Bucks County Beacon: New Report Shows Pennsylvania’s Cyber Charter Schools Are Failing Black and Hispanic Students
“Yet another study has been released that shows how cyber charter schools damage the education of Pennsylvania students and waste Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars.
There’s no question that for some students with particular academic and social challenges, cyber charters are a useful solution. But for the majority of students and their families, cyber charters are a bad deal. And that damage is felt disproportionately by certain groups of students in the commonwealth…
Cyber charters’ many issues have been well-documented. Academically, they fall far short of public schools. When the General Accounting Office studied them in 2022, they found a system of schools that resists oversight, presents “increased financial risks” to states, and produces poor student results. Even leaders in the charter school movement have found “well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools” and called for a radical overhaul (more than once).
Pennsylvania, the cyber charter capital of the country, bears the greatest weight of cyber-failure. And a new report from Good Jobs First, “Pennsylvania Cyber Charter Schools Fail Black and Brown Students,” show where much of this failure lands while laying out the many problems of Pennsylvania cyber charter schools.”
Read the full story at the Bucks County Beacon.