PA: Another Bill To Take Down, Sort Of, Cyber Charters

Rep. Curt Sonney is a GOP top dog in the Pennsylvania Education Committee, and he's never been known as a close friend of public schools. But he represents Erie, a district that has been absolutely gutted by school choice, so maybe that's why he has spent the last couple of years nipping at the heels of Pennsylvania's thriving cyber charter industry.

Harrisburg just had hearings on his latest proposal, a bill that he first announced last October and which has something for virtually everyone to hate.

Pennsylvania cyber schools are an absolute mess, barely covered by laws that never anticipated such a thing and protected by a massive pile of money thrown both at lobbying and campaign contributions.

The cybers do offer a service that is useful for some students (I personally know of one such case). But they also provide a quick exit for parents who don't want to deal with truancy issues or other disciplinary problems. Their results are generally very poor (none have ever been ranked proficient on the Big Standardized Test), and state oversight is so lousy that many were allowed to continue operating for years without ever having renewed their charters.

But what really has drawn the wrath of even people who don't pay much attention to education policy is that they are expensive as hell. Because the charter laws didn't really anticipate this cyber-development, cyber-charters are paid at the same rate as a brick-and-mortar charter. So an individual student may bring in $10-$20K, but costs the cyber charter the price of one computer, one printer, and 1/250th of an on-line teacher. The profit margin is huge, but so is the cost to local districts, with poorer districts in the state being hit the worst.

A year ago, there was a bill floating around Harrisburg to change the game-- if a local district opened a cyber-school, then any families that wanted to send their kid to an out-of-district cyber would have to foot the bill themselves.

The bill (HB 1897) is a bit involved, and we'll go digging in a moment, but the two headline items are this: all cyber-charters will be shut down, and all school districts will offer cyber education. Now, to look for some of those devilish details.

The timeline is nuts. The bill requires districts to have a full cyber education plan developed and submitted to the state by November of 2020. This pretty well guarantees that the plans will be a rush job for some districts, though many already have some sort of cyber-learning thingy in place. I appreciate the need for speed, but this is the kind of process that guarantees that some districts will be submitting paperwork-satisfying plans that don't necessarily have anything to do with reality. But all of that can be brought up at the public hearing required locally within 60 days of submitting the plan.

In addition to their own cyber-school, districts must also "provide provide students with the option to
participate in at least two alternative full-time cyber education programs." Those two programs must be provided by a third-party vendor. Why? Well, the cynical answer would be that this throws the cyber-charter industry a bone in the hopes that its lobbyists won't descend in numbers that blot out the Harrisburg sun. "Yes, I know we shut down your school, but there are now 500 districts that must hire cyber-providers for 1000 programs, so, you know-- ka-ching, and you're welcome." In fact, buried further down the bill, is explicit permission for the dissolved cybers to go ahead and do that.

There is a student-teacher ration requirement-- 25:1 for elementary and 30:1 for secondary. The state may waive this if the secretary is convinced that a higher ratio "will not adversely impact the academic quality of the program." Okay, question-- does that mean that if the program is lousy, it can have a waiver because a 150:1 ratio won't make it any lousier? Just asking.

All staff have to be properly certified-- an excellent protection for students in the program.

If a district pulls 20% of its students into cyber-education, it shall establish a cyber-school. It has the discretion to do this even if it doesn't meet the 20% mark.

It lays out the items that may be included in those third-party vendor contracts, which sets those vendors up to have at least some level of transparency. And those contracts will be available to the public (as are all such records in a public school system) and not kept secret (as in a charter school).

If a student is habitually truant, that student will be bounced out of the cyber-progam and not allowed to re-enter for two years.

Students can't be required to enroll in the cyber.

The department will offer some guidelines and "best practices" stuff to help districts set this all up. And there will be a state cyber-advisory committee. Those third-party vendors get a rep on this, but not anyone from an actual district.

And then the part about all cyber-charters being dissolved. They would be done at the end of the 2020-2021 school year.

Cyber-schools and cyber-student parents are freaking out about this, deploying op-eds wit varying degrees of accuracy and half-truthiness. But cyber charter operators are being offered a sweet market of captive customers. My numbers earlier were not exaggerations-- Pennsylvania has 500 school districts, so the law would call for 1,000 cyber-education programs to be run by third-party vendors. And seriously-- who but the companies that have been running cyber-charters will be ready to operate as third-party cyber-vendors within a year? Okay-- fun wrinkle, universities and other school districts are allowed to be third-party vendors, too. But cyber-school management companies will still have a leg up.

