Thursday, April 7, 2011

100% of PA Cyber Charter Schools Worse Than Public Schools

Breaking the oil addiction, infrastructure, healthy people, clean environment, educated people are keys to competitiveness in the modern economy.  Targeting well educational dollars is vital.

A powerful study done by Standford University measuring the performance in reading and writing of students enrolled in cyber charter schools, bricks and mortar charter institutions, and traditional public schools found that 100% of the PA cyber charter schools are "performing significantly worse than their traditional public schools in both reading and math." See page 20 of Charter School Performance in Pennsylvania at http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/PA%20state%20Report_20110404_FINAL.pdf

So why are we spending scarce taxpayer dollars on cyber charter schools? 

The report's findings on the performance of bricks and mortar charter schools was mixed.  Certainly charter schools that are documented to do a better job are wise investments, but charter schools that are documented to do a worse job harm children's education, waste scarce resources and are not a solution to our educational challenges.

5 comments:

  1. Should the first sentence of the second paragraph read ...found that 100% of the PA charter CYBER schools are...?

    I think you neglected to include the word "cyber" in there, as your third paragrahp goes on to note that brick and mortar charters produce mixed, not significantly worse results.

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  2. Free-ed.net dude!!!

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  3. I find it unfortunate that the initial focus of this is dollars not the all around educational well being of the students. Many children attend cyber charter schools as they can not safely perform in brick and mortar schools. It may be true that academic performance is at a lower level by comparison but other issues of social problems and illness play a significant role in PARENTAL DECISIONS regarding the best place for their child o be educated. Teachers and public school officials never cease to amaze me in their contempt for parents and the taxpayers who pay there salaries. Where do your children go to school. The Princpal of our local elementary school sends his sons to Catholic School. As you have stated in the beginning of the article, you are targeting dollars not the actual students.

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  4. It seems to me that someone should track the individual kids coming into the cyber schools before pronouncing the cyber schools as low performers. You may find that a huge percentage are dropping out of an academic situation that wasn't working. Cyber schools get a large influx of kids from public schools but that doesn't mean that those kids were doing well before the transfer. I pulled a daughter and son out of public school because they were doing so badly and homeschooled them. The son eventually went back (reading problems fixed) to public school. Our daughter also had her reading problem fixed in our homeschool program but didn't wish to return to public school. She is now in cyber school. She came to them already successful in reading and math but not because of the public school but because of homeschooling. If my children had gone straight to cyber school, the school would have inherited kids that were very poor readers. If the individual children were tracked and those who are responsible for the bulk of their education were credited or punished for the results of a couple of tests, only then could you tell if the cyber schools are doing a good job or not. It is possible that the public school scores are also being elevated a little if parents are pulling poor performers like our family did. Just a thought or two....

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