Page 26 - THE Journal, March 2017

26
| MARCH 2017
ONLINE EDUCATION
Dennis Pierce
shutterstock.com
Virtual Charter Schools Aim to
Boost Student Engagement
Amid greater scrutiny, online charter school operators are investing more in support.
HEN A FAMILY move uprooted Isabelle Lowell from her old
school a few years ago, she was discouraged by her experience at her new school. She felt she wasn’t being challenged enough, and she
struggled to make friends. Her father, Mark Lowell, reached out to iQ Academy in Los Angeles, an online charter school serving students in
five California counties.
Enrolling Isabelle, now 13, in iQ Academy was the best thing the family
could have done, Mark said. She is earning straight As, is fully engaged in her learning and has made numerous friends whom she sees outside of school. “From A to Z, our whole experience has been terrific,” he said.
Isabelle has never had a problem with engagement in her online school because she
is internally driven to succeed. But not all virtual school students are like her. In fact, researchers have uncovered largely disappointing results in analyzing the performance of virtual charter schools.
About 200 online charter schools are operating in the United States, serving nearly 200,000 students, according to Mathematica Policy Research. But a comprehensive, three- volume study by Mathematica, the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) in 2015 found that online charter school students significantly lag behind their peers from traditional public schools in math and reading achievement.
Full-time virtual charter school students learn essentially no math and less than half the amount of reading as their peers in traditional public schools, the CREDO study
concluded. These results were consistent across all subgroups, such as racial and economic background, native language and students with special needs.
What’s more, Mathematica found that virtual charter schools, on average, have larger class sizes than traditional public schools — and nearly half of their principals have not taught or managed in an online environment before. The vast majority
of online charter schools offer one-on- one instructional support for students, Mathematica found, but this support averages only 45 to 60 minutes per week.
“With a limited number of live
contact hours and a lean staffing model, online charter schools place substantial expectations on parents, who are expected not only to ensure that students keep up with assignments but also to participate ... in the student’s instruction,” the report said.