So what is there for the cyber-charters not to like? They will be forced to work with public school districts instead of around them, and they'll be forced to operate with more transparency than they're used to, and they'll have to hire more staff, and they will probably have to give up some of that tremendous profit margin they enjoy (although the bill is not super-clear about the money side of things). So, okay-- plenty.

For public schools, the biggest head scratcher is the need to offer three cyber-education programs.

Will this be the bill that finally does something about cyber-charters in Pennsylvanmia? Maybe, maybe not. It is one more sign that legislators are understanding more and more that cyber-charters have a huge funding and accountability problem. Let's see what they come up with next.

WI: Trying To Hide Charter Truth

One of the great lies of the charter-choice movement is that you can run multiple school districts for the price of one.

A school district of, say, 2,000 students can lose 75 students and with them about $750,000 dollars of revenue, and somehow that district of 1,925 students can operate for three quarter of a million dollars less. And how does the district deal with that loss of revenue? By closing a building-- because the more school buildings you operate, the more it costs.

The other common response of a school district to the loss of revenue to charters is to raise local taxes. If charters want to look at where some of their bad press is coming from, they might consider school boards like mine that regularly explain to the public, "Your local elementary is closing and your taxes are going up because we have to give money to the cyber charters."

We can run examples a dozen different ways. What is cheaper in the aggregate-- to house your ten person family in one house, or to house each family member is a separate building? Is it cheaper and more efficient to educate 2,000 students in one district with one set of administrators and special areas teachers, or in five school districts with five sets of administrators and special area teachers?

The inefficient, multiple provider model of charter schools creates greater expense, and the difference can only be made up one of two ways-- either taxpayers must fork over more money for education, or schools must cut services. If you are going to add charter-choice schools to a system, those are the only two options.

States have tried to fudge their way around with various systems of reimbursements to school districts for the students they lose to choice-charter. IOW, when that district loses the $750K, some states help make up the shortfall, either partially or completely. This is solidly in the Taxpayers Must Pay More category, but by funneling the money through the state, taxpayers might be kept unaware that they are paying more tax dollars so that a handful of students can go to a private school at public expense.

Which brings us to the morning  news from Wisconsin. 

Wisconsin is a happy land for school choice fans, with vouchers in play through three separate programs, robust choice advocacy groups, and a governor who tries to expand school choice every time the sun shines. So they have had plenty of opportunity to feel the effects of voucher prorgams sucking the life blood from public schools. Choice advocates have tried combating the bad PR with bad arguments ("it all just kind of evens out over time, somehow"). But now the legislature is trying to patch, or at least hide, the bleeding.

The 2015-2017 let local school districts draw on additional tax dollars, through state aid and through property taxes, to cover the money lost to vouchers, but Assembly Speaker Robin Vos didn't like that plan, feeling that local school districts could "pocket" the difference (schools would probably have squandered those tax dollars on books and programs and education stuff, and we can't have that). Vos's proposal would have dramatically reduced the amount of revenue that districts could call on to plug the gap, actually leaving districts in the hole.

Thursday the legislature passed a break-even compromise. If a school loses $750K in voucher money, they are authorized to gather some combination of additional state aid and local tax increases to raise exactly that $750K.

Which means that having vouchers in a Wisconsin school district raises the cost of educating students in that district by exactly the cost of the vouchers. The vouchers represent not a backpack of student money following students from school to school, but additional taxpayer dollars injected into the education system. The taxpayers will pay extra so that some students can go to a private school.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. If you want to stand up in front of the taxpayers and sell the idea that they should pay higher taxes so that some students can go to a private school at public expense, go ahead and try to sell that idea. But if you are going to insist on lying about it and insist, for instance, that people's taxes are NOT going up to finance vouchers-- well, that sort of dishonesty doesn't benefit anybody.

Wisconsin is a fine example of a state that has successfully avoided having an honest discussion about what they are actually doing, which is increasing taxes in order to fund a new entitlement-- the entitlement of a handful of students to attend a private school at pubic expense. Such an entitlement may or may not be a good idea-- that's a separate discussion, but step one in having that discussion is to be honest about what you want to do.

PA Cyber Charters Failing

Let me be clear up front-- I reject the use of standardized tests to measure the education of students, the effectiveness of teachers, and the quality of schools. The best predictor of student results on standardized test remains their socio-economic class.

