Six years of receipts. And now — real reform.

On September 5, 2019, we set out with a simple goal—to find out how much a single cyber charter school in Pennsylvania was spending on advertising each year.  We filed a Right-to-Know request with Commonwealth Charter Academy requesting this information.

After six months, hundreds of pages of documents from lawyers, an appeal to the Office of Open Records, and a $250 printing bill, we received hundreds of pages of heavily-redacted invoices.  Buried in these we found an invoice dated 8-18-2018 that showed CCA had spent $850,000 in three months on efforts to recruit students to their school. A second document laid out their spending schedule of $7.9 million for advertising and promotion in a single year.

At that moment, we made a decision. Ed Voters would make it a priority to learn more about how cyber charters were spending tax dollars and ensure that the public, the press, and the legislature had this information.

We were not going to look the other way when the cyber charter industry was wasting millions of hard-earned education tax dollars that were intended to be spent educating students.

Since 2020, Ed Voters has:

       ✔️  Filed hundreds of Right-to-Know requests and catalogued tens of thousands of invoices;

       ✔️  Written reports exposing wasteful spending and documenting the extraordinary fund balances and a building empire cyber charters have amassed;

       ✔️  Delivered memos to lawmakers, held “Cyber Charter Waste” days in the Capitol, and testified before legislative committees;

       ✔️  Held events throughout the commonwealth to raise public awareness and worked with the press to ensure that communities in every corner of Pennsylvania  know how the cyber charter industry wastes their tax dollars; and

        ✔️  We even won a Right-to-Know case on appeal in the Commonwealth Court with expert legal representation from the Public Interest Law Center that has precedential effect and can be used to guide future Commonwealth Court decisions focused on issues of transparency.

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Thirty-three weeks ago, we launched our Waste of the Week campaign, pulling back the curtain on one eye-opening example of wasteful spending at a time. And each week, the pattern was unmistakable: cyber charter schools have been burning through tax dollars that were supposed to support students and wasting them on:

• Social media ads,
• Costly TV and radio campaigns,
• Luxury retreats,
• Gift cards and giveaways,
• Real estate empires, and
• An endless stream of expenses that have nothing to do with student learning.

Today, we are sending you our final Waste of the Week (for now). The  reforms enacted in Harrisburg as part of the 2025-2026 state budget are a reset for cyber charters. School district payments to cybers will be reduced by more than $178 million this year and the attendance, truancy, residency, and  wellness check reforms will impact the industry’s operations.  It is not right for us to look back at their spending before these changes. 

However, this does not mean that the work is done. 

We will continue to advocate for additional needed reforms. We will be vigilant and continue to track cyber charter spending, expose abuse, and watchdog the industry. And we will monitor the compliance of cyber operators with the new requirements in the law.

These hard-won cyber charter funding and accountability reforms are the result of decades of work by advocates and school officials in every corner of the commonwealth and we are very proud of the work Ed Voters has done to contribute to the passage of this law. We are also deeply grateful for the lawmakers who said enough is enough and elevated cyber charter reform to be a priority for the General Assembly.

While you won’t be getting Waste of the Week emails from us in the near future, we hope you will continue to be engaged in our team’s efforts to support and defend public education in Pennsylvania (we do a lot!). The work we all do together matters and the impact on public school students is real.

Thank you for being with us every step of the way. More updates soon — and many more opportunities  to make a difference for public school students ahead! 

PS: If you believe in Ed Voters’ work, please consider making a donation today. We are a small team that operates on a shoestring budget. Every donation helps increase our capacity to make an impact! 

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