Pennsylvania's online charter schools (poor performance)

POOR RESULTS FOR PENNSYLVANIA ONLINE CHARTER SCHOOLS; April 18, 2011; Education Sector Quick & the Ed blog 

Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) report on Pennsylvania charter schools continued many themes from its national report: average learning gains for charters are smaller, charters’ performance improves as students are enrolled longer, and importantly, high variability among charters, with significant numbers of both high-performing and low-performing charter schools.

But, there’s one very interesting finding. In the CREDO sample, taken from schools that enrolled students from 2007 – 2010, there are eight full-time, online “cyber” charter schools. These eight schools enrolled 18,705 students — 30% of the study population — and contrast sharply with the typical “bricks and mortar” charter student. Online students tend to be white, ineligible for free and reduced lunches, and entered the online schools with significantly higher test scores. And, online students are more likely to be repeating a grade.

Overall, the results for the cyber schools were terrible. None of the eight online schools did better than their “virtual twins” in traditional district schools. And, the cyber school performance was so poor that it dragged down the results for charters in general…

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CHARTER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE IN PENNSYLVANIA; April 2011; credo.stanford.edu 

Expanding on the 2009 CREDO National Charter School Study Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, this report examines the performance of Pennsylvania charter schools for the period 2007 - 2010. Compared to the educational gains the charter students would have had in their traditional public schools, the analysis shows that students in Pennsylvania charter schools on average make smaller learning gains. More than one quarter of the charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their traditional public school counterparts in reading, but their performance is eclipsed by the nearly half of charter schools that have significantly lower learning gains. In math, again nearly half of the charter schools studied perform worse than their traditional public school peers and one quarter outperform them…