Oh, no, wait. In Pennsylvania, there is apparently one other factor that can predict how poorly a student will do on the Big Test.

Whether or not he attends a cyber charter.

Here's a chart that tells the story

SPP stands for School Performance Profile, the data that the state keeps to judge the schools within the Commonwealth. The "quality threshhold" is 70 or higher.

Research for Action did some number crunching for a report about charter performance in PA.

The validity of SPP as a measure of school quality is suspect due to its heavy reliance on test scores that are highly correlated with socioeconomic characteristics of students that are beyond the control of schools. Indeed, RFA’s analysis of the 2012-13 SPP scores revealed that SPP scores were heavily correlated with the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in a school building.

And yet, cyber charters still couldn't outperform the brick-and-mortar schools-- even those serving large low-income populations. And cyber-charters low-income population percentages are lower than even the charter school numbers.

The RFA report notes that while cyber-charters hit low percentages for English Language Learners, they have grown significantly in special education population. Perhaps that is related to the fact that cyber charters get about $8K for regular students and $23K for special education students. Do you suppose that has affected their marketing and recruiting at all?

Data is no longer available on turnover rates at cybers in PA, but the RFA report concludes that given cyber-charter's consistently terrible performance by the state's standards, the state would be crazy to authorize further cyber charter operations in the state. As I said, I reject SPP as a true measure of education quality, but if that's the rule we have to play by, then cyber charters have earned a severe benching.

The report is a good one, with more charts for those who like such things. Follow the link and read the whole thing.

Education Next Plugs Research Proving Not Much of Anything

This week Education Next ran an article entitled "The First Hard Evidence on Virtual Education." It turns out that the only word in that title which comes close to being accurate is "first" (more about that shortly). What actually runs in the article is a remarkable stretch by anybody's standards.

The study is a 'working paper" by Guido Schwert of the University of Konstanz (it's German, and legit) and Matt Chingos of Brooking (motto "Just Because We're Economists, That Doesn't Mean We Can't Act Like Education Experts"). It looks at students in the Florida Virtual School, the largest cyber-school system in Florida (how it got to be that way, and whether or not it's good, is a question for another day because it has nothing to do with the matter at hand). What we're really interested in here is how far we can lower the bar for what deserves to be reported.

The researchers report two findings. The first is that when students can take on-line AP courses that aren't offered at their brick and mortal schools, some of them will do so. I know. Quelle suprise! But wait-- we can lower the bar further!

Second finding? The researchers checked out English and Algebra I test scores for the cyber-schoolers and determined that their tenth grade test results for those subjects were about the same as brick-and-mortar students. Author Martin West adds "or perhaps a bit better"  but come on-- if you could say "better" you would have. This is just damning with faint praise-by-weasel-words.

West also characterizes this finding "as the first credible evidence on the effects of online courses on student achievement in K-12 schools" and you know what? It's not. First, you're talking about testing a thin slice of tenth graders. Second, and more hugely, the study did not look at student achievement. It looked at student standardized test scores in two subjects.

I know I've said this before. I'm going to keep saying this just as often as reformsters keep trying to peddle the false assertion used to launch a thousand reformy dinghies.

"Standardized test scores" are not the same thing as "student achievement."

"Standardized test scores" are not the same thing as "student achievement."

When you write "the mugwump program clearly increases student achievement" when you mean "the mugwump program raised some test scores in year X," you are deliberately obscuring the truth. When you write "teachers should be judged by their ability to improve student achievement" when you mean "teachers should be judged by students' standardized test scores," you are saying something that is at best disingenuous, and perhaps a bit of a flat out lie.

But wait-- there's less. In fact, there's so much less that even West has to admit it, though he shares that only with diligent readers who stick around to the next-to-last paragraph.

The study is based on data from 2008-2009. Yes, I typed that correctly. West acknowledges that there may be a bit of an "early adopter syndrome" in play here, and that things might have changed a tad over the past five years, so that then conditions under which this perhaps a bit useless data was generated are completely unlike those currently in play. (Quick-- what operating system were you using in 2008? And what did your smartphone look like?)

Could we possibly reveal this research to be less useful? Why, yes-- yes, we could. In the last sentence of that penultimate graf, West admits "And, of course, the study is also not a randomized experiment, the gold standard in education research." By "gold standard," of course, we mean "valid in any meaningful way."

So there you have it. Education Next has rocked the world with an account of research on six-year-old data that, if it proves anything at all, proves that you can do passable test prep on a computer. And that is how we lower the bar all the way to the floor.

