For years, Pennsylvania has funded a large number of cybercharters. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer funding flows to cybercharters annually. For years, the state has known the very poor educational results of these online charter schools. Yet the state continues to fund them. Why?
PDE has released 2022-2023 school performance data
Here’s what those ubiquitous cyber charter ads (that your tax dollars pay for) don’t tell you:
Entries in red are 20 percentage points or more below statewide averages.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For years the waste of minds and funding, consumed by the testing complex have been known, yet the testing continues. For years the greatest waste of funding lost in the testing complex hasn’t been ended by charter ‘splainin, yet the strategy doesn’t change. For years the “know-that” about choice school strategy, hasn’t ended the greatest waste of funding, yet the complicity in the greatest waste of minds and funding continues. Time to change the strategy…
LikeLike
As Always it is a No Confidence Vote in the techno-fascist instruments created and manipulated by states to justify this destruction of Public Schools. But man oh man, these scores are in the toilet and headed in the wrong direction year after year. Math & Science profoundly alienated & amputated from the everyday life of our kids in most brick & mortar classrooms. Cyber Space Academies are just another strategic degree of separation inserted into the well-funded Lay Siege To Democracy campaign.
LikeLike
If the pandemic taught us anything about education, it is that online programming is an inadequate, subpar education. Cyber instruction falls short time and time again, but we keep sinking public money into it to satisfy the charter lobby. Corrupt politicians are complicit in this shakedown of public funds. We also need to stop importing bad cyber instruction into regular public schools as it offers the same dehumanizing, subpar education for our onsite public school students. Computers are useful tools that are helpful to students, but they are no replacement for a trained and certified human teacher, nor are they a replacement for actual books and texts that students can review repeatedly. Cyber education is largely junk education for most subjects and students. Its real value is for the tech. moguls that make out like bandits at the cost of a legitimate, thought provoking education for our youth.
LikeLike
I would add that my own experience with cyber teaching did not endear me to the medium. I was of little service to my best motivated students. I was of no service to students who were either unmotivated or cynical.
LikeLike
Cyber charters are the extreme example. There are too many teachers even in less severe settings than online, teachers who are back to in-person instruction, but were never able to stop cyber instruction. Competency Based Education (CBE) online platforms are constant, embedded, standardized testing, and they are not only replacing teaching with the teacher still in the room in places; they are being hyped by the usual powerful suspects, billionaires, people who worship the billionaires, people who work for the billionaires, people who work for the billionaires and then work for the Department of Education and then go back to working for the billionaires… I should’ve known a dozen years ago when they started closing school libraries and claiming e-books were the future. At the time, I worked for a techie principal who told me he thought YouTube videos would soon replace written communication altogether. Foolishness. CBE is another fool’s errand. Cyber charters are a fool’s errand repeatedly run.
LikeLike
Well said, At my grandson’s school there are no books, and the teachers do not teach very much. They mostly function like “game show hosts.”
LikeLike
That’s right. I regularly hear game show theme songs through the walls and halls from the classrooms adjacent to mine.
LikeLike