Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools

[alp227]

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling a large chunk of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/education/online-schools-score-better-on-wall-street-than-in-classrooms.html?pagewanted=all

That's why education and other entities for the common good of We the People should NOT be for profit, ever.

[knitter4democracy]

1. As a teacher with some experience with these programs, I say we should ban them.

I know that's a bit extreme, but I've seen the programs, and they're crap. Wrong answers given as correct, English taught only in the easiest to test way (vocab and grammar only--no reading, no writing, no critical thinking required), and kids using their notes on the tests because there's no one there to tell them they can't. The students don't learn a darn thing.

Worse, these programs expect students to sit silently for hours in order to cover the material and prove mastery on a test. Many just plain drop out of these programs, and they're a waste of everyone's time and money.

[moriah]

2. If the populations they are serving are truly in need....

... of distance learning opportunities -- aka children who would otherwise homeschool, or extremely rural areas where a child getting to and from school may take 4-5 hours of their day, it's possibly better than the alternative.

But parents have to be actively involved in those situations.

I could see those type of schools used as an adjunct to homeschooling quite well, especially with parental involvement. When I was homeschooled for middle school my mother did not feel comfortable teaching math and science, so I enrolled in distance learning through the University of Nebraska at Lincoln for science, and Duke University for math.