As Sarah Cordes crunched the numbers, she was surprised by the sweeping trend of information she saw.
The Temple University associate professor, in a study published this summer, found that high school students at Pennsylvania's cyber charter schools weren't performing as well as traditional school district students.
Not just in one category but across the board.
From test scores to graduation rates to how likely they were to finish college in four years, the data showed that cyber charter high-schoolers consistently fared worse — even across geographies and demographic groups.
"Typically, you find certain types of schools work well for some students and don't work well for other students," Cordes said. "But here it was just these schools had worse outcomes regardless of the type of kid that was going there."
The 14 cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania teach about 60,000 students K-12, according to data as of last year from the state education department.
Pennsylvania leads the nation in cyber charter enrollments, according to an analysis by the PA Charter Performance Center — a watchdog group — using numbers from a few years prior.
Cordes' educational outcomes study used data from 2015-2020, but Pennsylvania cyber charters' comparative struggles existed before and persist, according to two Penn State University studies.
The first study, using data from 2002-2014, found that while cyber charters give families more choice, the positives are erased by "dubious academic benefits," wrote professors David Baker and Bryan Mann.
A second study, using data from 2021-2022, found "large and persistent gaps" in student achievement between cyber charters and rural school districts, especially, wrote co-author Karen Eppley, an assistant teaching professor in education.
CYBER CHARTERS RESPOND
There's a good reason their students seem to not be on par with district students, cyber leaders say: it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
They argue that students come to cyber school behind because their brick-and-mortar experience wasn't a good fit, said Agora Cyber Charter School CEO Rich Jensen.
"When you're looking at straight academic achievement scores, cyber schools will always be significantly lower, because a lot of times — like at Agora, and I take pride in this — we're their second chance, third chance, last chance," he said.
If an eighth grader comes to Agora reading at a fourth grade level and makes a year of progress, they're still reading four grade levels behind.
"It's very, very seldom that you have a student who is on track to be valedictorian wake up one morning and say, 'Huh, I think I'm going to go to a cyber charter school,'" Jensen said.
Cordes knows this argument — that students start cyber charter school with learning gaps — but she says her study controlled for students' previous achievement to get an accurate comparison. The study compared high schoolers of the same races and genders who went to the same middle schools.
State assessments, however, are only taken in person. That's a disadvantage to cyber students, said Tim Eller, chief branding and government relations officer at Commonwealth Charter Academy.
Adding frustration for school districts is that the students they lose to cyber charters take district tax money with them. State law requires the child's home district to fully pay their tuition.
Partial reimbursements and a tweak to tuition rates are coming next year after lawmakers took action this summer. But even with the funding changes, many districts will still lose millions of dollars a year. And that comes with "absolutely no control over the learning, the attendance, the participation of those children," said Colleen Friend, Carlisle Area School District superintendent.
Agora expects a 10-12 percent cut in its funding, Jensen said. The legislature's move was "a fair compromise" that was sensitive to districts' needs yet not lethal for cyber charters.
Eller wishes the funding model had been left alone, but "anti-cyber" voices were "louder" this time around.
A harsh reality for those voices, however, is that cyber charters are very popular. Commonwealth, for example, has a 94 percent return rate year after year, Eller said. Its families are happy.
"I'd seen the ads on Facebook, I'd heard the ads on the radio, and I'm like, 'that's cool,'" Commonwealth parent Amanda Price, who lives in the South Middleton School District, remembers thinking dismissively. "My only regret is that I waited."
WHAT ABOUT ACCOUNTABILITY?
Larry Feinberg, director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association's charter change advocacy, theorizes that not enough cyber charter students have the ideal situation, focus, discipline or family support to succeed online.
He also questions how much the Pennsylvania Department of Education — which authorizes cyber charters in the first place — is holding the schools accountable.
"But if a school district has these kinds of numbers, people will be screaming," Feinberg said of cyber charters' lower educational outcomes. "But cybers, it just goes on and on."
