The report focuses mostly on documenting charter school performance overall across the 29 states and two cities. Some of the more notable findings from the full sample include:

• On average, charter schools are producing more test-score growth than traditional public schools. The CREDO research team estimates that the extra growth is equivalent to six additional days of instruction annually in math, and 16 extra days of instruction in reading.
• The performance of charter schools is improving over time. The CREDO researchers track improvement by comparing their findings in the 2023 report to findings from their older, similar reports from 2009 and 2013.
• High-poverty students benefit from attending a charter school more than their low-poverty peers.
• Though charter schools outperform traditional public schools overall, virtual charter schools perform worse than other charter schools, and worse than traditional public schools.

On the last point, the CREDO dataset covers the years 2014 to 2019, so these virtual charter schools were virtual before it became (unfortunately) fashionable. The finding that virtual charter schools are ineffective tracks with evidence from the pandemic era showing that schools that spent more time in virtual learning had especially poor performance. The CREDO report makes it clear that charter schools are not special in this regard.

In terms of Missouri-specific findings, the report shows:

• Charter schools nationally are doing well, but Missouri charter schools are doing even better. Our charter schools are among the most effective in the country in terms of improving academic achievement relative to their traditional public-school alternatives. For example, in reading, Missouri’s charter schools are the fifth-most effective among the 29 states covered by the report.
• Mirroring the national trend, the effectiveness of Missouri charter schools is improving over time.

This is just a quick summary of a very dense and thorough report, so I encourage interested readers to take a closer look themselves. The CREDO report provides compelling evidence of the value of charter schools in Missouri. I hope our legislators enact policies that make it easier for charter operators to improve outcomes for Missouri children.

The post Charter Schools Are Highly Effective in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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The American Federation for Children found that 40 percent of parents nationally say they are more likely to homeschool or virtual school their children once lockdowns are over. A poll from USA Today found that 6 in 10 parents are likely to consider at-home learning options for their children, and 3 in 10 are “very likely” to do that.

Public School Options also polled parents and found that parents are largely concerned about safety for their child this fall. More than two-thirds of parents are concerned about whether or not they can safely send their children to school when schools reopen. Over 40 percent of parents in the survey are considering online options for their children.

In Missouri, the Columbia Public Schools District surveyed its community and found that roughly half of parents wanted to remain online and half wanted to return to the school building in the fall. The district is now offering families the option to choose online classes for the fall.

There are ways to keep students safe while still giving them a quality education. Safe Student Scholarships are one option that I’ve discussed before, but there are others. Of course, the coronavirus situation could change by the time school starts, and parents could change their minds. But right now, parents are clearly indicating they want more options. While Missouri has previously resisted online education, it finally might be time for the supply of online offerings to meet the demand.

The post What Type of Education Will Parents Want in the Fall? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

House Bill 42 (HB 42) has sat on the governor’s desk since late May and would allow, among other reforms, students in unaccredited and provisionally accredited districts in Saint Louis and Jackson County a chance to receive a virtual or online education instead of transferring to a higher-performing brick-and-mortar school.

In addition to portraying the school transfer law as “largely unpopular” (a 2014 poll showed that 60 percent of Missourians favor the program), Stuckey didn’t present a full picture of the virtual school issue.

Take Representative Bill Burns’ comment cut from his speech during the legislative session, as quoted in the Post-Dispatch:

“This is a special interest bill,” Burns said. “This virtual education, why does it have to be a private company? Why couldn’t the school system be in charge of virtual education?”

Other education officials and lawmakers alike questioned the measure’s wording, fearing it lacked the teeth to hold for-profit virtual education programs accountable for a students’ performance, given that the district wouldn’t have the means of regulating which company is used.

These comments suggest that school districts, not taxpayers, should hold schools accountable. Isn’t school choice the best form of accountability, because parents have the ability to pick a school that fits their child’s needs? The idea that school districts should regulate a private company assumes that school districts know what’s best for kids, not parents. And, do we really want failing school districts regulating anything?

HB 42 may not be perfect, but components like the virtual schools provision may give more kids a chance to escape an antiquated system where zip code, not choice, determines educational outcomes.

The post Is There Accountability for Virtual Schools in the Transfer Bill? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Politicians are notorious for answering the wrong question. When asked about legalizing drugs, they may ramble on about health care. When pushed on immigration, they’ll talk about jobs. Former presidential contender Mitt Romney once quipped to a reporter, “You get to ask the questions you like, I get to give the answers I like.” While the voting public may get annoyed when a lawmaker dodges a question, no real harm is done. It is a completely different matter, however, when lawmakers address the wrong question through legislation. Unfortunately, that is exactly what some Missouri legislators are doing in regards to the law that allows students to transfer from unaccredited school districts.

The primary question lawmakers are considering is, “How do we reduce the number of transfer students?” That, however, is not the question they need to address. Students are in schools that are failing to meet their academic needs, and they need quality options right now. The question lawmakers should be addressing is, “How do we make sure all students have access to quality schools?” These are two very different questions and require two very different legislative strategies.

