Ashlee G. was hired to develop online courses for Commonwealth Charter Academy in 2022.
Ashlee had previously taught in North Carolina and had experience developing remote learning courses for a private school and for The Girls Scouts of America.
That combination of skills was in demand at CCA, which was in the middle of what was becoming a massive and historic influx of new students, growing from fewer than 10,000 students to more than 35,000 students in less than five years. In 2018 the school had rolled out its own proprietary online learning software called “edio” and was continuing to develop many in-house courses.
Developing STEM and driver’s education courses for CCA paid her better than most Pa. schools would have with her experience. The hours were long but she enjoyed the work and received positive reviews from her supervisor. She even received two bonuses that were paid to staff, though technically she was an employee of an outside contractor.
Then, 10 months into her contract, Ashlee said she was approached by a man with a knife outside of the CCA Tech Works office near Pittsburgh where she worked. Nothing happened to her during the encounter but she said there were a lot of people living underneath a bridge near the office and she wanted to be on the safe side. So she reported what happened to the school.
CCA’s leaders quickly called her to see if she was okay. But the next day she was told not to come back to work. She was not given a reason. A few days later a security guard watched as she cleaned out her cubicle and turned in her laptop, she said. Ashlee had long considered herself an overachiever and had never been terminated for any reason. “I thought it was wrong,” she said. “They wouldn’t tell me why I had been let go.”
Ashlee assumed it had to do with reporting the man with the knife. Maybe they were afraid she was going to sue them over what happened, she still wonders years later, even though her only concern had been safety. “My theory is they felt like there were some legal issues that they were going to have to deal with and they didn’t want to deal with them,” she said. “I think they were protecting themselves.”
This sense that CCA was unduly concerned with its own financial interests was later reinforced when she received a notice saying that the school had challenged her claim for unemployment insurance. Ashlee appealed. No one from CCA showed up at the hearing to explain why she had been let go, she said.
Ashlee asked to have her last name withheld to avoid being Googled by future employers. But she let PennLive share her full name with CCA. CCA didn’t provide an official response to questions about what happened to Ashlee.
Prioritizing the school’s financial well-being was not a total surprise, Ashlee said. Ashlee’s boss and her boss’ supervisor had already told her on several occasions that her curriculum job existed because the school was hoping to sell the curriculum she was developing.
“The main goal was not to create curriculum for the CCA students, even though that was something we were doing,” she said she was told. “The main goal was to be a revenue stream for CCA, so that they could sell these courses and make more money for CCA. And we were told multiple times that that was the goal — to make money for CCA.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for CCA said that the school developed its online learning platform called “edio” because the school believed it would be better for its students, teachers and families. “We’ve also said that if other schools can benefit from the tools and systems we’ve built, we’re open to finding ways to help,” the statement reads.
Ashlee is one of a number of former CCA employees who say the nonprofit school seemed more focused on its finances and decisions that will put it in a better position to grow larger than on the academic success of its current students. CCA has spent tens of millions developing its online learning platform and creating its own courses. This investment has been more costly in the short run, they say, leaving the school with less money to invest in things like more staff that would help the students who are enrolled in the school now.
These additional curriculum costs come at a time when some traditional public school leaders say they have struggled to stay within their budgets, in part because thousands of students have been transferring to CCA in the middle of the year. Traditional schools across Pennsylvania have already budgeted to pay CCA more than $600 million in tuition for students who are currently enrolled. And if this year follows the pattern of the last few years, traditional public schools will be on the hook for an additional roughly $100 million for the students who transfer to CCA over the course of this year.
In the long run, CCA’s investment in its software and curriculum could save the school money and give the school a cost advantage over competitors, or potentially even give their students a higher quality online education. But Ashlee and several others who were involved in in the actual work, say the way the school managed the project’s costs got in the way of developing a truly superior curriculum.
As one former teacher put it, “It was a totally bizarre experience,” she said. “because it was public education run like a business.”
'BUILDING THE AIRPLANE AS YOU FLY IT'
When CCA first began to develop curriculum and software, its leaders were in a hurry because they were trying to separate themselves from Connections, the for-profit management company that had previously been making all of its decisions. But without its own software and curriculum, CCA’s school’s leaders would be limited in how much they could truly separate themselves.
Joyce Good was hired for her curriculum writing skills by CCA in 2015 and said CCA’s development of edio was essential for the school to move past the increasing limitations with Connections’ curriculum. “Their platform was probably seven or eight years old by then and was not designed for individuality,” Good said. (Connections has since revamped its curriculum and launched a new platform.)
CCA wanted Good to help develop an entire K-12 curriculum, or 144 classes with around 500,000 lessons and to do it in 18 months, she said. It was, “extremely challenging,” she said.