K12 Defies... Well, Everything

K12 remains the top dog in the junkyard of cyberschooling. It provides an instructive lesson in how a good pile of cash and friends in the right places can keep a business afloat even after people have poked holes in the hull.

There was never anything about the organization that didn't look like a red flag. It was set up by hedge fund manager Ronald Packer and propped up with money from junk bond king Michael Milken (an iconic Wall Street greedhound of the eighties who pioneered the art of getting caught, convicted and sent to prison, and still remaining rich and powerful). William Bennett, a former Secretary of Education and GOP pundit who was for many reformster ideas before it was cool, was a founding figurehead as well. More recently, Nathaniel Davis began rising through the executive ranks on the board (his previous experience-- CEO of XM radio).

K12 has been "embattled" all along. Here's a fairly brutal shot they took from the New York Times way back in December of 2011. Former teachers routinely write tell-alls about their experience, like this more recent guest piece on Anthony Cody's blog. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cybers that were disqualified from sports eligibility.

In February of this year, the Center for Media and Democracy named Ron Packard one of the highest paid public workers in the country (i.e. person paid with tax dollars). This despite "the alarming fact that only 28% of K12 Inc schools met state standards in 2010-2011."

A look at this report on executive compensation gives a picture of how lucrative the cyber charter business can be. Back in 2009, K12 was delivering a total of $5.51 million dollars in executive compensation. By 2012 that had climbed to $10.89 million, and the following year it jumped a whopping 96% to $21.37 million. And every last bit of it is our tax dollars at work. K12, like all charters, does not "make" money-- they just collect it from taxpayers.

Cyber schooling has long been a darling of ALEC, who, as they are wont to do, whipped up some helpful model legislation for states to follow. And legislatures have been mighty friendly to cybers. In PA, school districts must send their computed cost-per-student to the charters, but prior to 2011-2012 the state gave some of that money back to the bricks-and-mortar schools. Now, nothing.

Meanwhile, a cyber school can assign, say, 250 students to one teacher per subject. Each student gets a "free" computer. If we figure about 30K per teacher and about $500 per computer, that's a rough outlay of  $245,000. So, we spend about 1K per student, while taking in anywhere from 8K to 20K per student (students with special needs are golden). That is a mighty pleasant profit margin.

K12 may have suffered remarkably few consequences for their educational achievements, but when you make your business all about the benjamins, you may have to answer for financial issues. Packard stepped down at the beginning of this year, apparently with a giant suitcase full of personal gains that some stockholders felt was a bit ill-gotten, and they decided to get the courts involved. This is part of a cascade of lawsuits covering everything from artificially inflating stock prices to lying about what the company is actually accomplishing.

It remains to be seen what happens next for the biggest star in the cyber-educational firmament. If my browser ads are any indication, they still have plenty of money for advertising, which only makes sense-- in the cyber charter business, your success is not based on how many students you teach, but on how many you enroll. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that those numbers finally start heading down.

To learn even more about this story, I cannot recommend enough the website TheTruth About K12-- they've followed this story carefully and have a thoughtful and thorough compendium of useful info. Stop on over and educate yourself.

Cyber-Schools Still Suck, Says NEPC Report

The National Education Policy Center announced the release of its report on virtual schooling with the hefty headline "Responsible Policymaking Still Absent for Virtual Schools, Which Continue To Proliferate Despite Scant Research Support and Lagging Quality" There's going to be plenty of scholarly discussion and parsing of the full report, but based on the press release, I feel pretty comfortable with the headline I've chosen here.

The full title of the report, garnered by examining the records of 338 cybers, is VirtualSchools in the U.S. 2014: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence, edited by University of Colorado Boulder Professor Alex Molnar, and it will be all over the place shortly. But while we're waiting for the grownup scholars to sort through the details, let me see what a hack fake journalist can tell you about it.

Enrollment is rocketing skyward, sort of. In a finding that is, well, rather an odd surprise, it turns out that cyber-schooling is mostly for white kids. Current enrollment stands at 248,000 students, which is a whopping 21.7% increase over 2011-2012. But that enrollment breaks down into around 75% non-Hispanic whites, 10% African-America, and 11% Hispanic. Given the large cyber-presence in heavily Hispanic states and a national school population of 23%, the Hispanic numbers are surprising.

