Nearly 700 Maine public school students attend school each day without having to leave home. Instead, they log onto their computers, tune into lectures delivered by teachers in a different part of the state, participate in class discussions hosted via video conference and tackle coursework online at their own pace.
The students attend Maine’s two virtual charter schools. Maine Connections Academy recently started its second school year, and Maine Virtual Academy opened this fall.
As the schools, which serve students in grades seven through 12, get off the ground, the most comprehensive review yet of students’ academic progress at online charter schools has top-line conclusions that are pretty damning for virtual charter schools.
Standardized test results from students at 158 online charter schools in 17 states (Maine’s weren’t included since they’re so new) showed that, in one school year, students lost the equivalent of 180 days of instruction in math and 72 days in reading compared with peers in traditional public schools. Low-income students, English language learners and special education students lost even more ground, according to the analysis by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, at Stanford University.
Maine wasn’t exactly an early and enthusiastic adopter of virtual charter schools. Even as nonprofit organizations applied to the Maine Charter School Commission last year to open the two that are operating now, lawmakers from both parties proposed legislation to make it more difficult for virtual charter schools to set up shop.
But Maine’s online charter schools have caught on quickly since opening. Maine Connections Academy enrolls about 390 students, up from about 300 last school year. Its waitlist is 150-strong, said Principal Karl Francis. Maine Virtual Academy has about 300 students in its first year; it also has a waitlist.
“That waiting list shows that there’s a need out there that a virtual school can address,” said Bob Kautz, executive director of the Maine Charter School Commission, the state body that oversees Maine’s seven charter schools.
It would be easy to point to the recently released CREDO findings as evidence that virtual charter schools have no business educating Maine students. But we think the study results — which focus on students’ academic growth — should prompt a more detailed discussion among educators, parents and policymakers with an eye toward making online education as effective as possible. Virtual instruction, after all, isn’t going anywhere. It should be effective.
The CREDO study offers findings that should prompt further inquiry and, perhaps, influence the approaches existing online schools take to educating their students and the approaches states take to overseeing them.
As a whole, the 158 online charter schools CREDO evaluated didn’t measure up. But CREDO’s analysis revealed that students at online charter schools in Wisconsin and Georgia showed greater growth in reading than their traditional-school counterparts. In Michigan, online charter school students performed on par with their brick-and-mortar peers in both reading and math. Virtual school students in Illinois and Wisconsin also kept up in math.
Those findings show virtual education can work for students. What CREDO’s research doesn’t reveal is what it is about online charter schools in Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin that makes them more effective than others. That’s an area for further analysis.
CREDO researchers tried to pinpoint a range of school- and state-level practices that correlated with higher achievement. Those included parental involvement in the absence of in-person contact with teachers; frequent contact among teachers, students and their families; strict rules for class participation; employing guidance counselors; tying teacher pay to student performance; and allowing teachers to earn tenure. Policy-wise, the study also emphasized close state oversight of virtual schools.
“It kind of solidified the work ahead of us and the area of focus and what we need to get great at,” Francis said of the CREDO study. “We need to get better in math, and we need to get better with student engagement.”
Virtual charter schools won’t work for every student, but they’re an option that needs to be there — and needs to be effective — for the students who will thrive from it.
