Notes from the Field
Submitted by Frank Murphy on December 20, 2011
The state of Pennsylvania spends a large amount of taxpayers’ money financing the operations of cyber charter schools. In the 2009- 2010 school year, just four of these virtual schools received more than $231 million from the state’s education budget. This sum is about eighty percent of the amount of money that the School District of Philadelphia lost in state aid this last budget year.
During the 2009-2010 school year, Agora Cyber School received approximately $55 million of the funding Pennsylvania dispersed to the nine-cyber schools operating within its borders. Agora is part of the for-profit cyber school management company, K-12 Inc. The funds collected in Pennsylvania by Agora School account for 10% of its corporate parent’s annual revenue. K-12 estimates that the market potential for its brand of virtual schooling will potentially net it more than $15 billion as it expands its operations across the nation.
In Pennsylvania, about 30,000 students are enrolled in online schools at an average cost of about $10,000 per student. These schools receive the lion’s share of the state funds spent on charter schools. A good portion of this revenue flows to advertising firms, lobbyists, public officials and the top executives of the firms that manage these organizations.
In 2010, K-12 nationally spent $26.5 million of the money that it collected from taxpayer-financed state education budgets on advertizing its product. In Pennsylvania alone, this company has spent $681,000 on lobbying state legislatures since 2007.
This year $5 million in compensation was paid to Ronald J. Packard, the chief executive of K12. Mr. Packard oversees the operation of a company that is responsible for educating 94,000 students. The size of his salary makes the sum of money that Arlene Ackerman received during her three years as the superintendent of the Philadelphia School District appear to be paltry in comparison.
The New York Times has spent several months examining how cyber schools operate. This investigation focused on K12 and Agora School in particular. The results of this review raise important questions concerning the benefits to children and taxpayers of online schools such as those managed by K12.
As school districts across the nation struggle to provide for the needs of their students in the wake of brutal slashes like those Philadelphia faces, these questions are timely ones.
Read the full New York Times article here.