Three new studies came out last week, all raising red flags about the academic effectiveness of online charter schools.  In the past year or so, a few states have already begun to put the breaks on authorizing on-line charters, primarily due to scandals.  These new studies, with their focus on academic outcomes, may provide the hard systematic data to bring a complete end to them in some jurisdictions. The first study is by Mathematica.  If finds:

• Student–driven, independent study is the dominant mode of learning in online charter schools, with 33 percent of online charter schools offering only self-paced instruction
• Online charter schools typically provide students with less live teacher contact time in a week than students in conventional schools have in a day
• Maintaining student engagement in this environment of limited student-teacher interaction is considered the greatest challenge by far, identified by online charter school principals nearly three times as often as any other challenge
• Online charter schools place significant expectations on parents, perhaps to compensate for limited student-teacher interaction, with 43, 56 , and 78 percent of online charters at the high school, middle, and elementary grade levels, respectively, expecting parents to actively participate in student instruction
• These findings suggest reason for concern about whether the online charter school sector is likely to be effective in promoting the achievement of its student.

The second report is by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.  It found that

• students of online charter schools had significantly weaker academic performance in math and reading, compared with their counterparts in conventional schools.
• online charter schools exist in a number of different policy environments due to variation in state charter law and administrative regulation. Most of the existing regulation is reactive to controversy (restrictions on growth and autonomy), rather than proactive policies to guide the unique opportunities and challenges of online charter schools.
• several drawbacks to forcing online schools into the charter context, including:

1. Open admission requirements that prevent schools from screening for students who are most likely to be successful in an online school.
2. Authorizing and accountability provisions that are not well suited to the unique challenges of regulating online schools.
3. Funding mechanisms that preclude outcomes-based funding.

The last study was by CREDO at Stanford University.  It found:

• Online charter students had weaker growth than their [controlled counterparts in the study].
• Pre-online mobility is the same for online charter students and their [counterparts].
• Positive growth across a sector is possible. Some online charter schools which were part of multischool networks had average impacts on academic growth which were stronger than the typical online charter. Online charter schools in Wisconsin and Georgia had academic growth in reading which on average was stronger than their VCRs. These findings show it is possible for online charter schools to produce stronger growth, but it is not the common outcome.
• Few school-level practices had a strong relationship with academic growth. A review of the relationship between school practices as reported in the Mathematica survey and student academic growth found mostly insignificant correlations between school practices and growth. Of practices in the survey which had strong positive correlations, attending schools which offered some self-paced classes was the most wide-spread and was found to be consistent across all school levels. The findings on the expected parental roles was also revealing in that placing more instructional responsibilities on parents was strongly correlated with weaker growth across most settings.
• Teasing out the impact of state-level policies is difficult. The role of state-level policies matters in online charter education. The state-level policy changes included in the study did have significant relationships with the academic growth of online charter students. With the data included in this analysis, it was not possible to tease out which aspects of the particular policy changes led to the changes in academic growth. This is a critical area for future study.
• Being an online school matters more than being a charter school. Finally, the major impacts of attending an online charter school appear to be primarily driven by the online aspect of the schools.