Stanford study shows that online charter school students are lagging
Students in the nation’s virtual K-12 charter schools — with students who take all of their classes via computer from home — learn significantly less on average than students at traditional public schools, a new study has found.
The online charter students lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math during the course of a 180-day school year, the study found. In other words, when it comes to math, it’s as if the students did not attend school at all.
“There’s still some possibility that there’s positive learning, but it’s so statistically significantly different from the average, it is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year,” said Margaret E. Raymond, project director at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, at Stanford University.
It was the first national study of its kind to examine the academic impact of online public charter schools, which receive tax dollars but operate privately, often under the leadership of for-profit companies.
The study looked at students attending full-time, publicly funded virtual schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia and annual academic performance between 2008 and 2013. It excluded students who take one or two online courses but spend the bulk of their time in a “brick and mortar school” and those who attend blended learning schools, which offer a mix of traditional and online instruction.
The average online charter student lagged in reading achievement behind their counterparts attending traditional schools in all states except for Wisconsin and Georgia, where their growth was “significantly stronger.”
When it comes to math, students attending online charters did worse in 14 states and performed the same as their counterparts at traditional schools in three states — Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“It may be good for some students, but the evidence suggests for the majority of online students, the online charters are not serving them very well when it comes to academic growth,” said James L. Woodworth of CREDO, which collaborated on the study with the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Stanford study shows that online charter school students are lagging - The Washington Post:
