Cyber Schools: Friend or Foe? - competition, quality, and funding questions about electronic education

School Administrator, Oct, 2001 by Kimberly Reeves

Who pays the freight when your students enroll in other schools' online classes?

The issue for Superintendent Thomas Doluisio isn't technology. It isn't competition. Rather, Doluisio has labeled the underwriting of his state's new wave of cyber schools an "unfunded mandate."

Doluisio, like other superintendents in Pennsylvania, is fuming that he has to send away money to pay for charter schools and cyber charter schools in particular. Throughout this past summer, long after the budget for the 14,000-student Bethlehem, Pa., Area School District was passed, Doluisio continued to receive letters asking him to issue tuition checks from the district to schools across the state at a cost of $6,000 per child.

"I'm not afraid of competition. Bethlehem is part of the academic standards movement. We're doing some unique things here," Doluisio says of Bethlehem, a school district mixed both socioeconomically and ethnically, about 60 miles north of Philadelphia. "Competition doesn't bother me. I can compete with them, but let's not take away money from me in an inequitable fashion."

Only two of Pennsylvania's 65 charter schools in 2000-2001 were cyber schools, with another three launched this fall. That's a fairly modest number, but school officials are expecting to see even more ventures, especially with the entry this fall of for-profit corporations such as former Education Secretary William Bennett's K12. Pennsylvania and, to a lesser extent, Nevada have become a testing ground for how online schools should be funded. Few superintendents in Pennsylvania are happy with the trend.

"I cannot think of one superintendent who is not upset with cyber schools," says Stinson Stroup, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Superintendents. "They're concerned that the quality of some of the cyber programs that are being offered is not good, that they do not have an opportunity to review the programs and that there's no documentation that the cyber schools provide that verifies where the students actually live."

Steve Smith, who follows education for the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver, is tracking virtual schools that are about to open in Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, West Virginia and Michigan, joining existing cyber schools in California, Florida, Kentucky, Nevada and Utah. Smith says the interest in using online courses to leverage education is growing.

"We're at the point where technology can finally allow these types of schools," Smith says. "I know there's a heightened interest in the issue, just from the number of calls I've received on this issue."

Cyber schools have a distinct advantage, Smith says. Free of bricks and mortar, the virtual school can grow indefinitely, without the fear of stretching library facilities or adding portable buildings. But many state lawmakers, Smith says, are wrestling with laws so wide open--or even nonexistent--that they fear anyone could throw up a Web page, hire a couple of teacher aides and start recruiting home-schoolers.

That's one underlying issue in the debate. No one, not even the virtual schools themselves, have a clear number on just what it should cost to educate each student in a virtual school. Budgets for established virtual schools vary from $400,000 to just over $6 million. Some are funded with state dollars. Others are a collaborative among school districts. A few are tuition-based programs with targeted individual classes. Some are self-paced with intermittent teacher interaction. Others require regular seat time each day for students.

Money Motivation

Most cyber schools downplay a profit motive for online courses, even when the schools are being run by for-profit companies. Most stress the expanded academic opportunities as their primary interest. However, critics, such as Thomas Gentzel of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, question just how much of a financial commitment a nonprofit or for-profit cyber school must make to educate students.

"What they're doing in Pennsylvania is offering a $1,000 computer as a onetime investment. You give these kids a computer and hook them up online and for that [school districts] send $6,000 per year," says Gentzel, who is PSBA's assistant executive director. "It's a good deal for the cyber school. They get a ton of money. The home-schooler gets a free computer and he gets to go online for his education, which he can't do now. Meanwhile, the public schools get nailed financially one more time."

Pennsylvania law allows state funding to follow the child, which means that every child who enrolls in a cyber school or any charter school takes $6,000 out of a school district's budget. Doluisio calls that logic "naive and incomplete."

As the bills from charter schools who've taken in Bethlehem students continue to arrive, Doluisio is being asked to send dollars away from his district one child at a time, and that hurts the existing program even if it's only a handful of students from any one school.