“While we were doing that, we were also designing the platform and kind of building the airplane as you fly it,” she said. “There were a lot of issues. You build something new, it’s challenging. And we had a very short time period to do it.”
John Lipchik was one of many CCA teachers who helped develop some of CCA’s curriculum during his off-hours. Some of the history curriculums CCA developed, he said, were excellent. And others, he said, were not, and sometimes included simple errors of grammar or fact. “There were people who just lacked a lot of knowledge in their areas and wrote some very terrible curriculums in my opinion.”
Lipchik wasn’t the only teacher who felt that some of CCA’s early curriculum had problems. A former math teacher at CCA said the Connections curriculum was better than CCA’s.
“Teachers are skilled at teaching and people who make the curriculum, they have PhDs in the subject matter,” she said. “So instead of having a team of people that are well-versed in the subject matter, now you have teachers kind of just doing it in their spare time in addition to their full time job.”
While there was some pushback, Good said, it was rarely because parents were finding mistakes. Instead, she said, it came from a group of parents who were upset that the curriculum had become more difficult than what Connections Academy had prepared them for.
But CCA was addressing parent concerns as best as they could, according to some parents. “[CCA was] asking for a lot of parent input, teacher input. Students had surveys,” said one parent with students at CCA at the time. “It was bumpy. But they were taking a lot of feedback and they were making tweaks and figuring it all out.”
Good said the new platform allowed CCA’s teachers to individualize lessons to help students get caught up. “Teachers don’t just pick up a manual and teach from one end to the other,” she said.
Another staff member who worked on the curriculum said she felt pressure to “make it work” for parents, which she said, “we sometimes felt was code for dumbing it down.”
“I”m not trying to say that the CEO called me and said, ‘Make it easier.’ It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It was more pressure from a lot of sides to make families happy because there’s always this pressure that they leave and go somewhere else.”
EDUCATING AND SELLING
Ashlee said she wasn’t allowed to use many references to Pa. in the materials she developed so it could be sold to districts outside the state.
“Instead of sticking just to Pennsylvania standards and doing what was best for Pennsylvania students, we had to be a lot more broad because it needed to fit in the standards of pretty much any other state,” she said. “And it couldn’t be Pennsylvania-specific, which I think does a disservice to Pennsylvania students.”
Adam Fraser, the former academic provost of CCA, said he pushed back against CCA leaders who were trying to sell the school’s curriculum. He thought it was important to use Pennsylvania-specific references because the school’s students would ultimately be responsible for passing Pennsylvania’s standardized tests.
”When I heard that, I was like, ‘Sorry, guys, there is no part of me that can get on board with that. This is the blood, sweat, and tears of our teachers building it for our students,'” he said. “On top of that, it was built with taxpayer money, and we’re not in this to make another buck.’”
CCA defended the school’s approach. “Ensuring that CCA branding and copyrighted content are not embedded in edio simply allows the platform to remain flexible and accessible for broader educational use,” said Tim Eller, a spokesperson for CCA.
One CCA staff member who worked on the technology-side of the curriculum development, felt CCA’s focus on creating new materials was because CCA’s leaders didn’t think highly of the online materials that already existed.
“CCA is very committed to having things in house and not paying someone else for the content that in their eyes even is subpar,” he said.
Another CCA employee who helped develop edio’s curriculum said she initially incorporated high quality instructional materials from other technology companies like Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin. But she was later told to create the curriculum from scratch, without anything that had a copyright. In her opinion this made the quality worse.
“To do that you have to strip the curriculum of everything that’s interesting,” she said. “You don’t get any of that really special personalized content, like an article from the Wall Street Journal. You can’t have it in there because you can’t resell it unless you partner with that organization and get access to their content and license it. The quality goes down because it’s just bland.”
In the short run, creating its own curriculum was actually more expensive, she said, because the school had to hire a whole team of content and technology developers to build it. “We were basically running a curriculum development company,” she said, that was investing tens of millions of dollars per year into developing a new product. This included working with more than 100 contractors from India who worked on the technical implementation.
“The advantage to CCA in the long term is that they’re saving money because they’re not paying these partners” for copyrighted content, she said.
This was part of the reason why she eventually left the school. “We shouldn’t be about selling our curriculum,” she said. “We should be about educating kids.”
PennLive Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of stories about CCA titled “Virtual Dominance: How a cyber charter school has upended K-12 education in Pa.” You can read the first, second and third story in the series here. The fourth story, also published today, is about how some staff say the school’s rapid growth has come at a cost. The next story in the series is about why so little is known about how much students are learning at Pa.’s fastest growing school.
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