If lawmakers want to make sure students have access to great schools and not simply “fix” the transfer program so that it does not burden the local public school districts, they need to pursue every opportunity to expand options for kids. That means they need to be unbiased about the type of school a student attends—traditional public, public charter, virtual, or private.

Right now, there are high-performing charter schools that want to serve students from unaccredited school districts. What’s more, many of these schools are miles closer than other traditional public schools to which students are currently transferring. Yet, current laws do not allow charter schools to take students from other districts. Artificial district boundaries are limiting options for students, and these boundaries should be erased. Missouri should allow public charter schools to enroll students across district boundaries.

The same goes for virtual schools. The beauty of a virtual school is that a student can be anywhere—in a hospital bed or at an Olympic training facility—while completing school work. With such flexibility, it is asinine to constrict the reach of a virtual school to the limits of a district’s boundaries.

Just as it makes no sense to draw arbitrary lines around charter or virtual schools, it is not necessary to draw demarcations between public and private schools. Public education is the idea that all students should have access to a quality education at public expense. Though public school districts have been the traditional way of delivering public education, the idea of public education and the district are not the same thing. Indeed, 20 states have created programs that utilize private schools to help deliver the idea of public education.

How do we make sure all students have access to quality schools? Lawmakers must stop dodging this question; failing to do so means denying students opportunities to a great education.

James V. Shuls is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and a fellow at the Show-Me Institute.

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Ironically, though Imagine schools closed, they were not the lowest-performing schools in Saint Louis. In fact, 41 Saint Louis public schools had proficient and advanced percentages that were lower than Imagine College Prep High in communication arts. In math, 22 Saint Louis public schools scored lower than Imagine Academy of Environmental Science and Math. Yet these schools remain open.

The coming year should be a banner year for charter schools throughout the state. With the closure of the Imagine schools and the steady improvement of existing charter schools, I expect to see significant gains in overall charter performance in 2013.

So what is next for Missouri charter schools?

It seems unlikely too much will happen in the Missouri Legislature regarding charter schools because they passed a bill last session allowing universities to sponsor charters in all unaccredited districts and districts that have been provisionally accredited for three years. Additionally, the bill allows school districts to sponsor their own charter school within their district. Hopefully, some districts will take advantage of this and offer more options to their students.

Though it is unlikely lawmakers will extend the right to sponsor charters throughout the state to universities in the next session, there is potential to expand options for some students. The state could begin allowing virtual charter schools to enroll students statewide. This would provide a great service to students in areas that traditionally do not have educational options and would be a real benefit to the state.

The post Charter Performance IV: Looking Ahead appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn’t taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions — which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members — are aligned against it.

So children continue to learn from blackboards and books — the kind made of dead trees! no hyperlinks! — rather than getting lessons the way they consume virtually all other information: online. Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it’s like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of “Avatar” in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site. […]

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students…

Moving lesson planning and delivery online can provide students with more supervision, not less, says Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of “Disrupting Class.” It would free teachers, Horn says, “to do hand-holding and mentoring, something which is pretty much impossible in the current model.” After all, where is it written that the babysitter, disciplinarian, lecturer and evaluator must all be the same person? Or even that they all have to be in the same building?

Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls. The Virtual Virginia program focuses on offering Advanced Placement classes to every student in the state, bringing college-level courses to rural districts and inner-city Richmond, where high-level instruction is difficult to get. Rocketship Education, in San Jose, Calif., brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, cheap, modular space along with a small staff and hands their studies over to online curriculum for part of each day.

Online education has already become a boon for kids with special needs, the students least served by the traditional system. Education entrepreneur Tom Vander Ark launched Internet Academy, the first online K-12 establishment, in 1995 in part to serve kids with unorthodox education requirements, from serious athletes to children with health problems or learning disabilities.

One of the most successful areas of online education so far is helping kids who have fallen off the educational grid. Companies such as AdvancePath Academics scoop up students classified as unrecoverable by traditional schools and help them complete their education. Some dropout-recovery programs can be found in shopping malls and gyms.

Online education is no silver bullet for Missouri’s educational problems because there is no such thing. Each student is different, and although the traditional models may work well for most (a point I think is debatable), others may experience far more success in a more structured online program that still allows students to move at their own pace. Others could benefit from more independent learning styles like Montessori schools. All these options have their places, and we will be most successful when we allow parents and students find the pedagogical methods that work best for them instead of trying to force hundreds of thousands of individuals into the same boxes.

Sarah Brodsky has written about online schooling several times, and Caitlin Hartsell has also blogged about the issue.

The post Celebrate Educational Diversity appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Enrollment in the SLPS Virtual School is constrained by the district’s rule that online students spend one or more days a week in a classroom, working with Virtual School teachers in person. This policy is unusual for an online school; most such schools allow children to talk to teachers through video conferencing or by telephone, and require less frequent meetings. If SLPS made weekly in-person meetings optional, it could open enrollment to students who live far from St. Louis.

Another factor that has limited the Virtual School’s growth is its policy that elementary students must be enrolled full-time. Permitting young students to enroll in individual classes would give more children the ability to participate.

