HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Cyber charter schools appear to be spending millions of dollars in taxpayer money on advertising, but at least one refuses to show the details.
Commonwealth Charter Academy is one of the biggest cyber charters in the state and recruits students through extensive and expensive advertising.
But the school responded to a Right to Know request by claiming details about those expenses are "protected trade secrets" and turned over documents that were heavily redacted.
According to Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters of Pennsylvania, those documents still revealed some disturbing numbers.
"The cyber charter school is spending, on average, probably $7 million to $8 million a year on contracts with lobbying and public relations firms and on services," she points out.
Spicka says state law needs to be changed to require transparency in the way charters spend nearly $2 billion of taxpayer money every year.
Cyber charters receive the same amount of taxpayer money per student as brick-and-mortar public schools.
Spicka calls the advertising budget excessive and says the public has a right to know how those funds are being spent.
"We don't know if they're using this money to try to skew their enrollment," she states. "Are they focusing on high-tuition school districts? Are they trying to exclude some students or student populations?"
Spicka says the $8 million spent on advertising could have hired 80 or more teachers in under-resourced classrooms or hundreds of teachers' aides.
Spicka wants to see the law changed to require that all charter school advertising state that it was paid for with taxpayer dollars and to require charters and school districts to post those expenses online for the public to see.
"I think most Pennsylvanians would be really surprised to learn that cyber charter schools are using the property tax dollars they get to fund protected trade secrets of these high-priced lobbying and advertising firms," she states.
A bill was introduced last year to require that all charter school advertising referring to tuition stipulate that it is taxpayer funded, but the bill did not come to the floor for a vote.
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Education advocates are calling on lawmakers to increase funding for programs to combat the teacher shortage.
Around 37% of schools nationwide report being short at least one teacher. The problem is worse at schools serving high-poverty neighborhoods where more than half report a vacancy.
Susan Kemper Patrick, a senior researcher on the Educator Quality team at the Learning Policy Institute, said those numbers are troublingly high.
"At least 314,000 teaching positions across the U.S. are either unfilled or filled with teachers who are not fully certified for their assignments," she said. "This means at least one in ten teaching positions nationally are either unfilled or not filled with a certified teacher."
Data from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing showed 10,000 teacher vacancies in the 2021-22 school year. The number of teacher credentials issued that year was down 16% from the previous year - but has now started to trend upward.
In 2023, California passed a bill to make it easier for retired teachers to return to the classroom.
Kemper Patrick noted that schools are resorting to desperate measures such as combining classes, relying on a virtual teacher or using a long-term substitute.
"The U.S. Department of Education School Pulse survey found that 36% of public schools across the U.S. reported that they had to increase class size due to teacher and staff vacancies," she said.
Kemper Patrick blamed the problem on low salaries, noting the average starting salary for a teacher nationwide is less than $43,000 a year. Congress is currently considering two bills, the Diversify Act and the Educators for America Act, which would double the amount of the Teach America grant from $4,000 to $8,000 per year.
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It's estimated that nearly half of all schools in the country don't have enough teachers. To help change that, the University of Texas in El Paso offers a residency program to help ensure that first-time teachers succeed.
The "Miner Teacher Residency" gives students in the College of Education an opportunity to work in elementary and middle schools alongside working teachers.
Clifton Tanabe, dean of the UTEP College of Education, was part of a recent national roundtable discussion on ways to solve the teacher shortage, and said the program gives future educators the skills they need to be ready for their first day of class.
"A third grader in a first-year teacher's classroom is only going to get to do third grade once, but that teacher will be able to do the third grade again and again," he explained. "So, we want them ready for that first group of third graders that they take on."
Tanabe added nearly half of the students enrolled in the program are first-generation college students and 70% are bilingual. He adds that mirrors the population of students in the public school system in El Paso, where 90% of the students are Hispanic. Most of the new teachers remain in the area, he said.
Many school districts have been forced to leave positions open, or fill them with teachers who are not fully certified. Some rural Texas districts have gone to a four-day school week. And some teachers are leaving the profession, citing increased workloads, low pay and concerns about safety.
According to Tanabe, teacher retention is directly related to being successful in the first two years on the job - and the UT program addresses this.
"So, folks who graduate from our residency model in their first and second years in teaching are set up with an instructional coach who's from the university, from the College of Education, to work with them on individualized instructional improvement," he continued.
The residency program is in its sixth year. It currently has 62 teachers working in five different school districts in the El Paso area.
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Ohio's Black students are more likely to face excessively harsh discipline practices such as expulsion and suspension, according to a recently released report from the Children's Defense Fund of Ohio.
The data show out-of-school suspensions and expulsions rose in every grade level from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the 2022-23 school year, compared with the previous academic year.
John Standford, state director for the Children's Defense Fund of Ohio, said economically disadvantaged students comprised 83% of all out-of-school suspensions.
"School districts really have to pay closer attention to the data and really screen the data, review the data, on a regular basis to really begin to address the issues of inequities," Standford urged.
Last year saw 174,000 cases of total suspension or expulsion among low-income students compared to 35,000 cases among students who do not qualify as economically disadvantaged. According to the report, Black females in Ohio were six times more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions than their white female peers. Black males were also more than four times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white male peers.
Kim Eckhart, research manager for the fund, said she understands the difficulties teachers face. She hopes the report encourages districts across the state to support schools with the resources and time needed to address behavioral problems restoratively.
"We need schools to be supporting teachers with additional time and space," Eckhart contended. "So that there is capacity to address these things, rather than just kicking the student out of the class, kicking them out of the school."
School discipline practices are also linked to Ohio's alarmingly high chronic absenteeism rates. According to the report, missing as little as two days of school per month can lead to chronic absence. More than 26% of Ohio students -- more than 400,000 children -- were chronically absent from school in the 2022-2023 school year, up by nearly half from the 2018-19 school year.
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