[Vision2020] Students of Online Schools Are Lagging

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
 Reprints<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/students-of-virtual-schools-are-lagging-in-proficiency.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23&pagewanted=print#>


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January 6, 2012
Students of Online Schools Are Lagging By JENNY
ANDERSON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/jenny_anderson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management
organizations rose sharply last year, according to a new report being
published Friday, and far fewer of them are proving proficient on
standardized tests compared with their peers in other privately managed charter
schools<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/charter_schools/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
in traditional public schools.

About 116,000 students were educated in 93 virtual schools — those where
instruction is entirely or mainly provided over the Internet — run by
private management companies in the 2010-11 school year, up 43 percent from
the previous year, according to the report being published by the National
Education Policy Center, a research center at the University of Colorado.
About 27 percent of these schools achieved “adequate yearly progress,” the
key federal standard set forth under the No Child Left
Behind<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/no_child_left_behind_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>act
to measure academic progress. By comparison, nearly 52 percent of all
privately managed brick-and-mortar schools reached that goal, a figure
comparable to all public schools nationally.

“There’s a pretty large gap between virtual and brick-and-mortar,” said
Gary Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement and research at Western
Michigan University and a co-author of the study.

“E.M.O.’s” — educational management organizations, a term coined by Wall
Street in the 1990s — now operate 35 percent of all charter schools,
enrolling 42 percent of all charter school students, according to the
report. “Charter schools are publicly funded and they are serving public
school students,” Dr. Miron noted. “But they are increasingly privately
owned and privately governed.”

Some of the management companies are nonprofit organizations — the largest
is the KIPP Foundation, with 28,261 students — while others are for-profit
companies (K12 Inc. leads this sector, with 65,396). The report focuses on
those that have full-service agreements to run schools, as opposed to
vendors that offer ancillary services like curriculum development.

The number of schools — virtual as well as brick-and-mortar — managed by
for-profit E.M.O.’s dropped 2 percent in 2010-11 from the previous year,
but the number of students leaped 5 percent to 394,096. In the nonprofit
sector, there was a 12 percent increase in the number of schools to 1,170
and a 62 percent increase in students to 384,067. Nonprofit E.M.O.’s have a
better track record of academic success than for-profits, and smaller
E.M.O.’s in general perform better than larger ones, at least defined by
the federal standard of adequate yearly progress — a metric Dr. Miron
called “very crude.”

Data was not available for about 10 percent of the schools run by
for-profit E.M.O.’s and 20 percent of those run by nonprofits. Among those
that did provide data, 48 percent of the schools run by for-profits met the
federal standard, as did 56 percent of those run by nonprofits. About 52
percent of traditional public schools meet the standard.

Among large for-profit E.M.O.’s — those that manage 10 or more schools — 43
percent met the federal progress standard, compared with 62 percent of the
schools run by E.M.O.’s with one to three schools. Among nonprofits, 63
percent of those with four to nine schools met the standard, compared with
52 percent for organizations running 10 or more schools and 56 percent for
those running one to three.

  [image: DCSIMG]


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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