Right now, there is no cap on what Pennsylvania’s 14 cyber charter schools are paid. Instead, the amount depends on which school district a student lives in, with the highest rate being just under $29,000. The proposed new law would cap the amount cyber charter schools receive at $8,000 per student across the commonwealth.
Gov. Josh Shapiro previously estimated that this change would redirect more than $265 million from cyber charter schools to traditional public schools, although the fiscal note attached to the House bill estimated the savings to be around $616 million. The amount each local district would benefit would depend on how much each district currently spends on cyber charter tuition.
But there were warning signs on Wednesday that the bill could struggle to survive the budget season in its current form, as it received only two votes from Republicans, and will require more Republican support to pass through the Republican-controlled Senate. Last year, a less dramatic package of reforms to cyber charter schools received the support of 22 House Republicans.
Reps. Tom Mehaffie, R-Dauphin County, and Kathleen Tomlinson, R-Bucks County, were the only two lawmakers to cross party lines on Wednesday in the 104-98 vote. Mehaffie and Tomlinson’s districts brush up against Harrisburg and Philadelphia, cities with two of the biggest concentrations of students who have left traditional public schools to attend a cyber charter school.
The bill is one of a number of cyber charter school reform bills that have been proposed in the past two decades and comes on the heels of Republican Auditor General Timothy DeFoor’s call for reform. In February, DeFoor found that Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools had increased revenue by $425 million and reserves by nearly 150 percent during a period of four years. This was the third auditor general report since 2010 that identified problems with cyber charter school finances, but the first by a Republican to call for a funding formula more tied to the actual costs of running a cyber school.
Rep. Mary Isaacson, R-Philadelphia, the primary sponsor of the bill, echoed DeFoor’s report in her opening speech. “The audit uncovered egregious, wasteful and questionable financial practices of these cyber charter schools,” she said. “and the Auditor General himself highlighted the need for meaningful reforms of our charter school laws as the solution to these problems.”
But House Republicans said the tuition cap would effectively require many of the cyber charter schools to close, and they called out Democrats for not providing any evidence to support the idea that $8,000 was a reasonable amount to set tuition at.
“Where exactly does this number come from?” asked Rep. Martina White , R-Philadelphia. “A few years ago, the previous administration under Governor Wolf tried to push a $9,500 tuition rate.”
The House Education Committee held three hearings in April and May about cyber charter school reform. But despite many hours of testimony, both Republicans and Democrats on the committee admitted that they hadn’t yet seen a rigorous breakdown of what it should cost to run a cyber charter school.
That didn’t appear to have changed this week. During a debate of the bill in an education committee meeting on Monday, several Democrats said that the $8,000 figure was more of an opening gambit in the budget negotiations to come. “That’s a number that’s going to be obviously negotiated in the budget between the chambers and in the future that number is going to move based on our costs as they move,” said Democratic Rep. Paul Friel of Chester County.
Although Republicans claimed that the bill would be disastrous for cyber charter schools and their more than 65,000 students, they also didn’t go into the details of how. “Capping funding per student at $8,000 will mathematically close all cyber charter schools. It’s not an opinion, it’s math,” said Rep. Marc Anderson, R-York County.
Although most of the debate during Wednesday’s floor vote was focused on the tuition cap, the bill also includes a number of substantial reforms that would change how cyber charter schools are allowed to operate. Those measures include:
- Changing the special education funding formula, so cyber charter schools wouldn’t have an incentive to profit from admitting special education students who have needs that can be addressed relatively cheaply, and by avoiding enrolling students with expensive special needs;
- Placing a five-year moratorium on new cyber charter schools;
- Capping the schools’ total enrollment if their students are not making adequate academic progress;
- Capping their rainy day “unassigned fund balances”;
- Requiring competitive bidding and procurement;
- Adding additional disclosure requirements for their capital spending and building purchases.
“Now, if those boys attended a local public school, a local brick and mortar charter school, a local Catholic school, a local religious school elsewhere,” he said, “there would have been eyes on those children.”
A handful of Republicans on Wednesday said that they were open, at least in principle, to some kind of cyber charter reforms but wouldn’t support a bill that included the $8,000 cap. And they wanted to pair cyber charter reforms with similar measures for traditional districts.
“I’m all for accountability. I’m all for having a real discussion about what it costs to educate a student. And most importantly, I am very focused on what those outcomes are,” said Republican Rep. Bryan Cutler , of Lancaster County, during Monday’s education committee hearing. “Because if the discussion is cyber schools perform poorly, therefore, we should either have a moratorium or shut them down — we have plenty of public schools that are not currently meeting those very same standards.”
House Minority Leader Jesse Topper, R-Bedford, said the modest cyber charter reforms passed last year should address some of the issues raised in DeFoor’s audit. Topper said that cyber charter schools have become the de facto school of last resort for many Pennsylvania students and the commonwealth’s leaders need to rethink what success looks like for these cyber students.
“Success might be having the ability to achieve graduation, getting a high school diploma. For some, success may be not dropping out,” he said. “Let me be very clear, if we destroy cyber charters in Pennsylvania , the high school dropout rate will skyrocket. And where will those students go?”
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