The Sentinel asked to speak with someone from the state education department about oversight and accountability of cyber charter schools. A spokesperson referred The Sentinel to its website instead and did not respond to questions by press deadline.
Cyber charter schools must prove long-term viability when applying to the department, according to its website, by demonstrating they'll have "sustainable support" from teachers, parents and students.
The department also conducts reviews of cyber charter schools before renewing them, and its periodic visits can include accessing student performance data, teacher criminal histories, financial records and much more.
"Cyber charter schools must work cooperatively with PDE to ensure that they are operating in a fiscally responsible manner and providing quality educational services to students," according to the department's website.
New oversight requirements passed into law this year include classifying administrators as public employees, which means they'll have to file statements of financial interest with the state.
Administrators also can't award contracts if they have a conflict of interest, and they'll be fired if convicted of crimes including felonies, fraud or theft.
But these are only partial solutions, argue experts and school district leaders.
Pennsylvania has "relatively lenient regulations and lax oversight" of charter schools overall, Eppley said, and the state is thus sometimes called the "wild west."
Financial wrongdoing is a likely way to get a charter revoked, Cordes said, but "charter schools do not generally tend to get shut down for low performance, unless it's really bad and really persistent."
Cyber charters, just like school districts, submit annual reports and improvement plans to the education department, and they must follow state curriculum guidelines.
Differences between the two, however, include that charters are allowed up to 25 percent of their teachers to not be certified. Not all of them must live in Pennsylvania, either.
All 1,700 Commonwealth teachers are certified and live in Pennsylvania, Eller said.
At least eight in 10 of Agora's 375 or so teachers have a master's degree or higher, Jensen said. A fair number of teachers come to Agora right out of college, he said, but "at least 75 percent probably have some prior teaching experience in brick-and-mortar setting" whether in public or parochial schools.
"I think the mindset is sometimes that we just don't care," Jensen said. "We care very, very much, and we're always being a continuously improving school."
A major difference in the two types of schools is that districts are governed by elected boards and cyber charters are instead run by unelected boards of nonprofit trustees.
"Although they are labeled as public schools, the public isn't really involved in them at the state level," Feinberg said.
But beyond government, cyber charter leaders contend, there is an ultimate accountability in their school: the families that choose them. If the school isn't meeting students' needs, they can leave, and then the school loses that revenue.
If Commonwealth, which is home to nearly four in 10 Pennsylvania cyber charter students, was underperforming, "we wouldn't have the enrollment we have," Eller said.
FOLLOWING THE INFLUENCE
Cordes trusts that cyber charter schools operate in good faith — that they have "kids' best interests at heart."
But the elephant in the classroom is the influence that cyber charter schools exert on the elected officials who make the laws that govern them, researchers and experts said.
Pennsylvania superintendents whom Eppley surveyed as part of her 2023 study said legislators "are under a lot of pressure from the charter school lobby" because it funds their campaigns.
"So, it's a strong disincentive for lawmakers to institute tighter regulations and more fair funding formulas for those cyber charter schools," Eppley said, recalling those complaints.
Michael Gogoj, Carlisle's assistant superintendent, said people will "rarely" see ads on TV for public school districts but "constantly" see them for public cyber charter schools.
"What we can say assuredly is that our tax dollars are going back into our program for students in one way, shape, form or another," Gogoj said.
Feinberg advises people to make sense of the accountability issue by watching the money that cyber charters and their supporters spend on these ads, as well as outside events and promotions. It "pays off for them," he said, as students leave district schools.
"When you have nine pairs of elected eyes that are responsible for reviewing the spending twice a month in public board meetings, that has an impact," Feinberg said of school districts. "The charter schools can do whatever they want to, basically, and nobody's paying attention, because they're getting free hot dogs at the Reading Phillies courtesy of fill-in-the-blank cyber charter."
©2024 The Sentinel (Carlisle, Pa.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
