Online charter school students are lagging

No surprise that a new study shows that online charter schools are a total disaster for kids – this is 100% consistent with my report from two years ago on the largest online charter operator, K12 (see www.tilsonfunds.com/K12.pdf):

Students in the nation's virtual K-12 charter schools — 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 is available at: http://credo.stanford.edu/research-reports.html

Stanford study shows that online charter school students are lagging

The first national analysis of its kind has found that K-12 students enrolled in online public charter schools — where they take all courses online — seriously lag their counterparts in traditional public schools in math and reading achievement. (David Paul Morris/BLOOMBERG)

By Lyndsey Layton October 27

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/stanford-study-shows-that-online-charter-school-students-are-lagging/2015/10/27/c42dc502-7cce-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html