Are cyberschools less appealing to non-whites, or are cybers aiming their marketing primarily at the white market? Has cyber-school become one more way to get your kids away from "Those People"? Time to take a closer look at the marketing for outfits like K12 (which has a whopping third of all the cybercustomers).

The cyber-free-or-reduced-lunch population runs 10% behind the general population (35%). Students with disabilities runs just over 7% compared to 13% nationally. I found this number surprising, since I think of students with disabilities as people for whom cyber-schooling can be a particular good alternative to bricks and mortar. Less surprising is the English Language Learners (ELL) population-- 9.6% in the real world, but less than 1% in cyberian schools.

So how well do cyber-schools serve their oddly skewed population? After sorting through various state measures of effectiveness, the researchers determined the answer is, "Crappily." (I'm paraphrasing).

30% of the schools had not been measured for effectiveness at all. Only 33.8% of the schools who had been rated did well. Cybers operated by private for-profit organizations were less likely to do well. Only 157 schools reported on-time graduation numbers; their rate was 43.8%. In other words, a student in cyberschool has a less-than-fifty-fifty chance of actually graduating from it.

The report looked through a wide variety of reports, from bureaucratic through journalistic, and wherever one looks, one sees fields and fields of cyberschool suckitude. Consistent, inexcusable, suckitude.

Funding. Apparently every state uses some version of the cockamamie system we use in PA, where the amount that the cyberschool is paid per student has nothing to do with what providing the education actually costs, thereby providing cyber operators with a profit-grabbing system that is literally easier than taking candy from a baby, because a baby cries but a legislator just asks if you want more. 

In 2012 K12 made 29 million dollars profit. In 2013, that number was jacked up to 45 million. This is what it looks like when greed makes you stupid. Cybers could charge half the per-capita cost of a brick and mortar school. They would still make an obscene pile of money, and the savings to taxpayers would win cyber-operators hearts and minds from state capitols to local main streets. But since they can't pass up even one more dollar, cyber-operators now get caught both doing a lousy job of educating and price gouging for it.

They could have made allies out of all the people who hate public education, who accuse us of doing a lousy and costing us money. Instead, cyber-operators are busily demonstrating a system that is even worse, that wastes even more money and delivers even fewer results.

NEPC sticks to items that can actually be researched, so yet another report does not address some of the more obvious issues with virtual charter schools, or as some of my students like to call them, "those schools where anybody can do your homework for you, and you get a free computer." But there appears to be more than enough meat in this report to feed some well-needed discussion.

The report will hit the print media tomorrow and be available on line any minute. If you are not familiar with NEPC, you should be-- these folks do actual peer-reviewed legitimate research. Once you have digested this report, you should send off a copy to your favorite legislator (in PA, be sure to attach a note reminding them that SB 1085 is a lousy idea). It's time that cyber-schools be accountable to the taxpayers they milk and the customers they bilk.

Opportunity Cost: Distance Learning & Best Ravitch Line from NPE Conference

In the midst of show weekend with my students here in PA, it was interesting to try to follow the Network for Public Education Conference in Austin this weekend. I have two initial takeaways from the experience.

Distance Learning Is Even Worse Than Phone Sex

I followed lots of folks on twitter, watched some of the streamed video, viewed video clips as soon as anyone put them up. This conference left a huge footprint on the interwebs, with #npeconference leading the twitter trend list both days on weekend that included rising tensions in the Ukraine and preparations for tonight's Oscar bash. Beyond getting a few more sessions in front of the live streaming or hiring someone to carry around video devices, I'm not sure how much more digitally covered the conference could have been.

And I have to tell you-- it wasn't nearly enough. I caught some of the meat, got to see the real faces and hear the real speech cadences of many people that I've come to know online, read many of the best lines form the weekend-- but in the end, I still felt like a bunch of my friends had had a really cool party and group experience and I had missed out on it. So much energy and excitement leaked through the sad tiny pipeline that is the internet-- I can't quite imagine how much there was in the real place.

Which made me think-- if this was how it felt to try to distance-follow an event in which I was primed to be engaged and which was accessible to me by a whole array of current technology, how terribly inadequate distance learning, cyber-schooling and all the other computer-based substitutes for a real live teacher in the same room as students must be.

Like phone sex (I imagine), the experience lived somewhere in the land between better-than-nothing and painful-because-it-reminds-you-of-what-you're-missing. In the end, I come down on better-than-nothing, but my feelings that distance learning must be terribly inadequate are now even more confirmed.

