Mar 30, 2013 4 min read

Cybercharter schools have won praise in some quarters for being the wave of the future, a natural outgrowth of our wired, interconnected world and a way for students to customize their education and learn at their own pace.

But evidence is also starting to pile up that, at least in their current form, cybercharter schools offer a substandard education and come with little or no regulation or accountability attached. Since they drain per-pupil funding away from brick-and-mortar institutions, this should worry not just parents who have students enrolled in cybercharter programs, but taxpayers concerned about the quality of their local schools.

In a presentation to Washington School Board Monday night, Superintendent Roberta DiLorenzo laid out an eye-opening case that logging on to the computer every day and attending an online classroom is not necessarily commensurate with the everyday, flesh-and-blood interaction of an old-fashioned classroom. Nor does it generate any appreciable cost savings. DiLorenzo noted that Washington School District, which is hardly brimming with dollars thanks to the city’s shrinking tax base, has had to pony up $1.9 million over the last five years for cyberschooling pupils who live within the district. In the current school year, Washington has 38 students who are enrolled in cybercharters, at a cost, as of March 18, of almost $400,000.

One Washington student enrolled in a cyberschool earned only seven credits in four years. How much did the district have to pay? $36,000.

While we acknowledge that online education might be the only recourse for students with special needs, talents that require extensive travel or those with severe disciplinary problems, we’ll confess to some skepticism over the notion of planting a student in front of a computer all day for geometry or history classes, where there are neither peers to interact with nor teachers to offer face-to-face guidance. Standardized test scores have shown cybercharter schools lagging behind in Adequate Yearly Progress, as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act, and a study by Stanford University found elementary and middle school students in Pennsylvania cybercharter schools performed worse in reading and math than their peers in traditional classrooms from 2006 to 2010.

DiLorenzo also reported that there are a number of ways students can get around attendance requirements in cyberschools – one ingenious student is said to have attached the mouse on her computer to a fan for the duration of the school day so it would oscillate and show she was active when she was, in fact, otherwise engaged. Home schoolers, who are taught by their parents or some other adult, have to endure more stringent scrutiny than students enrolled in cyberschools. Parents of home-schooled students have to submit annual applications to the district which include goals and objectives, have a certified evaluator from outside the district interview the student and submit other material to the district’s superintendent. When DiLorenzo recently asked the cyberschools for updated attendance reports, notification of when a student drops out and records of progress, most of the requests were denied, and one lawyer for a cybercharter school sent a letter saying they were not entitled to the information.

In other words, keep sending the checks, but, please, don’t ask questions.

We believe that if parents want to enroll their children in cybercharter schools that is their right, just as it is their right to home school them or send them to a private institution, such as John F. Kennedy Catholic School in Washington. However, we don’t think school districts – and the taxpayers who fund them – should be asked to foot the bill, particularly for an education that seems to yield such dubious results.