One of the major characteristics of modern education reform is to change where we teach. The most radical change in place is to the nebulous electronic cloud. Virtual Charter schools, public schools taking public money, but run for profit, have proliferated the modern reform movement. You can read about this in the New York Times expose on how Online Charters perform well with Wall Street, but not so much for students.
So how are these Virtual Schools doing, with your taxpayer monies? The most extensive report to date, from the National Education Policy Center shows that they are not doing so well. Only 27% of virtual charter schools made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). This is compared to 48% of brick and mortar charters, and 50% of traditional public schools.
To be sure, No Child Left Behind is broken. The for profit charter managers complaint is exactly that. However, is NCLB more unfair to virtual charters? Ask yourself, why are traditional schools passing at almost twice the rate as virtual schools? At the same time, states are fighting like crazy to increase virtual access while decreasing traditional school access. Failing at twice the rate, but we want to increase them?
Not only are the virtual schools failing at close to twice the rate, the have far fewer disadvantaged students. In fact, Virtual Schools are not impoverished at all. Conservatives will tout virtual schools as an escape for urban students from supposedly bad schools. Well, poor, urban students are not escaping to online charters. Compared to schools with similar populations, these online charters do even worse! This study was conducted by the Western Michigan University, and re-enforces recent findings of charters in Pennsylvania.
Cross Posted at MN Progressive Project