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 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 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.
Virtual charters lag performance of other schools, report says
Legislation could grow online options
By Lori Higgins Free Press Education Writer
Virtual charter schools are one of the fastest-growing segments of the charter school industry, but a report released today raises questions about how well they educate students.
The report by the National Education Policy Center says 27% of for-profit companies operating virtual schools met the adequate yearly progress standards of the federal No Child Left Behind law. That compares with 48% of traditional brick-and-mortar charter schools and about half of all public schools nationwide. Charter schools are considered public schools.
The report comes as the Legislature considers a bill — part of sweeping legislation that would give parents more choices for their children’s education — that would expand virtual charters in the state. State law enacted in 2010 allows only two to open and restricts enrollment to 400 in the first year. The bill — passed in the Senate late last year and now before the House — would remove those barriers.
Since the law was enacted, two virtual charters opened for the 2010-11 school year: Michigan Virtual Charter Academy and Michigan Connections Academy.
Standard called unfair
Today’s report, titled “Profiles of For-Profit and Nonprofit Education Management,” is a comprehensive look by Western Michigan University researchers at the performance of education management organizations that run charter schools nationwide.
Lead researcher Gary Miron, an education professor at WMU, said it’s unclear why so many virtual schools are not meeting the academic goals.
“These are not highly impoverished schools. … These schools should be more likely to meet adequate yearly progress,” he said.
The report was criticized by one of the leading providers of online education, K12 Inc.
K12 operates a number of virtual charters across the nation, including Michigan Virtual Charter Academy. Of the 39 virtual schools that K12 operates that received an AYP rating in 2010, 13 met the standards.
Jeff Kwitowski, spokesman for the company, based in Herndon, Va., said using the adequate yearly progress standard tojudge virtual schools is unfair.
“It’s not a reliable measure. The secretary of education has said that the AYP measure under (No Child Left Behind) is broken and unfairly labels schools as failing.”
Stringent rules
Education Secretary Arne Duncan indeed has urged states to apply for waivers from some strict No Child rules that make it easy for a school to stumble, causing a number to be identified as failing.
In Michigan for instance, schools need 77%-88% of students to pass state math exams in order to meet the standards. But subgroups of students in those schools, including those living in poverty, minority groups, limited language students and special-education students, also must hit those goals. If one group doesn’t make it, the whole school fails. Schools also can miss if they don’t test at least 95% of students, and if they have attendance rates that fall below 90% and graduation ratesthat fall below 80%.
Kwitowski said that once students arrive in virtual schools, they show growth, and the longer they’re enrolled, the better they perform.
He also noted that the National Education Policy Center is partially funded by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, which has been critical of some aspects of the charter school movement.
Similar conclusions
Connections Academy, based in Baltimore, operates the other virtual charter in Michigan — Michigan Connections Academy. Nationwide, 27% of its virtual charters met the standards.
Neither of the Michigan virtual charters was open long enough to be in the study.
Miron acknowledged some of the concerns about using the adequate yearly progress measure. But he pointed to research in Pennsylvania that looked at individual student achievement data and came to similar conclusions about virtual schools.
And, he said, when there is such a wide gap between the percentage of virtual charters meeting the standard and other public schools, “that’s pretty meaningful and significant.”
To see the charter school report, go to www.nepc.colorado.edu
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