Charter schools should keep track of students
Charter schools, both of the brick-and-mortar and online variety, have been hailed as a free-market solution to many of the woes that bedevil public education. However, time has shown many of the students who pass through these schools perform no better academically than their public-school counterparts, and charter schools have been plagued by questions of exactly how accountable they are, even as they gratefully accept public money.
Take, for instance, the problem of truancy. Right now in Pennsylvania, a student can be enrolled in a cyber charter school, where they must check in online every day school is in session (though one assumes that process can be manipulated by a computer-savvy young person). If three days pass without an excused absence, then a student’s home school district is notified, and that district is left to investigate the absence, even though they have little or no daily interaction with the student.
However, a bill was introduced by state Rep. Dom Costa of Allegheny County that would hold brick-and-mortar charter and cyber schools responsible for tracking the attendance of their students. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Costa was motivated to introduce the measure after reports surfaced of children who were enrolled in cyber charters being abused by their parents or guardians, out of the view of other adults who could have intervened. Though Costa doesn’t believe the majority of children in cyber schools are subject to abuse, and nor should anyone else make that assumption, he thinks checking attendance is a task best left to the charter schools, in order to take the middleman out of the process and make it less likely that students will fall off the grid, to paraphrase a pediatrician who talked to the Post-Gazette.
A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools told the Post-Gazette the schools “would welcome that kind of accountability and authority,” but the cost could be an issue. But it’s not as if public school districts are awash in cash either. Charter schools should be doing this because it would demonstrate they can be answerable to the public which pays no small amount for their operation.
And they haven’t always been conscientious on this score. Just a little over two years ago, Terry Mutchler, then the executive director of the Office of Open Records, told a state Senate committee that charter schools routinely ignored requests for information under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law, even though they were publicly funded. Closer to home, Roberta DiLorenzo, the superintendent of the Washington School District, recounted in 2013 her requests for attendance and progress reports from students enrolled in the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in Beaver County were met with silence and a “cease-and-desist” letter from an attorney. Since then, Nicholas Trombetta, the founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, has been indicted for allegedly concocting a scheme to siphon taxpayer funds away from the school and into his own pocket, as well as the pockets of friends and relatives. Trombetta entered a not-guilty plea and is still awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, it was recently discovered more than 300 students were apparently AWOL from an online school for months on end, even though the school was still receiving state funding for those students.
If charter schools want to be taken seriously as alternatives to public schools, they have to show they can educate students at least as well as public schools, perform administrative tasks with equal efficiency and be open and accountable to all comers. On those counts, the jury is still most definitely out.