Editor’s note: This is the final piece in the series titled “Virtual Dominance: How a cyber charter school has upended K-12 education in Pa.” The series looked at the causes and consequences of the unprecedented growth of Commonwealth Charter Academy, Pa.’s fastest growing school. The final piece is an analysis of what the stories revealed.
Commonwealth Charter Academy is the most successful education organization that most Pa. residents had never heard about — until recently.
The cyber charter school is larger than any K-12 district in the commonwealth outside Philadelphia. And its roughly $667 million budget last year was substantially larger than the budgets of Dauphin County, the city of Harrisburg and Harrisburg Public Schools — combined.
PennLive published a 10-part series, “Virtual Dominance,” about how the school has managed to attract more than 35,000 students and what the implications are of this explosive growth.
Even as PennLive began publishing the first half of the series in October, some of the dynamics that made CCA so successful were starting to change. Lawmakers drastically cut the school’s funding and are requiring the school to adapt to new regulations. Then, some local school districts started pursuing legal action to reign in the school’s excesses.
One reason CCA flew under the radar for so long is its growth is unprecedented. It added 25,000 students in the past five years. The speed of this change caught politicians, regulators, educators — and news outlets — off-guard.
The school has also avoided attention. Charter schools are designed to be run by non-profit trustees who are appointed rather than democratically elected. Innovation can require ruffling the feathers of the status quo and nonprofit boards are, in theory, better able to withstand pressure to conform than publicly elected boards. But even among cyber charter schools, PennLive’s investigation found, CCA has stood out for how little it prioritizes transparency.
This may not be an accident: CCA owes much of its success to its willingness to buck conventions. The school separated itself from the national for-profit company that was controlling it, Connections Academy, to give it more local control. Then the school invested heavily in developing its own software and educational content rather than relying on a national curriculum. Some of its staff say the school didn’t always prioritize quality as it was being developed, but the school says owning the curriculum has given it flexibility.
Most recently CCA invested more than $700 million in a network of “Family Education Center” buildings, while other cyber schools were spending more on staff or saving in their rainy day funds. Whether or not you agree with CCA’s choices – and not even everyone at CCA did – the school has been forging its own path.
CCA’s willingness to take on educational orthodoxy has extended to the regulatory body responsible for overseeing it: the Pennsylvania Department of Education [PDE]. The school has resisted PDE’s efforts to impose an enrollment cap that would limit how many students it could serve. It has fought efforts to require students to appear on-camera or in-person as part of a system of wellness checks, even after one of its students died from neglect. And the school has become the de facto center of resistance to the state’s standardized testing regime.
The school’s ability to avoid and resist public scrutiny has some limits: The school is publicly funded and subject to the whims of Pa.’s political process. CCA and other cyber charters have faced the threat of budget cuts every year for more than a decade. But Republicans in the state legislature, who are strong advocates of school choice, have largely protected CCA in the past.
So it seems to have caught CCA off-guard that its own rapid success was changing the political dynamics that had previously given it cover. The Pa. legislature passed a roughly 20% cut in funding for cyber charter schools in November, along with several other regulations meant to provide more accountability. Those cuts followed more modest cuts and changes passed in 2024.
CCA’s political power has always been more diffuse than traditional school districts because its students are spread across the commonwealth. Most voters have their kids enrolled in local public schools. So even Republicans who believe strongly in school choice face an electorate more directly invested in their local district’s success than CCA’s.
The financial impact CCA was having on these schools grew too large to ignore. (There are 13 other cyber charter schools who make up about half of the Pa.’s cyber charter sector but the rapid growth has only come from CCA.) The impact was muted at first because local school districts were receiving additional COVID-relief funding. But when that federal funding dried up, local school district leaders began to complain loudly about the roughly $100 million in additional lost revenue they were facing each year, as CCA continued to attract more students.
CCA hasn’t said yet how it’s going to respond to the recently passed state funding cuts.
When CCA was just a small or medium-sized charter school, most voters and politicians didn’t notice how CCA dug in its heels. But CCA is no longer an upstart, alternative to the traditional public school system; CCA now forms one of the largest parts of the system.
