Okay. so think back to high school.
I know this might be painful, but picture your
typical daily schedule. 50-minute blocks, one for each subject: Chemistry, Geometry, English, etc.
This is what the school day has looked like for most students in the
United States for about the last hundred years, but that's changing. For a small
but growing number of students, the school day looks more like this.
Ten minutes working on a math worksheet then 15 minutes on an English paper, then
20 minutes on Facebook and then a three-hour shift bagging groceries.
That's because in 32 states and D.C., students of all ages don't actually have
to go to a physical school building. Instead they can attend online charter schools, full time.
In their advertisements, these schools promise
students and parents autonomy, flexibility, and peace of mind.
If I didn't have Florida Virtual School I probably would have been a dropout. I can
start and end work when I want to. After years of bullying and changing schools I
could finally learn at my own pace.
There's just one problem with these
schools: for the vast majority of students they don't work.
The share of
American students who attend online charter schools is small. It's less than
1%, but enrollment has grown fairly steadily since 2011 and their growth is
part of a wider movement in public education known as "school choice".
It's the idea that parents should have options beyond the neighborhood public school.
It's a notion that education secretary Betsy DeVos has championed for years.
The more choices we have, the more competition we have, but also the better product.
Like traditional public schools, charter schools are funded by a mix of
federal, State, and local taxes. But while taxpayers elect school board members to
oversee traditional public schools, charter schools are different. If a group
of people want to start a school, they sign a contract or a charter with the State.
Some charter schools have longer hours or use a different curriculum.
Most have a physical building, but a growing number don't.
For both types, the state
pays the group a set amount for each student that they enroll.
Most of the groups that run online charter schools are for-profit companies.
The largest are k12 Inc. and Connections Academy. They run 122 online charter schools
in 29 states, which enroll more than half of all online charter students nationwide.
They're both part of publicly traded companies, which means that some
of the tax dollars they get for running schools go towards paying their shareholders,
One of whom used to be Betsy DeVos.
Gary Miron is a professor of education. He studies online charter schools and he
crunched the numbers and found that these companies made:
In their ads k12 and other online
charter operators tout their research-based curriculum, but the data
show that kids in online charter schools are falling way behind. One way that
researchers measure a school's success is to look at students test scores at the
beginning and end of a school year and see how much they've grown. In the most
comprehensive study to date, researchers at Stanford University looked at 17
states with online charter schools and compared their yearly growth to regular
public schools and charter schools in those states, that serve similar
populations of kids.
They found that attending an online charter school had
the equivalent effect of missing 180 days of instruction in math.
In most places that's an entire school year. In reading, students lost about 72 days
compared to their peers in regular school.
There were a few exceptions.
Online charters in Georgia and Wisconsin had significantly better growth scores
in reading than regular schools, but those states only serve a fraction of
the country's online charter students. The vast majority live in states where
attending an online charter school is statistically equivalent to missing
weeks of school.
They're allowing these companies to operate charter schools,
sometimes with more than a hundred students per teacher. That's more than
six times the national average for public schools.
We reached out to k12 and Connections and both companies
disputed the methodology of the Stanford study. K12 said they changed their
curriculum since the study came out in 2015, but a 2016 study of online charters in Ohio,
found that students there are still doing significantly worse than
their peers in regular school.
So, if these schools get such poor results,
why don't states just shut them down?
Online charter companies like k12 and
Connections have spent millions on lobbying and campaign contributions at
the state level.
Of the 64 online charters they ran in 2011, all but one
were still open in 2016. And 55 new ones had opened for business.
States have the power to hold these companies accountable they're just choosing not to.
And students are paying the price.