Online Public Schools Are a Disaster, Admits Billionaire, Charter School-Promoter Walton Family Foundation
A new political strategy: throw online charters overboard to save the rest of the school privatization industry.
“If virtual charters were grouped together and ranked as a single school district, it would be the ninth largest in the country and among the worst performing,” co-wrote Walton’s Marc Sternberg and Marc Holley, respectively the foundation’s director of educational giving and its evaluation unit director, in a recent Education Week commentary. “Online education must be reimagined. Ignoring the problem—or worse, replicating failures—serves nobody.”
Last fall, the giant foundation, which has pledged to spend its second billion to expand charter public schools nationally between now and 2020, simultaneously released three detailed comissioned studies finding more than two-thirds of America’s 200,000 charter students receiving all of their instruction over the Internet were barely learning the basics.
“The majority of online charter students had far weaker academic growth in both math and reading compared to their traditional public school peers,” their experts’ press release said, after noting that kindergarten-through-high school students need to be in classrooms with live teachers, not occasional faces on computer screens. “To conceptualize this shortfall, it would equate to a student losing 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math, based on a 180-day school year.”
Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes, or CREDO, which calculated the semesters of lost learning, looked at virtual charter schools in 18 states. It found enrollments had nearly doubled between the 2009-'10 and 2012-'13 school years, documenting a rapidly growing corner of the charter school industry, which presents itself as an alternative to traditional public schools.
“Based on even modest funding levels of $6,000 per student, 65,000 students [in 18 states] represents a public investment of $390,000,000 annually,” CREDO’s report said. With 200,000 students in 200 online schools in 26 Online Public Schools Are a Disaster, Admits Billionaire, Charter School-Promoter Walton Family Foundation | Alternet:
