Temple prof: Pa. cyber charters turning huge profits, sending tax dollars out of state
by thenotebook on Jan 06 2014 Posted in Latest news
Photo: Emma Lee/NewsWorks
Temple University Law Professor Susan DeJarnatt researches cyber charter schools.
Fewer teachers. No school building. No heating bill. Same cost.
You'd think Pennsylvania's 16 cyber-charter schools, which teach home-based students via the Web, would spend a lot less per student than bricks-and-mortar schools.
Not so.
They collect as much money per student as the state's brick-and-mortar charter schools. Despite a call from Governor Tom Corbett to do otherwise, the state still doesn't ask how much it actually costs to educate students in cyber-charters to proficiency standards (nor does it, actually, for any of its schools).
Instead — as it does for brick-and-mortar charters — the state simply demands that school districts turn 70 percent to 80 percent of their normal per-pupil costs over to the cybers. (School districts are allowed to deduct certain expenses such as debt-service and transportation costs from their payments to charter schools.)
Those costs, of course, differ greatly from one school district to another. And since the state's cyber charters can take students from any of Pennsylvania's 500