Charter School Organizations Sound Alarm over Online Schools!

Dear Commons Community,

A coalition of charter school organizations (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50CAN-The 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now) has just issued a report expressing serious concerns about online charter schools. What is significant about this report is that these organizations in the past have been supporters of online education.  The authors for this report reviewed existing research and collected additional data on their own.  The overall summary of the report (see below for details) is that:

“compared to traditional public school students, full-time virtual charter school students have much weaker academic growth overall.. data show that in a given year full-time virtual charter school students overall make no gains in math and less than half the gains in reading realized by their peers in traditional public schools.”

Online learning has a lot to offer education at all levels but these types of results are very problematic and threaten to hurt its development. The organizations that produced this report were right to sound the alarm.

Tony

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Summary of Findings

Full-time virtual charter schools perform worse than traditional public schools in most states. Of the 17 states included in the state level results in the “Online Charter School Study” by CREDO, fulltime virtual charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools in 13 states in reading, performed better in only two states, and the differences were not significant in two states. In math, full-time virtual charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools in 14 states, while the differences were not significant in three states.

All subgroups of students have weaker academic growth in full-time virtual charter schools than in traditional public schools. All subgroups of students – white, black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American, multi-racial, those in poverty, English-language learners, and special education students – perform worse in full-time virtual charter schools than in traditional public schools.

The vast majority of full-time virtual charter schools perform worse than traditional public schools. In reading, 67 percent of full-time virtual charter schools have weaker growth than their comparison schools. Only 2 percent outperform their comparison schools, while 32 percent perform no differently.   

In math, a full 88 percent of full-time virtual charter schools had significantly weaker growth than their comparison schools, with the remaining 12 percent performing no differently.

The average full-time virtual charter school student stays for a short time. On average, students spend two years in full-time virtual charter schools.

The mobility rates for students after they leave full-time virtual charter schools are extremely high. Full-time virtual charter school students have a mobility rate of 36 percent, meaning that students who leave full-time virtual charter schools have a more chaotic school experience after they leave full-time virtual charter schools than they did before they enrolled in such schools.

 

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