Skip to content

Sunday, Jun 7, 2020

Do some cyber charter schools misrepresent attendance rates?

Allegra Taylor, Gigafact Foundry
yes

Online charter schools, sometimes called "cyber" charters, receive funding in the same way as brick-and-mortar schools, through a per-pupil allocation. Few states require online charter schools to provide detailed data on attendance and enrollment. There have been multiple instances of these schools inflating attendance numbers.

In 2016, K12 Inc., a for-profit online charter school operator, agreed to an $8.5 million settlement with the state of California over various claims, including inflating attendance records to collect more state funding than it was entitled to. In 2019, the company reported just over $1 billion in revenue from as enrollments grew 6.9% to 118,800.

Another operator, Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, faced similar charges from the state of Ohio in 2017. It closed in 2018.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.