Most virtual charters schools are educational frauds. But they are very profitable.The corporation provides a computer, some printed materials, and access to an underpaid, overburdened teacher who is monitoring many screens. In return, the online corporation is paid full state tuition, while providing none of the staff, programs, or resources of a regular school.
New studies find that the academic performance of students schooled online is poor. The worst online schools are in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, in both reading and math. About 8% of charter students are enrolled in cyber charters.
Benjamin Herrold writes in Education Week:
“Students who take classes over the Internet through online charter schools make dramatically less academic progress than their counterparts in traditional schools, according to a sweeping new series of reports released today.
The National Study of Online Charter Schools represents the first comprehensive national look at the roughly 200 schools in the publicly funded, independently managed cyber-charter sector. Such schools enroll about 200,000 full-time students across 26 states.
Reports jointly released by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and Mathematica Policy Research found that:
More than two-thirds of online charter schools had weaker overall academic growth than similar brick-and-mortar schools. In math, 88 percent of online charters had weaker academic growth than their comparison schools.
On average, online charter students achieved each year the equivalent of 180 fewer days of learning in math and 72 fewer days of learning in reading than similar students in district-run brick-and-mortar schools.
As a group, online charters are characterized by high student-to-teacher ratios, low student engagement, and high student mobility.
Online charters frequently offer limited opportunities for live contact with teachers and a relative paucity of supports for families, despite high expectations for parental involvement.
From funding to enrollment to oversight, states are failing to keep up with the unique policy challenges that online charters present.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They have really effective lobbyists, though:
“The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio’s largest charter school, wants to limit the damage from its F grades on state report cards, now that the Ohio Department of Education is no longer just throwing them out of key new charter school evaluations this year.
Officials at the politically-connected e-school want the state to count it just like any small charter school in those ratings – not as a 15,000-student giant.
Rather than counting as 15,000 students in a school that’s not teaching kids enough, they want ECOT counted as just a single school in those evaluations of charter school oversight agencies, known as “sponsors or “authorizers,”
The schools were expanded over and over in Ohio without any consideration of the effects on public schools, so public schools now serve as the public “safety net” for the politically powerful privatized online sector.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/09/e-school_giant_ecot_with_15000_students_wants_to_count_the_same_as_tiny_charter_schools_in_state_evaluations.html
“On average, online charter students achieved each year the equivalent of 180 fewer days of learning in math ”
My interpretation of this is that the kids learned NOTHING. Maybe I just don’t understand !!
15000 kids in Ohio were signed up to cyberschools. So not only does the state see nothing, and the parents see nothing, and the parents don’t even get the child care benefit of normal school. Who are these parents ?
There’s very little risk involved for the parents because they can experiment and then just return the child to the public school if the private sector experiment doesn’t work out. And they do. There’s enormous churn in online charters, which of course creates churn in public schools. The public system bears all the risk of the experiment, and they do it with less funding. It’s lose/lose for them but they weren’t consulted or even considered because we’re all busy pretending this isn’t a system when it is (of course) a system and there are systemic effects. I know it’s breathtakingly stupid to not consider systemic effects of experiments so one would think The Best and The Brightest would understand this simple concept, but that’s actually what happened. Systemic effects were completely ignored.
The comparison between national coverage and DC promoting more and more charter schools and local coverage is really fascinating.
It’s like 2 trains s-l-o-w-l-y colliding, where reality meets rhetoric:
“Also last week, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Tim Ryan, both Ohio Democrats, promoted legislation that would require greater federal oversight of charter schools, in Ohio and elsewhere. Despite the frequently dismal record of Ohio charters, the U.S. Department of Education approved a $71 million grant this month to promote and expand charter schools here — the largest amount given any state.
Ohio’s charter school excesses “have only gotten worse and worse over the last 15 years,” Senator Brown told me last week. “Some of the top people in the top echelons of state government have abused the public trust, and the legislature and executive branch have not been all that interested.”
Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/DavidKushma/2015/10/25/Don-t-let-abuse-cronyism-kill-charter-school-reform.html#UmtPZIu2aRDKQCev.99
Isn’t Bill Gates’ vision of the future wonderful?
Why do you suppose this is and what can be done about it, aside from parental evolvement. Some students learn better in a classroom setting with a schedule, I’m in grad school and I’m one of those, I’ve tried online courses as an undergrad and it wasn’t for me. But some students don’t do well in classrooms, they need more freedom. This is also a great way to encourage self-starting , etc. Is there a way to find out what kind of students are using this alternative method, what kind of teachers are usually running them, and seeing where the gap is? What teaching methods these kids need. What training these teachers need. Like many ideas it is not being fulfilled in practice. What practices need to be changed to make it work for students who need it?
The same goes for district online credit recovery programs. It is likely they are serving similar student populations.
In Arizona districts are offering these programs to keep these students (and their funds) in house since many were leaving for virtual charters.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/09/23/online-credit-recovery-in-need-of-improvement.html
“Too many credit-recovery programs are out there just pushing students to the finish line on graduation with low rigor or just flexible pacing, but without the skills development,” said Susan D. Patrick, the association’s president and CEO. “We intentionally call that out as being not appropriate.”
Interesting study. Here in Ohio, Fordham is evangelizing the study. I can’t help but wonder if they are the mouthpiece for brick and mortar charters and this is a play to eliminate BOTH virtual charters and traditional public schools. All part of “running the schools like a business”. If Fordham’s vision is just brick and mortar charters, this study certainly is to their benefit as a way to eliminate the “competition”. So Randian.
Also, the study uses the old voodoo of “virtual students” or the dreaded counterfactual nonsense. Certainly there are more parameters to the models between individual students, if learning can even be accurately modeled. Virtual schools may indeed be serving an at-risk population that is endanger of dropping out. The question is if the public schools are a virtual schools safety net, or is it the other way around? Maybe more data here on better demographics and where the pipeline ends up would help. With 40,000 student here in virtual schools, that number bears some further investigation as to why the students are not able to succeed in traditional schools.
The idea of considering student demographics makes strange bedfellows. Both high-risk urban and rural public schools and virtual charters make the point that demographics play a major role in student learning – income, parents, ESL, etc. A point we all make here on this blog. So these ad hoc comparisons using questionable models are not always convincing.
Some of the traditional public schools around here do pair up virtual learning with classroom experience for at-risk students or those not fitting into the regular classroom. I do think it can work with well-paid teachers, adequate facilities, and listening to the voice from the classroom rather than politicians.
Why am I not surprised?
Young vertebrates learn from the example set by adults. They instinctively watch and mimic adults. In animals that live in communities, they want to please adults.
Computer screens are not people. Even images of people on computer screens are not people.
So TRUE! People are not widgets. Gates is WRONG again, and so are the rest of the DEFORMERS who think computers are better than a certified, bonafide, “real” teacher, NOT a TFA-er.
I’d encourage anyone who can to comment on this article in the Columbus Dispatch. It is positively over run with ECOT teachers and parents who refuse to address the actual problems. Understandably, they defend themselves (as they should because many do work hard, the issues come more directly from school management) and the minority of children who do benefit from online schools (the chronically ill and bullied).
They forget the other side of the issue, which is classes where fewer than 5% of students are actively engaged in learning. That the end of semester is a dump of assignments that isn’t evidence of learning, but of rushing through to do the minimum amount to earn that “passing” D. Of being encouraged by principals and school leadership to consider the lowest possible D in one quarter, and no work in the second quarter a passing grade of a D. That grades are changed that do not reflect students who know enough to denote proficiency in a subject. These issues all compound and are passed along up the grade levels.
Schools who are angry about the money being taken from them and sent to charters should begin asking to see log-in times for students at online charter schools and requesting the money go back to the district or state for students who do not show an actual engagement at their charter school.