Serious problems with Colorado online schools

by David Safier

Education Week (subscription only) published a series of 3 articles on Colorado's online schools, based on an intensive 10-month investigation:

1. Public Schools Also Lose When Online Students Fail
2. Test Scores Raise Questions About Colo. Virtual Schools
3. Investigation Finds Lax Oversight of Online Education

I can't say for certain how relevant these revelations are to Arizona, since no one has conducted a similar investigation here. But given our lax charter school laws and oversight, I would expect similar findings in our state.

Should anyone be surprised many online students, especially older ones who are less likely to be watched over by their parents than young children, don't learn a whole lot when they're expected to sit by themselves, at home, in front of a computer 4-6 hours a day doing school work? I would be hard-pressed to have the will power to stick with something like that. Some students thrive, certainly, but as the articles indicate, lots of them do very poorly. Their scores fall on standardized tests, they often leave the online schools in a year or two, and those who stay have terrible graduation rates.

Here are some of the major findings of the three articles.

• Student achievement falls for individual students who go from brick-and-mortar to online schools. The drop is highest for the higher income students.
• Online schools keep students enrolled long enough to get their yearly funding, then an exodus begins back to the schools the students came from. The money stays with the online schools. The brick-and-mortar schools have to educate the students (who have often fallen behind) without getting a penny for the returned students. "At least $6 million annually went to online schools for students who weren’t there."
• About half of online students leave the schools within a year. After two years, only a quarter of the students are still there.
• "Online schools also had among the highest dropout rates and lowest graduation rates in the state over the past two years. In 2010, fewer than one in four online school seniors graduated compared to nearly three of every four high school seniors statewide."
• Online schools use aggressive recruiting tactics to recruit students.
• Online schools spend a great deal of money for lobbyists whose job is to convince legislators to loosen regulations, keep online schools in districts where they aren't wanted and keep online schools from being closed down when their practices and performance rates are sub-standard.

My summary of the findings doesn't do justice to the articles,which include far more information and some mouth-dropping examples of problems with the schools. But this post would be far too long if I went into greater detail.

DON'T BE A BUNCH OF LUDDITES NOTE: Charter schools are problematic, and online charters are doubly so. But I'm not against either type of school, at least in concept. Both are here to stay, and both, when done properly and well, can be advantageous to some students.

A major problem with charters, online and brick-and-mortar, is the profit motive. Mixing profit and education is dangerous for students, since any good business person understands: (1) a dollar not spent on a student is a dollar in the profit column; and (2) profit increases with volume, so more students, whether the school is right for them or not, means money from the state.

If those of us who are concerned about this educational trend turn this into a "Get rid of charters and online education completely" battle, we lose, because we're on the wrong side of history. We need to fight for transparency, regulation and oversight to make sure our children are not being exploited by people who are in education for the wrong reasons.