My Favorite Ravitch Point of The Weekend

I got the keynote address in bits and pieces through twitter (set strike was today), so I know there were plenty of applause lines there. But I definitely caught the truncated video of the NPE press conference, and that call for Congress to get involved again some more in the Giant Testing Mess (which leaves me with some mixed feelings because, hey, there's no way THAT could end badly) included a phrase we ought to hear much more often in this debate.

Opportunity cost.

"Opportunity cost" used to be a semi-obscure economics term. Basically it underlines that buying a candy bar for a dollar doesn't cost you a dollar-- it costs you all the other things you COULD have spent the dollar on. By spending money here, you lose the opportunity to spend it over there.

This is the perfect way to frame the debate over testing and test prep. We keep talking about ytime, about how much time the tests take, how much time we spend preparing, how much time goes into testing.

But it's not just time. As Diane correctly noted, we're really talking about opportunity costs. A week of test prep means students lose the opportunity to play in band or sing in choir or draw in art or play a game in phys ed. A week of testing costs students the opportunity to spend that week doing something else.

We could pay the cost of testing simply in time. We could say, "Look, these tests are so important that we are going to add two months to the school year just to get ready for the tests and then take them." We could actually pay the cost in time pretty easily. But if we paid it that way, we'd know exactly what it was costing us (summer vacations, angry phone calls from angry parents).

But opportunity costs we can hide. And we have. We've hidden them because we are pros at that and have been for years. We add new units about health and safety and nutrition and adopting dogs and fold it into the year as if the school year is a big accordion-shaped squeezebox of fluid infinite time. We never talk about opportunity costs.

So it is dead-on correct to call for a study of opportunity costs. It is dead-on correct to ask what we are taking away to do this unholy regime of pointless testing.

Because when something costs time, there's the illusion that there's always more time. We can get it back. But opportunities lost are gone for good. And talking about opportunity costs force us to ask hard questions.

Talking about value is easy. Did I get good value for what I spent? Is this a decent dollar's worth of candy bar?

But talking about opportunity cost-- that's another thing. Because now the question is-- of all the things I could have spent this dollar on, is this candy bar the best?

Proponents of the high stakes test-based education status quo (another thing that Ravitch got dead-on correct-- this IS the status quo, not a challenge to it) don't just need to prove that their testing regimen has some value or may serve some useful purpose. What they need to prove is this-- looking at the resources spent, the money spent, the hours of young lives spent, the work of education professionals spent-- looking at all those costs, were there better opportunities? What opportunities did we give up to pursue the big ball of testing wax, and would some of those opportunities have been a better use of our resources? What opportunities are we and our students going to have tomorrow, and which ones should we pursue? Is the high stakes test-based status quo really the best thing we can think of to spend our time and effort on? I may not have been there, but I bet everybody who was in Austin knows the answer.

K12 Go Away

Because I travel to plenty of ed sites, the internet is sure that I want to see plenty of ads about K12 and their awesome free on line schooling.

On the one hand, cool, because every ad they show me they pay for, and advertising K12 to me is a waste of their money.

Except, of course, that the money they're wasting is my tax money. The money they're wasting on radio spots and tv ads and big billboards is my tax money.

K12's ads are a great expression of the belief in free government money. The cyber-schools are advertised as free (and include a free computer!!) which is unvarnished baloney.

Aided by the legislature in Harrisburg, cyber-schools are bleeding local school district dry. They highlight one of the major flaws in school choice and its variations (of which cyber schools are just one)-- these kind of choice plans disenfranchise all the taxpayers in a school district who don't have children there.

Are you someone with grown children who wants to see your school district keep neighborhood schools open, because it's good for the community and it provides a solid education? Well, too bad. In many school districts, a handful of parents get to decide that the school should be closed because they want their child to attend the free school on the free computer.

In PA the problem is seriously exacerbated because of our crazy-pants formula assumes that if one student leaves a classroom, suddenly it's cheaper to operate that classroom, as if the light, heat, teacher, bussing, and other fixed costs are reduced. Meanwhile, the competing cyber-school business is paid vastly more than the cost of providing their service. I tried to think of an analogy for this, but it is so flipping insane that there isn't one. No wonder investors are getting into the cyber-school business-- it's like printing money. It's like running a used car lot where the customer hands you a filled out check and you give them whatever car you feel like giving them.

So, K12, no, I'm not interested. You aren't free, you aren't public, and for many , many students, you aren't even an education. Go away, and give me my tax dollars back.