Commentary July 23, 2020: Thinking about a cyber charter school for your child?

Parents considering cyber charters due to COVID might not be aware of their consistent track record of academic underperformance. 

As those parents face an expected blitz of advertising by cybers, in order for them to make a more informed decision, you might consider providing them with some of the info listed below:

A June 2 paper from the highly respected Brookings Institution stated, “We find the impact of attending a virtual charter on student achievement is uniformly and profoundly negative,” and then went on to say that “there is no evidence that virtual charter students improve in subsequent years.”

In 2016, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the national charter lobbying group 50CAN released a report on cyber charters that found that overall, cyber students make no significant gains in math and less than half the gains in reading compared with their peers in traditional public schools.

A Stanford University CREDO Study in 2015 found that cyber students on average lost 72 days a year in reading and 180 days a year in math compared with students in traditional public schools.

From 2005 through 2012 under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, most Pennsylvania cybers never made “adequate yearly progress.”

Following NCLB, for all five years (2013-2017) that Pennsylvania’s School Performance Profile system was in place, not one cyber charter ever achieved a passing score of 70.

Under Pennsylvania’s current accountability system, the Future Ready PA Index, all 15 cyber charters that operated in 2018-2019 have been identified for some level of support and improvement.