Charter school funding
Time for lawmakers to fix flawed system
Charter school funding, an oft-visited topic of debate in the Pennsylvania Legislature, is back on the agenda this year, most recently with hearings on a proposal that would vastly restructure the role of cyber charter schools.
Lawmakers are well aware of the funding issues with charter schools and need to fix the inequities in the flawed system.
A good starting point would be a change in the way cyber charter schools are funded.
Charter schools were created by the Legislature in 1997 with a funding formula that essentially calls for the money to follow the student. A district’s per-pupil cost is the tuition paid by the district to the charter school a student attends. There is no cost to the student.
Those tuition payments can vary from district to district, ranging from about $7,000 per student to nearly $18,000.
Charter schools, though publicly funded, are privately managed. Brick-and-mortar schools have to get a charter from a local school board, but cyberschools are approved by the state and have no oversight from local elected officials.
When first approved, lawmakers likely never envisioned the dramatic growth in the creation of charter schools. Today, there are nearly 180 charter schools in the state, including 15 cyber charter schools that teach nearly 35,000 students through online courses.
Cyberschool funding, in particular, has been a point of contention for decades. School districts claim that their per-pupil cost for educating a student is much greater than that of a cyberschool, especially since their cost includes expenses cyberschools don’t have — busing, food services, athletic budgets, multibuilding utility costs, etc.
The amount that public school districts pay annually in charter school tuition grows each year, resulting in cries from school districts that those payments are forcing tax hikes upon residents. Critics maintain that the cyberschools actually make money on the current payment system and build up huge reserves in the process.
A report by Education Voters of Pennsylvania, a project of the Keystone Research Center, criticized overpayments to cyberschools, claiming that districts offering their own online education programs can do so for about $5,000 per student, and $8,865 per student in special education classes. Using those figures as standard cyberschool tuition payments, the report claimed public school districts could save $290 million a year. That includes projected savings of more than $8 million a year for the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and $32 million a year for Philadelphia public schools.
There have been repeated attempts at reform that have gone nowhere in the Legislature, largely due to strong lobbying efforts by the cyberschools and their supporters.
Perhaps the best suggestion came in 2014 from state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale who called for the state to assume funding of cyber charter schools. The Legislature responded with a deafening silence.
Gov. Tom Wolf has previously called for reform of charter schools, particularly cyber charters that have no local oversight. Legislators should follow suit and begin addressing the funding formula, starting with the cyberschools.