, because rigor is diluted to keep enrollment up.
One improvement to the funding system might be to have taxpayers pay one initial price based on a flat cyber school student rate. Then a factor could be assessed to apportion additional funds based on the value of education that school can typically provide. This would tend to tie costs to value.
Access to information
Many of the cyber charter schools post their board meeting minutes, but most of the important information is covered in the executive session. The Access to Information law does require access to some cyber charter school information, but access requires giving your name and may require copying costs. Getting internal information is not an easy task and is much more difficult than getting information from any public brick-and-mortar school. Access to information varies widely from one cyber charter school to another.
—
Brian Lutz is a retired cyber school teacher.
Even if charter cyber schools or charter schools were a viable alternative, why would we allow them to be run by a CEO without any training and level of understanding how to educate kids. All they are experts at doing is syphoning taxpayers money into private individuals under the guise of reform. Not only are the “craftiness” not related to education innovation, but management is farmed out to private firms that have no visibility or accountability to taxpayer oversight. The overpriced service provider uses its funds to lobby for more business and less oversight.
The poens in all this are the public tax dollars that follow the student that are paid in full regardless of quality of service rendered. What legitimate business model would ever be based on service and not tied to quality of service rendered? None. We are guaranteeing payment regardless of service rendered. This stinks.
Even if charter cyber schools or charter schools were a viable alternative, why would we allow them to be run by a CEO without any training and level of understanding how to educate kids. All they are experts at doing is syphoning taxpayers money into private individuals under the guise of reform. Not only are the “craftiness” not related to education innovation, but management is farmed out to private firms that have no visibility or accountability to taxpayer oversight. The overpriced service provider uses its funds to lobby for more business and less oversight.
The poens in all this are the public tax dollars that follow the student that are paid in full regardless of quality of service rendered. What legitimate business model would ever be based on service and not tied to quality of service rendered? None. We are guaranteeing payment regardless of service rendered. This stinks.
Even if charter cyber schools or charter schools were a viable alternative, why would we allow them to be run by a CEO without any training and level of understanding how to educate kids. All they are experts at doing is syphoning taxpayers money into private individuals under the guise of reform. Not only are the “craftiness” not related to education innovation, but management is farmed out to private firms that have no visibility or accountability to taxpayer oversight. The overpriced service provider uses its funds to lobby for more business and less oversight.
The poens in all this are the public tax dollars that follow the student that are paid in full regardless of quality of service rendered. What legitimate business model would ever be based on service and not tied to quality of service rendered? None. We are guaranteeing payment regardless of service rendered. This stinks.
Paying failing Cybercharters is about the same as paying for vouchers with no accountability at all
Over the course of 12-14 years I worked for four different cyber school. Two in outer Philadelphia suburbs and two inner city cyber schools. The ones in the city were all about buildings. Buying and or building and expanding. In the suburban schools non- profits were formed to own the buildings so its members could reap the rewards. In all the schools it was about growth. Quality of education was an after thought.
At all the schools I pretty much saw the same phenomenon. Midway into the 1st quarter nearly 50% would be failing. Maybe 10-15% would be in A or B range. So to put it bluntly 100% of tuition tax dollars are paying to educate about 10% of the students. So when this occurs as it always does a new grading scheme is implemented to pass most of the students. And some of the cyber schools even when students failed the reconfigured grades were slow to remove them from their rolls even when attendance was over 15 days missed. One school very creatively counted 3 days absences as 1 day missed. PDE was even aware of it and did nothing about it.
There was even a time when the schools portal to deliver lessons was down for a month because the CEO counted on his friend to design a portal to deliver lessons that the could market and sell and make the rich. When implemented it died on delivery even when they were warned that it wouldn’t work.
There was a time when several of the cyber schools were on a tear to set up centers all around the state. Some of them were ok but the ones in inner Pennsylvania cities were horrible. They would find a local “community organizer” and pay them to enroll students from the community. Usually black or Latino communities were the target. Several were stated in church basements packed with as many as 100 students. Students had access to lessons through the internet. They were provided computers to use in the center. If the computer broke they were penalized with having to use a slow computer. The lighting was poor and the urinals were rank with urine. No teachers were present except for an occasional visit. Eventually, due to poor performance most of these centers were shut down. But at some point it was very lucrative for the schools.
Enough for now but many also engaged in union busting techniques to prevent the unions from getting a foothold. Teachers suffered the consequences when associated with an attempt.
Back in mid 2000’s a Pa Representative was sounding the alarm on Pa Cyber Schools.
https://www.mcall.com/2010/08/21/a-decade-later-pennsylvania-cyber-schools-go-viral/
Pa Representative Karen Beyers –
“State Rep. Karen Beyer, R-Lehigh, still hopes legislators will adopt her 2006 bill that would set a statewide tuition rate for cyber charter schools, as well as subject them to sunshine laws, limit the amount of fund balances they are allowed to carry over, and restrict employees from sitting on their schools’ executive boards.”
She tried but Pa Republicans squashed her well intended initiatives. One of the schools I was at actually brought in Republican Candidates to speak to faculty. I believe this was illegal. Toomey even came in one time.
The board at one school was packed with friends and let CEO do as he/she pleased.