Education Week - November 4, 2015 - 8

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Study: Cybercharters' Effect 'Overwhelmingly Negative'
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overall academic growth than similar
brick-and-mortar schools. As a group,
the schools were characterized by
high student-to-teacher ratios, low
student engagement, and high student mobility. They also offered students limited opportunities for live
contact with teachers. From funding
to enrollment to oversight, states are
failing to keep up with the unique
policy challenges that online charters
present, the researchers contended.
Only in Georgia and Wisconsin did
online charter schools show more
promising results. Online charters
in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas had
the worst results, in both reading and
math.
The findings "leave little doubt
attending an online charter school
leads to lessened academic growth
for the average student," wrote the
researchers from CREDO.
In response, the country's largest
for-profit operator of online charter
schools criticized the studies as based
on outdated data and a questionable
methodology.
National groups representing charters and online-learning proponents,
meanwhile, described the results as
alarming and troubling.
"There is a place for virtual schooling in our nation, but there is no
place for results like these," said Greg
Richmond, the president and CEO of
the National Association of Charter
School Authorizers, in a statement.

Rapidly Growing Sector
Despite being a relatively recent
phenomenon, full-time online charter
schools now enroll about 8 percent of
charter students nationwide, according to CRPE, a think tank affiliated
with the University of Washington.
Overall, white students (71 percent of total enrollment) are over-

represented in online charters, while
Hispanic students (12 percent) and
English-language learners (0.4 percent) are underrepresented, according
to Mathematica, which conducted a
survey of 127 online charter principals
for its study.
The Mathematica researchers
found student-to-teacher ratios
that averaged about 30-to-1 in online charters, compared with 20to-1 for brick-and-mortar charters
and 17-to-1 for traditional public
schools. Other support staff were
also scarce: Most of the online charters surveyed did not use tutors,
teaching aides, or instructional assistants and had only one guidance
counselor.

Weak Academic Gains
Because online charter students
learn over the Internet, often via selfpaced courses, proponents have questioned the relevance of such figures.
They have also pointed to online
charters' use of "synchronous" technologies, ranging from phone calls to
Web conferencing, as a strategy for
allowing teachers to interact with a
wide range of students in real time.
But the Mathematica researchers
found that's more aspiration than
reality.
"Students in a typical online charter
school have less synchronous instructional time in a week than students
in brick-and-mortar schools have in a
day," they wrote.
In looking at the impact of attending an online charter school,
the CREDO researchers contrasted
the annual academic growth of
students attending online charters
with that of a comparison group
that was similar in terms of grade
level, gender, race/ethnicity, poverty, English-language-learner and
special education status, and prior
scores on state tests.

37,977

Ohio

34,588

Pennsylvania

25,615

California

14,891

Georgia
Arizona

12,766

Colorado

12,307

Nevada

8,967

Texas

8,605

Oregon
Wisconsin

6,724
5,810

HIGHEST CYBERCHARTER ENROLLMENTS
Some 200,000 students nationwide are enrolled in full-time
online charter schools. Among the 26 states where such
schools operate, these 10 have the most students enrolled.
SOURCE: Mathematica Policy Research.

Members of the comparison group
attended the traditional brick-andmortar schools where their peers
would most likely have landed had
they not been cybercharter students.
The analysis focuses on academic
growth, not absolute achievement.
The analysis CREDO conducted for
its piece of the three-part study, called
Online Charter School Study 2015,
included data from 158 schools in 17
states and the District of Columbia.
In a statement, K12 Inc., a for-profit
company affiliated with schools that
enrolled more than one-third of online
charter students in 2013, attacked

GETTY

that methodology, saying it's impossible to create legitimate "virtual twins"
for online charter students, as the
CREDO researchers purported to do.
In their analysis, the CREDO researchers found that online charter schools in 13 states showed far
weaker gains in reading than traditional schools. In two states, no significant differences between online
charters and traditional schools were
found. Online charters showed positive effects on reading gains in Georgia and Wisconsin.

Math a Particular Problem
Online charters were not found to
have a positive effect on mathematical gains in any state. In three states,
no significant differences were found.
The CREDO researchers found that
online charters showed significantly
weaker math gains than traditional
schools in 14 states.
Just about any way the data were
sliced for online charters-by racial
and ethnic subgroups, for students
in poverty, by instructional and
management model, compared with
brick-and-mortar charters-the story
of weak academic growth in online
charters was largely the same.
"All student profiles ... have weaker
growth in online charter schools than
in [traditional public schools]," the
CREDO report says. "This is due to
the overwhelming negative impact
on student growth from attending an
online charter school."
About two-thirds of online charter
schools contract with for-profit education management organizations for
help with curriculum, assessments,
professional development, and management services.

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 4, 2015 | www.edweek.org

K12 Inc., the largest such organization, said in its statement that it has
been aware of academic challenges
among its students for some time and
has invested millions of dollars in efforts to improve.
"We have taken vigorous actions
over the past two years to meet these
challenges with results not reflected
in this study," the statement says.
"We are proud of where we are today
and where we are going."
In a statement, Nina Rees, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said
she was "disheartened to learn of the
large-scale underperformance of fulltime virtual charter public schools."
She cited possible changes that
might help the sector, including funding online charters based on performance, rather than enrollment.
Rees also noted that the new reports
do not address students in brick-andmortar schools who take an occasional
course online, or "blended" models
that combine online and face-to-face
instruction. Full-time online schools
operated by states and districts were
also not included in the CREDO,
CRPE, and Mathematica studies.
Those caveats aside, the new
findings provoked a common reaction from researchers and practitioners alike.
"My recommendation to policymakers is to first address the qualityassurance question before continuing
to open up access" to online charters,
said Susan Patrick, the president
and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.
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Education Week - November 4, 2015

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