The Walton Family Foundation has been a key player in the movement to privatize public education. It recently pledged to pump $200 millions year into new charter schools to compete with public schools and drain away their resources.
Nonetheless, Walton published an editorial in Education Week admitting that online charter schools were a failure. Walton funded the research that showed their negative results.
“The results are, in a word, sobering. The CREDO study found that over the course of a school year, the students in virtual charters learned the equivalent of 180 fewer days in math and 72 fewer days in reading than their peers in traditional charter schools, on average.
“This is stark evidence that most online charters have a negative impact on students’ academic achievement. The results are particularly significant because of the reach and scope of online charters: They currently enroll some 200,000 children in 200 schools operating across 26 states. 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.
“Funders, educators, policymakers, and parents cannot in good conscience ignore the fact that students are falling a full year behind their peers in math and nearly half a school year in reading, annually. For operators and authorizers of these schools to do nothing would constitute nothing short of educational malpractice.”
Unfortunately, Walton doesn’t promise to stop funding these failed ideas. But it does promise to ask tough questions when the next online charter asks for money.
Fooled me once, shame on you.
Fooled me twice, shame on me.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can anyone tell me, then, why the Obama Administration and the various foundations are so blatantly pushing online learning into existing public schools?
Shouldn’t this give them pause, instead of inspiring what amounts to a huge government/private sector marketing campaign to push schools into investing in more online classes?
Maybe they should go back and read how they sold online charters. How did that work out? Is there maybe some caution and common sense called for in the latest marketing campaign? Maybe the “digital natives” are actually just children and not a new species?
I seem to remember some governor pushing the idea that all students would be required to take an online course in order to graduate. Did I dream this idea?
Jeb and his “Digital Learning Now!” pushed online courses as a graduation requirement
Several states went along
2Old2Teach, this may not be in effect any longer but at one time recently, students in Alabama had to take an on-line class to graduate.
It was Floridah.
Don’t forget that Idaho had (or maybe still has?) the same requirement–to take at least two online classes in order to graduate.
Maybe they could also impress upon the buddies in the “online charter sector” in states like Ohio to cool it with the constant ads and marketing.
Did the public sign up to pay to promote for-profit schools? I don’t recall any of the ed reform politicians running on that. Every time I hear an ad I think “we all just paid for that”. How many marketing and ad people and media outlets are we paying with public education dollars? Is that why we see less and less of the money we sent to the state in actual public schools?
Chiara: your second paragraph highlights a feature—not a bug—of the charter/privatization movement.
And it is an area where the purveyors of corporate education reform rarely try to defend the “new civil rights movement of our time.” How telling is their avoidance of this topic? On this blog we’ve even had tepid defenses of the humungous salary of Eva Moskowitz ($ucce$$ Academy) but for advertising—pretty much “silence is golden” when it comes to taking public monies out of the classroom and into the pockets of advertisers. Just doesn’t fit with the “it’s all for the kids!” and “we do more with less!” and like mantras of self-styled “education reform.”
Thank you for bringing up this important point.
😎
If I have to see ONE MORE AD regarding Utah Connections Academy, I’m throwing my TV out a window. My personal “favorite” is the commercial where the student “loves literature taught by UCA so much that she became a teacher.” Has to be seen to be believed, but You Tube doesn’t have the ads. Go figure.
Maybe the Waltons and others should consider that competency based education is really online education with a Bill Gates ribbon around it. What Gates and others fail to understand is that the most effective programs engage humans in meaningful interactions with other humans that direct, guide, inform, question and elicit based on feedback from other humans. CBE is like putting lipstick on a pig.
When i first started teaching ESL, I taught high school in a class that was mostly Haitian. I was required to take them to the language lab twice a week. This room was arranged with partitioned desks for each student. I noticed almost every student pushed his/her chair back, not to be a problem, but so they could see each other. I concluded they couldn’t stand the sense of isolation. The students also groaned when we had to go to the lab. It was a drag! Research tells us that cyber programs only seem to work with older, motivated middle class students, even then they are often bored to tears.
When are the Waltons going to admit their business model is a failure for everyone except themselves?
I went to the CREDO website, downloaded the report, read. It is very damning for cyber charter schools. There are several other reports on the same site for the same subject worth the read.
The problem is is that the State Governors and Legislators have blinders on and do not take the time to really study the issue. What they see is a possible way to save money on facilities and Teachers. Wrong things to worry about!!! Worry about will the Students actually receive a quality education that will prepare them for life. It is not happening cyber charter schools (virtual charter schools). New Mexico has two statewide virtual charter schools that were not part of the CREDO study but clearly from the testing reports and school grades these two schools are not making the educational marks needed for our children. But, they are making a lot of money for K-12, Inc. and Connections (Pearson owned virtual schools).
Virtual schools are just money makers. Not institutions for properly educating our children.
CREDO is a part of the conservative Hoover Institution housed at Stanford University. CREDO is funded by the equally conservative Walton Foundation with Pearson contributing to some studies. CREDO’s study focused on two subjects only, comparing test scores.
The difference in test scores is one thing. The statement that transforms those scores into days of learning is a statistical fiction.
“The CREDO study found that over the course of a school year, the students in virtual charters learned the equivalent of 180 fewer days in math and 72 fewer days in reading than their peers in traditional charter schools, on average.”
There is no “standardized day of learning.” If “a standardized day of learning” did exist , I doubt that the length of that “day” would be the same in an online environment and environment of a charter school with face to face interactions between students and teachers.
This fiction was created by three economists who seem not to understand the difference between instruction and learning, whether on line or in regular classrooms. CREDO relies on a days of learning formula created by Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Lugar Woessmann. “Is the US Catching UP? International and State Trends in Student Achievement.” Education Next, Vol. 123, No. 4, Fall 2012.
The Waltons want everything on the cheap. From the way they treat thier employees to the way they want to treat our children. Only the Waltons win in “Wally World”. They are the worst of the worst. Shame on ANY educator shopping within their four walls. Shop somewhere else and eat a little less.
Careful with the double talk from reformers during this election year. Don’t forget Obama to the NEA in ’08. They say everything you want to hear until they hold office and then…
I remember very well! I won’t forget the lies and betrayal.