HARRISBURG — One notable area of bipartisan consensus in Pennsylvania’s recently finished, four-month-late state budget? A group of new policies that boost oversight of cyber charter schools, and also give public school districts a break on the tuition they pay to these schools.
Pennsylvania is home to 14 cyber charter schools, which have ballooned in popularity since the pandemic. The schools, which can accept as many students as they want, enrolled nearly 60,000 students statewide in the 2023-24 school year.
An audit of five cyber charters released earlier this year found that their revenue had nearly doubled from 2020 to 2023, and their financial reserves had increased by nearly 150% in that period.
As cyber charters have grown, there has been increasing focus in Harrisburg, particularly among Democrats, on updating the commonwealth’s decades-old charter school law to account for these new realities. This year, Republicans also got on board with making some significant changes.
“The goal of all of this was to bring balance,” state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) told Spotlight PA. “What we attempted to do is reach a compromise … that ensures that cyber charters can continue to be an option for parents and families, but also brings fairness to the cost that the taxpayer pays for cyber charters, as well as a balance of accountability.”
Public schools have welcomed the changes in the budget. Cyber charters, meanwhile, see them as an existential threat. A coalition of nine of the schools’ leaders released a joint statement arguing the budget would lead to closures and “thousands of valuable teachers and school staff losing their jobs.”
And while Pittman said this effort should close the book on cyber charter reforms for now, key Democrats disagree.
“We did good work when it came to creating new rules around cyber student safety,” said state Rep. Pete Schweyer (D., Lehigh), who chairs his chamber’s Education Committee. “It was certainly a good-faith start to the conversation, but there’s much more to do.”
What’s in the budget?
One major focus of the budget changes was financial. Chiefly, public schools had begun to complain that growing cyber charter attendance was draining their resources.
Pennsylvania school districts must pay tuition for any students who live within their borders and opt to attend a charter school. Rates are calculated based on the district’s per-student spending, with deductions for expenses cyber charters don’t have, like facility maintenance.
Despite some updates in last year’s state budget, public school districts had maintained they were still paying too much (and contributing to enormous surpluses at some cyber charters, which the audit found were sometimes paying for things like gift cards and vehicles). These concerns had extra weight for lawmakers because they’re already under a court order to make Pennsylvania’s public school funding system more equitable for poor districts.
Savings for public schools
To that end, the budget deal allows public schools to deduct more expenses from their cyber charter tuition — the list now includes a large portion of the expenses districts pay for student activities, for instance.
Lawmakers estimated these changes would have reduced districts’ total payment to charters by about $178 million in aggregate, or 14.6%, in the 2024-25 school year.
Tightening student wellness checks
Also at top of mind for members was student safety.
Last budget cycle, lawmakers included language in their deal that required cybers to make sure “each enrolled student is able to be visibly seen and communicated with in real time.” It was inspired in part by a case in which a 12-year-old student at Pennsylvania’s biggest cyber charter died after being allegedly tortured and starved by her guardians.
That large cyber charter, Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA), resisted performing those wellness checks, saying the letter of the law didn’t actually require them. Tightening the law, and identifying other areas where cyber charters should protect student well-being, became a goal for both Democrats and Republicans.
The budget deal subtly changed the wellness check language to get rid of any possible loophole: Schools must now ensure each student “is visibly seen” weekly.
It also added penalties if the state Department of Education thinks a school isn’t complying with these checks, which include mandating child abuse prevention training for staff, mandating in-person meetings with students, or prohibiting the school in question from receiving state grants.
Truancy crackdowns — and not just for cyber charters
The deal also seeks to crack down on truancy for all students.
Among other things, students who regularly have unexcused absences from school now can’t transfer to a cyber charter school during the academic year, unless a judge approves the move. All schools have to have attendance improvement plans for regularly truant kids, and they all have to send the state education department quarterly reports about attendance enforcement, plus report all unexcused absences.
Cyber charter schools must now have weekly benchmarks for learning progress in place for any student who is taught via “asynchronous education” — a method common in cyber charters in which a student learns and submits work without meeting with a teacher in real time. If students don’t meet these academic benchmarks, they can be considered absent or face some other consequence.
Verifying where students live
Another issue that critics of cyber charters have raised in the past is that the schools don’t always keep up-to-date records of which public school districts students live in — and therefore, which district should be paying a given student’s tuition.
The budget deal requires cyber charter parents or guardians to submit proof of residence twice a year, instead of just upon enrollment or if they move. Parents of homeless students are exempt from this requirement — an effort to account for a federal law that says students who are homeless or dealing with housing insecurity are not required to prove residency for school enrollment.
A devastating cut, or a modest reform?
Malynda Maurer, who heads Pennsylvania’s smallest cyber charter school, the Central PA Digital Learning Foundation, told Spotlight PA that any cut to the tuition her school receives is going to hurt.
“It's not like we have a lot of room for movement” in our budget, she said. “One of our niches is that we spend a lot on personnel because we believe in people … so the biggest part of our budget, of course, is personnel.”
She was less bothered by the accountability reforms — though she noted, things like multiple residency checks per year will likely be an administrative burden. Plus, she said she worries that the truancy crackdown could disadvantage some students.
“I get it, there are kids who try to take advantage of hopping from school to school to stay truant,” she said. “But there are cases that's not the case … We have many cases where kids came to us, and they started a new leaf, and they were no longer an attendance problem, because this type of education and this type of environment is what they needed.”
Of concerns that the state’s payment changes could lead to closures, Maurer said she isn’t yet sure because she doesn’t have firm numbers — those will have to come from the public schools that pay her students’ tuition.
But, she said, “any cut in funding does affect us … that's probably a slightly different answer than you would get from a larger school where they have some wiggle room in their finances because they have so many students coming in. We don't have that luxury.”
There’s an enormous range in the size of cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania. Maurer estimates that hers currently has around 200 students. The largest, Commonwealth Charter Academy, told Spotlight PA in July that it had more than 30,000 students.
In their joint statement, the coalition of leaders at 10 cyber charter schools — including Maurer — were even more definitive that the funding changes would be devastating. They estimated it would be closer to a $300 million cut in aggregate, rather than the $178 million lawmakers projected.
“We expect that two of the 14 public cyber charter schools currently operating in Pennsylvania will be forced to close within one year. Within two years, an additional five public cyber charter schools will most likely be forced to close,” a spokesperson wrote in the statement.
Schweyer, the Education Committee chair, said he wasn’t sure where the cyber charters were getting their estimates about the measure’s financial burden. He noted, lawmakers’ numbers were bipartisan.
Public school advocates, meanwhile, say they see this as a first step toward a charter school funding scheme that actually works.
“School districts across the Commonwealth that have been begging for cyber charter payment reform were heard in this budget,” Arthur Steinberg, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said in a statement after the deal passed. “Every dollar appropriated for public education should be received by public schools and put to work for public school students, period.”
Democrats have proposed much larger reforms in the past — including a system that would set a base tuition rate of $8,000 per student in charter schools, instead of the formula that is currently used.
Schweyer said he’s still interested in that idea. He also has a slate of other cyber charter oversight reforms in mind, which he said he plans to introduce in the new year.
Whether those additional reforms will get anywhere is an open question. Pittman, the state Senate GOP leader, doesn’t think they should.
“After making two years of significant changes to how cyber charters are funded, this should close the chapter on the conversation going forward, certainly for the next few years,” he said. “It’s time to hit the pause button and evaluate the impact of those changes going forward.”