Many educators agree that the formula for funding charter schools and cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania is broken. The Basic Education Funding Commission is currently holding hearings with the goal of creating a new formula for funding all schools in the state, and that may well involve the creation of a new scheme for funding charter schools.

As the situation exists now, charter schools are funded almost entirely by the school districts where the student lives, and this creates a burden for schools and property tax payers. This is taking an ever greater share of taxpayer money, because the students leaving traditional public schools generally do not result in decreased costs for those schools.

Dr. Wayne McCullough is a member of a committee of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials working on recommendations about the new formula. He testified before the commission on November 24 and said that, in most school districts, “when you remove 50 students from the classrooms, and you take one out of this class, and one out of that, a few out of second grade a few out of fifth grade, there are no cost savings attached, so it become entirely a burden of the local taxpayer.”

He continued, “Between 2011/12 and 2012/13, a full 57% of the increase in property taxes statewide was dedicated to paying the annual increase in charter school expenses.” Before the 2011/12 school year, districts received money from the state that covered about 25% to 30% of the cost of charter schools operations, but now districts get no state funding to cover this state-mandated cost.

Many state officials are weighing in on the matter. Eugene DePasquale, Pennsylvania’s auditor general, wrote an editorial recently and noted that the charter school funding picture is exacerbated by the flawed overall education funding process in the state.

He said “In the state’s 500 public school districts, the per-pupil funding for basic and special education varies dramatically, ranging from $10,000 in some districts to as much as $42,000 per pupil in others.

“This dramatic difference in funding becomes even more vivid in the case of cyber charter schools. Cyber schools [which are schools that exist only on the Internet] must accept students from all 500 school districts, and, because of disparities in the per-pupil funding process, they may receive up to 500 different regular education tuition rates and 500 different special education tuition rates.

“Cyber charter school students—no matter what county they reside in—receive the same instruction, but the tuition paid to the cyber schools by their home school districts can vary by tens of thousands of dollars a year.”

There is also a question about whether the funds going to charters, and especially cyber-charters, are bringing a good return on investments. A review of School Performance Profiles (SPP) of the three kinds of schools in the state by an organization called Research for Action found that the average score for traditional public schools in the state for the 2013/14 school year was 76.9, the average for brick and mortar charter schools was 65.1 and the average for cyber charter schools was 48.7.

The commission has many questions to consider as it tries to create a new formula, such as whether or not to hold onto the current “hold harmless” practice, which guarantees that districts will get at least as much funding as they got the previous year, even if student enrollment goes down. But the funding of charters is one of the more important they will have to answer.

DePasquale recommends that the state reinstitute the charter school tuition reimbursement from the state to school districts and that payments for cyber charter schools come directly from the state rather than school districts.

McCullough recommends that the number of charter students in a school district be taken into account in any funding scheme. We see that as a bare minimum in the creation of the new funding formula.