Online charter schools, which are run mostly by for-profit companies, have long struggled with poor academic outcomes—from test scores, to academic growth, to graduation rates, to attendance rates. The most high-profile study, done by economists at Stanford University in 2015, found that students attending an online charter school made so little progress in math over the course of a year that it was as if they hadn’t attended school at all.
Findings such as that, as well as numerous media and government investigations into gross mismanagement of schools, has led some prominent charter school advocacy groups to start pushing for increased regulation of virtual schools. Read the full article here.