San Antonio — As information about the academic struggles of Pennsylvania’s cyber charters has become more accessible, the full-time online schools have increasingly enrolled students from the state’s least-educated communities and most-disadvantaged school districts, according to a new study to be presented here Sunday as part of the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The result, according to researcher Bryan Mann of Penn State University?
Cyber charter have become an inequitable corner of Pennsylvania’s school-choice system, leaving the state’s neediest students with another bad option that their peers from better-off school districts largely avoid.
“This may be the educational policy equivalent of asking someone in a food desert to pick between two fast food restaurants and hoping they make a healthy choice,” Mann wrote in a pre-conference email interview.
In Pennsylvania and across the country, full-time online charter schools have come under withering scrutiny. Studies by the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes at Stanford University have found at both the national and state level that students in the schools learn at a dramatically slower pace than their peers in traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Last fall, Education Weekpublished a major investigation into the sector, highlighting concerns about students not using the schools’ educational software and about extensive lobbying efforts by the for-profit management companies that dominate the industry…
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