Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Failing Online Charter Schools

I am not a fan of charter schools, or rather, I am not a fan of for-profit charter schools that siphon public money away from public schools.  It does not matter whether they are brick and mortar schools, or online programs.  In recent travels to other parts of the country, I have seen brand new buildings housing charter schools that look like palaces, and I have driven by some that occupy space in what appears to be worn out strip malls.  I am very aware of a few charters that have done incredible things, particularly KIPP Public Charter Schools, turning lives around for kids who come from poverty stricken backgrounds, but note that “public” is included in the title.  In Iowa, charter schools have struggled to gain a foothold.  In large part I believe that is due to the fact that the majority of people in a community have a positive feeling about the job being done in our public schools.  However, there are a few, and while proponents can argue that they provide more educational options to parents, overall, in our country they are not doing what they were intended to do.

In a report published in April 2019 by the Education Week Research Center, nearly three-quarters of students enrolled in online charter schools in the U.S. are attending “schools” where less than half of the students have graduated in four years.  Also contained in this report is the following:
Nationally, half of all virtual charter high schools had graduation rates     below 50-percent in the 2016-17 school year. Thirty-seven percent of schools had graduation rates at or above 50-percent. Graduation data for the remaining 13-percent of schools was masked for various reasons, such as to protect student privacy. There are about 163 virtual charter schools educating over 30,000 seniors nationally as determined by the adjusted cohort graduation rate, according to federal numbers.

In a Stanford University study in 2015, it was found that students attending an online charter school made so little progress in math over the course of a year that it was as if they hadn’t attended school at all.  That is unconscionable!  Let us apply that to our high school, or for that matter, any public high school in the United States.  If our students were not learning math in our classes, the community would be justifiably upset and many of us — from teachers up to administrators — would most likely lose our jobs.  In essence, we are talking about malpractice, and yet it appears that nothing is being done to demand accountability from these charters.

Most of the online charter schools are run by for-profit companies, and since the beginning, they have struggled with academic performance.  On a trip four summers ago we stopped in Indianapolis and spent some time downtown.  In a shopping mall, there was a lot of signage, including forty-foot banners spanning the walking area, advertising a couple of different online charter programs.  Both schools had kiosks where you could get information and sign your child up.  According to the Education Week study, not one virtual charter school operating in Indiana in 2016-17 had a graduation rate over 50% in the past four years.  What would you think if our school had a graduation rate of less than 50%?  On a national level, anything under a 90% graduation rate is considered low!

In Iowa, there are two “state approved” charter schools.  Both of them are for-profit, and both of them are aligned with and administrated by public school districts.  Students in the state can open enroll to either of the two districts and then enroll in the online charter option.  One of them is Iowa Connections Academy that is aligned with the CAM school district in southwest Iowa.  The other is called Iowa Virtual Academy in the nearby Clayton Ridge district.  In looking at graduation rates in Iowa, the state average for public schools in 2018 was an all-time high of 91.4%.  (North Fayette Valley has consistently exceeded the state average.)  The school district with the lowest graduation rate in that year was Storm Lake in western Iowa, a district with a very high percentage of ESL and low-economic status students, as well as a very transient population.  The second lowest graduation rate was CAM at 77%, which must include those students who enrolled in the Iowa Connections Academy (ICA).  In an online search, ICA’s profile reports a graduation rate between 70 and 79%, which is in lowest 50% of Iowa schools.  Clayton Ridge’s graduation rate was reported at 82.7%, which also puts them very close to the bottom of schools in the state.  There is no additional information provided by this district on the ICA profile.

While I am not sure of the financial arrangement between these two schools and their partner school district, I do know that state funds in the form of per pupil costs go to them through the open enrollment law we have in Iowa.  We have had a small number of students from our district choose to open enroll into the programs, two of whom graduated as they transferred their senior year.  None of the others graduated.  

In my opinion, this whole charter movement, which is strongly supported by current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, is a way to separate certain groups of kids from other groups.  Many of the brick and mortar charter schools have specific entrance requirements that prevent students from certain demographic groups from enrolling, despite state and local laws that are supposed to prevent it.  It has been a way for the private sector to get public funding, and yet stay free of the same requirements and standards that public schools must meet.  In the accountability laws that exist in every state, no public school could survive unscathed with a graduation rate less than 50%.  The state would have swooped in, shut it down, and either close it or forced dramatic restructuring.  They have done this since the advent of No Child Left Behind.  However, the for-profit charter schools have been protected, and have not been held to the same standard.  It is a significant question of fairness and a level playing field.  In my mind, it is a misuse of taxpayer dollars to allow these failing schools to continue.  We wouldn’t stand for that if our school was failing.

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