Even in the ethically dubious world of charter schools, online charters seem to be dicey.<\/p>\n
Now comes a study which indicates that online charters are about as effective as not going to school at all<\/a>:<\/p>\n A new study on the effectiveness of online charter schools is nothing short of damning \u2014 even though it was at least partly funded by a private pro-charter foundation. It effectively says that the average student who attends might as well not enroll.<\/span> (emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n Fundamentally, the problem here is that many of the supporters of things like cyber-charter schools are autodidacts, the sort of people who would literally break into computer science lab in the dead of night to teach themselves about computers. (This is an actual example from the life of Bill Gates, a big charter supporter.)<\/p>\n People who are that aggressively self taught are few and far between, and there are simply not enough people who fit that mold (I don’t, for example) for the rapidly expanding rolls of internet academies, and those who could succeed with these institutions don’t really need them. They could learn anywhere.<\/p>\n BTW, this is also an indictment of MOOC<\/a>s, (M<\/b><\/u>assive O<\/b><\/u>pen O<\/b><\/u>nline C<\/b><\/u>ourses) which seem to be the latest fad in higher education.<\/p>\n
<\/span> The study was done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, and located at Stanford University, in collaboration with the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and Mathematica Policy Research. CREDO\u2019s founding director, Margaret Raymond, served as project director. CREDO receives funding from the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation, which provided support for the new research.<\/span>
<\/span> CREDO has released a number of reports in recent years on the effectiveness of charters \u2014 using math and reading standardized test scores as the measure \u2014 which collectively conclude that some perform better than traditional public schools and some don\u2019t. In its newest report, released this week, CREDO evaluated online K-12 charter schools. There are 17 states with online charter students: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.<\/span>
<\/span> The study sought to answer this question: \u201cHow did enrollment in an online charter school affect the academic growth of students?\u201d Academic growth, as mentioned before, is measured by standardized test scores for the purpose of this study, which evaluated scores from online charter students between 2008 and 2013 and compared them to students in traditional public schools (not brick-and-mortar charters). Here are some of the findings:<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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<\/span> Layton quoted Raymond as saying, \u201cThere\u2019s still some possibility that there\u2019s positive learning, but it\u2019s so statistically significantly different from the average, it is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year<\/span><\/b>.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n