What's wrong with virtual charter schools
The education of thousands of North Carolina students and millions of taxpayer dollars are currently at risk in the latest school privatization scheme that continues to draw far too little attention from the media and even many education advocates.
Two online charter schools opened in the state this fall, operated by two different for-profit companies, one of which, K12 Inc., has a scandal-plagued record in other states.
A provision snuck into the budget in the 2014 legislative session ordered the State Board of Education to approve two virtual charters as pilot programs. Only two companies applied to run the online schools, guaranteeing they would both be selected.
Numerous studies have raised serious questions about the performance of virtual charters and K12 schools in particular.
A report by a Washington think tank about a California virtual charter run by the company found dramatically lower test scores than traditional public schools, startling high dropout rates, questionable attendance figures and a host of other problems.
Two months ago a report from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that there are problems with online charters in general, not just the ones run by K12.
The report was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, a strong advocate for the charter school movement, and found that students in online charters made far less progress than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
One of the authors of the report said the gains in math were so small that it was “literally as though the student did not go to school for the entire year.”
Last week brought maybe the most compelling evidence of all that the General Assembly made a terrible decision in ordering the state board to approve the schools.
The former education commissioner of Tennessee, Kevin Huffman, described his experience of the last four years overseeing the virtual charter in his state, also operated by K12, on the education blog The Seventy Four.
Huffman, himself a strong pro-charter and school-choice advocate appointed by conservative Republican Gov. Bill Haslam, pulls few punches in his essay that includes this summary.
“From these modest beginnings and with the help of an unscrupulous operator, an inept school district, and the generally screwed-up politics of education, the worst-performing school in Tennessee opened and remains open to this day,” Huffman says.
Huffman goes on to describe how the virtual school was plagued by operational problems Chris Fitzsimon: What's wrong with virtual charter schools - Winston-Salem Journal: Columnists:
