PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Enrollment in Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools was up sharply last year, resulting in a heftier price tag for local districts, according to a new report.
The report, issued Thursday by advocacy nonprofit Children First, said Pennsylvania has more students in cyber charters than any other state. However, the report questioned state oversight of cyber charters.
“We are the cyber charter capital of the nation, measured in terms of student enrollment,” said ML Wernecke, the report’s author and the director of Children First’s Pennsylvania Charter Performance Center.
Enrollment in Pennsylvania’s online charters jumped 59% last year during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the report. And all 14 of Pennsylvania’s cyber charters score below the state average in reading and math, Wernecke said at a virtual news briefing.
Pennsylvania’s cyber charters get paid by local districts at the same per-pupil rate as brick-and-mortar charters do, Wernecke said. However: “The preponderance of research shows that costs in a virtual environment are 25% to 30% below an in-person environment,” she said.
Pennsylvania’s cyber charter funding system doesn’t make sense, Democratic Philadelphia State Rep. Jordan Harris said at the briefing. “Even as a school choice supporter, I do not understand why cyber charter schools get the same amount of money as brick-and-mortar charter schools,” he said.
The executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, Lenny McAllister, took issue with the report’s findings. “Singling out public cyber charter schools, when we have experienced shortcomings throughout public education for decades — especially when concerning the families that [disproportionately] flock to charter schools — is myopic,” McAllister said in a statement. “The recommendations of the report are not the solution and follow the typical narrative: ‘We must fix (i.e., decrease) funding for cyber charter schools.’”
McAllister added, “Many of the proposals proposed for ‘charter school accountability’ are also ones that anti-school choice proponents do not want to apply to school district schools that have failed communities for generations.”
Montgomery County State Rep. Joe Ciresi, a Democrat, has sponsored a bill to overhaul how charters are regulated and funded. “Every one of these increases our property taxes. And the biggest thing we hear as legislators is ‘What are we doing about property tax reform?’ This will reform it.”
Charter reform has perennially stalled in the state legislature. State House Education Committee chair Curtis Sonney, a Republican, said he was frustrated that for years Pennsylvania charter reform has failed to reach the finish line.