Will Pennsylvania Ever See Cyber Charter Reform, Or Will Taxpayers Continue To Get Soaked?

This month’s piece for the Bucks County Beacon looks at the ongoing attempts, renewed again this legislative session, to reform our lousy cyber funding system.

The markup on cybers is enormous, as many school districts had driven home when they set up their own in-house cyber-school options for the pandemic. 

In an op-ed for GoErie, Wattsburg Area School District Superintendent Kenneth Berlin noted that their in-house system cost them about $3,000 per student, but Insight PA Cyber Charter School, using the exact same platform, would be paid $13,118 per “regular” student and $23,587 per special education students (a strange kink in PA law makes special education students valuable “cash cows” for charter schools). 

A study in California found that taxpayers were wasting roughly $600 million per year, with cyber charters taking around a 100 percent markup on their actual costs. 

That’s because cyber charters are paid based on the per-pupil rate at the student’s “home” district. Pennsylvania cybers are paid by a formula that has nothing to do with their actual costs. Imagine your local public district saying, “We’d like to collect $50,000 per student from taxpayers, just because.” In April of 2016, State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a blistering report, dubbing PA charter law the “worst in the nation,” and nothing about the law has changed in the years since. 

The results are visible. 

Some cyber-charter chains are able to invest in profitable ventures such as real estate holdings. Commonwealth Charter Academy paid for a huge Jerrold the Bookworm float in a Philadelphia parade, and if you’re headed to see the Wilkes Barre/Scranton Penguins, you and your group can get tickets for the CCA Ice Level Lounge.  

In the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, Pennsylvania’s cyber-charters spent $35 million on marketing alone. Agora Cyber Charter spent $50,000 to sponsor Mummies of the World at the Carnegie Science Center. REACH spent $31,000 on air zooka blasters branded with the school logo. There’s the massive cyber-school fraud in the case of Nicholas Trombetta of Pennsylvania Cyber School, who was convicted of siphoning off $8 million of the tax dollars funneled to him from PA taxpayers. 

A 2019 study published in the American Journal of Education found that cyber schools hit poorer districts particularly hard.

Pennsylvania is a cyber charter haven. It may be our beautiful landscape, or it may be that this is a cyber-friendly state, an excellent place to make big money in the cyber charter racket. In 2021, cybers took in almost $1 billion taxpayer dollars.  

In short, a lot of money collected from taxpayers in order to pay for education is going to expenses that have nothing to do with education at all.

There’s plenty more. You can read the full article here.