New Report Shows Pennsylvania’s Cyber Charter Schools Are Failing Black and Hispanic Students

From the Bucks County Beacon

Yet another study has been released that shows how cyber charter schools damage the education of Pennsylvania students and waste Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars.

There’s no question that for some students with particular academic and social challenges, cyber charters are a useful solution. But for the majority of students and their families, cyber charters are a bad deal. And that damage is felt disproportionately by certain groups of students in the commonwealth.

A 2019 study by Bryan Mann (University of Alabama) and David Baker (Penn State) looked at cyber charter data from 2002 (the year they became law in Pennsylvania) and 2014 found that after some initial cyber-enthusiasm, word began to spread that cyberschools did not educate very well. Wealthier communities backed away from cyber charters, but enrollment in poorer communities stayed up, meaning the communities that could least afford the loss of revenue for their public schools took the biggest hits. 

And Mann and Baker note that “a steady stream of recent, scientifically sound, national evaluations reveals that cyber charter students tend to score lower on year-end tests and also have lower growth in learning over time than regular public school students. The same is true in Pennsylvania, where there is even evidence of knowledge loss (negative growth scores) from 4th to 8th grade in reading and math, literature, algebra, and biology among many cyber charter students.”

Last year, research showed problems even beyond the actual years of schooling. “Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults,” a 2023 working paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, showed a correlation with several undesirable outcomes:

“Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor’s degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools.”

The study found that virtual charter attendance was associated with a lower likelihood of high school graduation or GED, lower likelihood of college enrollment, and a lower likelihood of employment up to six years after high school—and those employed made, on average, 17 percent less than students from public schools.

Cyber charters’ many issues have been well-documented. Academically, they fall far short of public schools. When the General Accounting Office studied them in 2022, they found a system of schools that resists oversight, presents “increased financial risks” to states, and produces poor student results. Even leaders in the charter school movement have found  “well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools” and called for a radical overhaul (more than once).

Pennsylvania, the cyber charter capital of the country, bears the greatest weight of cyber-failure. And a new report from Good Jobs First, “Pennsylvania Cyber Charter Schools Fail Black and Brown Students,” show where much of this failure lands while laying out the many problems of Pennsylvania cyber charter schools.

The one new thing here is showing that the failure lands disproportionately on Black and Hispanic students. Read the full article here.