Just as Republicans are expanding charter schools nationwide, charters are cutting costs just to survive.

Cuts to education not only affect public schools, but charter and voucher schools. With tighter state budgets, and continued ideological slashing of education budgets, schools will have no choice but seek out the cheapest route to survive as a business, no matter how it fails our children.

If this sounds absolutely outrageous, and not what you thought would happen to your kid’s education, then you haven’t been paying attention to all the “naysayers,” who have been vilified by the far right.

Liberty and choice sound wonderful, until you figure out it has nothing to do with reality. Check out the cutting and slashing taking place in charter schools now. Oh, remember when we had public schools…?

Hybrid charter schools—those that blend online and face-to-face instruction—has been growing over the past five years. Some observers of the field believe financial stresses have not only caused more charter school founders to embrace a hybrid model in hopes of saving money on teachers, facilities, and content, but have also led some already-existing charters to attempt the transformation from brick-and-mortar to hybrid schools.

But now, the educational model seems to have shifted into overdrive. And while full-time virtual learning has drawn increased scrutiny from the news media, policymakers, and the general public, hybrid models may be fairly insulated from such negative sentiment.

Virtual schools failure rates were very high according to recent research. So with state budget cuts to education, charter schools are looking ahead:

Michael Horn, the co-founder and executive director of the Mountain View, Calif.-based Innosight Institute's education practice and the co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, perhaps the most influential work among K-12 online and blended-learning advocates, said those schools are hoping to be able to cut back on costs, whether it's by using smaller facilities in a model where students attend class every other day and work remotely on the other days, or by increasing pupil-teacher ratios.

That pressure may also be reflected in a flurry of similar developments in Arizona, Michigan, and other states with exceptionally tight education budgets, and could potentially hinder the movement's long-term future if it leads to poorly performing schools. "Some blended-learning models are great and some are pretty bad," Mr. Horn said. "I think you needed a bunch of proof points in the marketplace to really get people excited about it."

Anybody want their kid to be the guinea pig caught in this hodge-podge of private “innovation,” experimentation, budget cutting and uncertainty?