The post An Opportunity for SLPS appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Some of the educational choices that exist in Florida are notably absent in Missouri. For example, Florida students with disabilities may choose between different public schools or receive scholarships to attend private schools. Tax credits drive a separate scholarship program for students from low-income families; these students also have the option to receive tutoring, which is provided by private companies through contracts with school districts. Florida’s public school system boasts multiple virtual schools. And Florida does not constrain its charter schools to a few cities, as Missouri does; they’re spread out across dozens of counties.

Even more remarkable is the view expressed in the video that parents should research different schools and decide which would be best for their children. Missouri doesn’t need to import all of Florida’s parental choice programs and establish all of the same scholarships. It would be enough to adopt the perspective that choice in education is every parent’s right. Choice shouldn’t be seen as a last-ditch response to failure.

The post Parental Choice in Education: How Missouri Compares With Florida appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The legislature has created a system that sets up very strong incentives for a school district to contract with some corporate on-line operation, open up a virtual charter school, and set about trying to poach other districts’ students.

He then compares the ACT scores of his district’s students with the scores of an online school’s students. Fewer of the online school’s students took the ACT, and the average score of those who did was about one point lower than the district’s average.

The board member’s use of the word “poach” brings to mind hunters entering a forest illegally and shooting deer. That can’t be what he means, so lets look at the second definition. According to Dictionary.com, “poaching” can also mean “any encroachment on another’s property, rights, ideas, or the like.” Unless the board member has his own definition of the word, it seems that he views students as his district’s property and thinks other schools need permission to educate them anywhere else.

I’m sure the students who attend online schools don’t see themselves as being poached. They know they don’t belong to any school district. Taking online courses is their decision. And while the board member won’t acknowledge that online schools give students a choice, if it weren’t true, there would be no point in comparing test scores as he does in his essay. Telling people that your district has better scores than a competitor makes sense only if students can act on that knowledge and choose for themselves.

The complaints about poaching make the district look defensive and vulnerable. Districts that are doing well don’t panic when someone else offers online education. St. Louis County districts aren’t accusing SLPS of foul play because it enrolls a few of their students in its Virtual School. It would be silly for the districts to get upset when the vast majority of families prefer their brick-and-mortar schools to the SLPS Virtual School.

The board member’s emotional response may indicate that his district is threatened by the online option. Instead of pointing fingers, the Madison Metropolitan School District should consider opening an online school of its own.

The post One District’s Competition Is Another District’s Poaching appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“The district makes money whether we enroll one student or 160,” Prescott said. “K12, Inc. charges a fee for each course. It might be $400 a semester. For a student who takes six classes for both semesters, that’s $4,800 a year. We count that student as full time and we get $7,000 from the state, which nets the district about $2,000 per student.”

I wonder whether the St. Louis Public Schools’ Virtual School, which also contracts with K12, is equally lucrative. I would guess not, because SLPS requires students to meet with a district teacher in person at regular intervals. Those meetings could bring up staff costs.

Given that districts can earn a profit from teaching students online, why don’t more of them form virtual schools? I can suggest a couple of explanations. Most districts probably don’t know much about online courses or what they could gain by enrolling students in them. Until recently, distance learning was the domain of old-fashioned correspondence schools, online charter schools, and state-level virtual schools. Traditional districts weren’t involved. Districts are used to a system in which they get revenue based on how many students are sitting in classrooms. The concept of earning more by sending students to a different environment goes against their experience.

It could also be that some districts view virtual schools as an admission of failure. If students choose virtual instruction over in-class learning, maybe that means that the brick-and-mortar component of the district wasn’t so great all along. I don’t think that’s an accurate analysis, because no single educational method is right for everyone. But I can see how districts might reach that conclusion in a school system of few choices.

The post Online Education Can Be a Boon for Districts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Normandy is only provisionally accredited; its student MAP scores are better than Wellston’s, but not by much. Normandy has shown admirable willingness to accept new students; however, it hasn’t demonstrated that it can provide a significantly better education than Wellston did.

If Wellston students were given a choice, some might wish to attend Normandy, and others would probably prefer other schools. It’s too bad that the board assigned everyone to a single district and did not allow the students and their families to make the decision.

Wellston students are left with one option besides Normandy: They can attend the St. Louis Public Schools’ Virtual School.

The post State School Board Votes to Close Wellston appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The new program, which will take children out of the traditional classroom and send them online to learn, starts in August.

Yet no teachers have been hired for the program.

“I have to admit I wish we were further ahead, but with a new program we have a crunch time,” Curt Fuchs, virtual school director, said.

I see from this article that something in my previous writing about the Virtual Instruction Program was inaccurate. I did not know that Missouri has partnered with two private virtual schools, Kaplan Virtual Education and Connections Academy, to provide course content. However, I stand by my argument that MIssouri should allow virtual schools to compete for students.

Furthermore, requiring teachers to have Missouri certification is a bad idea. The whole point of virtual education is that the teacher doesn’t have to be right there with you. What if we could hire teachers who already teach in Florida’s successful virtual education program, for instance? If Missouri gave the program more flexibility, it would probably get off to a smoother start.

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