CCA could try to adapt to its new political reality by increasing its transparency or working more collaboratively with regulators. But early indications suggest that it may continue a combative approach: the school held special board meetings in December and January to hire three new law firms.
CCA isn’t the only actor that needs to adapt: so do traditional school districts. The recent budget cuts won’t make the financial challenge that CCA represents go away. The financial pressure will return and could grow even larger if local schools don’t figure out how to retain the students CCA has been taking away.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education also needs to adapt: CCA’s dominance isn’t just a threat to the funding of traditional schools, but the rest of the cyber charter school sector. Smaller schools are showing signs they are struggling to attract students as they compete with the singular megaphone that CCA now wields. CCA was born out of the innovation that charter schools are meant to foster but its size could squelch potential future innovations.
If CCA wants to avoid future cuts and regulations, it may have to more proactively make the case that its students are best served by a mega-cyber charter school. There are some obvious advantages to its size, such as being able to offer a wide variety of classes, more physical locations and some economies of scale. But it’s possible the school’s quality will suffer from continued growth, which some former CCA staff members told PennLive, has already happened.
CCA seems to do little outreach to the public beyond parent recruitment and tours for politicians. It doesn’t send out regular press releases, organize events that provide transparency into its operations, publish robust data about academic performance or explain the trade-offs involved in the strategic decisions it makes — or even acknowledge that trade-offs exist.
CCA’s CEO, Tom Longenecker, almost never gives media interviews and didn’t respond to roughly a dozen requests from PennLive. The school’s chairman of the board has taken to throwing insults at media coverage he doesn’t like rather than devising a plan to better communicate with the public.
Much of the school’s communication efforts are focused on attracting new students and keeping parents happy. But if the school wants the political support necessary to continue its work, CCA may have to try to more actively persuade people who don’t experience the school first-hand — that it’s providing a high-quality education to all its students.
The question about quality
The resistance to state testing at CCA, in particular, has upended one of the main mechanisms by which charter schools are supposed to be held accountable. Republican President George W. Bush pushed an educational reform agenda that promoted more choice among charter schools, at the same time he tried to increase accountability through standardized testing. The theory was that parents would choose higher quality schools and struggling schools would have to adapt, improve or close.
CCA has turned this formulation on its head: instead of attracting parents with evidence of the school’s quality, CCA’s leaders say the fact that parents choose the school is the evidence of its quality.
There isn’t a clear measure of quality anymore to give teeth to any efforts to hold CCA accountable. Neither Democratic nor Republican leaders show much support for Pa.’s current testing requirements and they have not given a clear vision of what being a quality school is supposed to look like.
And until that happens, CCA’s growth has demonstrated that Pa.’s de facto measure of school quality is enrollment because that’s how Pa.’s schools are financially rewarded. CCA’s leaders get this: They often describe the school as a family service organization, first and foremost, and secondarily, an educational institution.
This can be seen in how CCA runs its office buildings with corporate efficiency. Its employees respond quickly to parent concerns and often do whatever it takes to make them happy. Thousands of those parents have become fervent supporters of the school. There are undoubtedly many public schools that would benefit by taking a more customer-service approach to their relationships with parents.
One of the big unanswered questions remaining is what CCA’s growth ultimately means for the 35,000 students it is supposed to educate. CCA’s critics worry its students will ultimately be less prepared to enter Pa.’s colleges and workforce, as the school lowers standards to keep parents happy. No amount of positive parent survey responses will prepare CCA’s students for the real world challenges they will ultimately face.
Academic studies tend to show cyber school students doing worse than students in traditional schools after they graduate. And while there are limitations to these studies, they at least serve as a stand-in for the students who are hard to reach. It is hard to get a CCA parent who is avoiding truancy problems to tell her story, for example. And it’s hard to know exactly what proportion of CCA’s students are benefiting from its flexibility and how many are using the school’s flexible approach to avoid accountability.
The academic studies and test data tend to show one thing; the school’s most vocal parents tend to believe another.
While this seems like a stalemate, this past year shows that Pa.’s political leaders and CCA’s parents continue to forge ahead with the best information available to them.
You can read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and 10th stories in the series here.