Costly Failure:

California is Overpaying for Online Charter Schools that are Failing Students

Written by Gordon Lafer, Ph.D., Clare Crawford, Larissa Petrucci, and Jennifer Smith

Online charter schools have grown especially rapidly since the COVID-19 pandemic.  While online options are important for some students, online charter schools provide an inferior quality of education by every available measure.  This is true both for the student population as a whole and for every subgroup including African American, Latino, or Asian students, students with disabilities, English language learners, and students who are homeless or in foster homes; every demographic group does worse in online charter schools than in traditional public schools.

Yet despite having much lower costs, such schools generally receive the same dollars per student in public funding – or nearly the same – as do traditional brick-and-mortar schools with regular teachers.  Studies from numerous states show that the cost of operating online charter schools is dramatically lower than that for traditional schools.  This is also evident in the practice of some of the nation’s largest charter chains.  The Connections Academy schools, for instance – a subsidiary of the for-profit Pearson company —  was found to be charging less than $5,000 for students enrolled in its online private elementary school, but taking more than twice that in taxpayer dollars for students enrolled through public school districts.  All told, the report estimates that Californians waste $600 million per year by overpaying for the costs of online charter education.