Feb 16, 2016 3 min read

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about cyber charter schools, particularly in light of the fact one of the biggest players in the commonwealth, Beaver County-based Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, is under the microscope for alleged financial improprieties by its founder, and another, Agora Cyber Charter School outside Philadelphia, just laid off dozens of employees with no warning.

But setting aside fundamental questions about their operation and overall effectiveness, there’s one issue surrounding cyber schools that should unnerve even those who think home-and-computer-based education is the wave of the future – the costs imposed on a student’s home district when that student decides to enroll in a cyber charter school.

Right now, a cyber charter receives the full amount it costs to educate a student within the student’s home district.

That price tag encompasses expenses like building maintenance and transportation, even though a student at a cyber school doesn’t leave home and doesn’t hop onboard a bus. It simply makes no sense to provide a cyber school with the same per-pupil allotment brick-and-mortar institutions receive.

Adjusting this flawed formula is among the ideas contained within a budget proposal outlined by Gov. Tom Wolf last week.

Naturally, there’s plenty of room to scoff at Wolf plotting a course for the next fiscal year when the budget for the current one is eight months overdue and shows no signs of arriving anytime soon. But making adjustments to the ways charter schools are funded would save taxpayers money and provide more resources for public schools where the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s K-12 students are educated.

Another proposal being put forward by Wolf would end the too-generous “pension double dip,” which has charter schools being compensated by the state for 50 percent of their pension costs, even while pension costs are fully factored into the tuition money that districts pay to charters. He would also like to see charter schools send unused money in reserve funds, now totaling $148 million according to the budget proposal, back to school districts at the end of each school year, and change the flat-rate amount school districts give to charter schools for educating special-needs students. Wolf would like that compensation to reflect the severity of a student’s disability. Why, for instance, should a charter school that has enrolled a student with a mild speech impediment be compensated for the same amount it would cost to teach a student with autism?

Charter school advocates, perhaps predictably, have panned Wolf’s proposals. Robert Fayfich, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, went so far as to characterize them as an “unrelenting attack” in a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But this seems less an attack than a much-needed course correction that will save money for public school districts that are not exactly rolling in cash.

Supporters of charter schools have long contended they can serve as laboratories for innovation outside the constraints of the public school system and, in some instances, be profitable business enterprises. If this is the case, then they should be subject to the same imperatives for cost-effectiveness that govern public schools and, indeed, businesses.