Students attending Colorado’s full-time online education programs have typically lagged their peers on virtually every academic indicator, from state test scores to student growth measures to high school graduation rates.
But an independent analysis of previously unreleased online school data by the I-News Network and Education News Colorado reveals key new findings and an achievement gap that alarmed education officials:
- Online students are losing ground. Students who transfer to online programs from brick-and-mortar schools posted lower scores on annual state reading exams after entering their virtual classrooms.
- Academic performance declined after students enrolled in online programs. Students who stayed in online programs long enough to take two years’ worth of state reading exams actually saw their test results decline over time.
- Wide gaps persist. Double-digit gaps in achievement on state exams between online students and their peers in traditional schools persist in nearly every grade and subject – and they’re widest among more affluent students.
A top state education official called the findings “very concerning.”
“We’ve got to ask some questions here and we’ve got to see what’s going on,” said Diana Sirko, deputy commissioner of learning and results for the Colorado Department of Education.
Sirko said the CDE will launch a “comprehensive review” of online standards and accountability under the guidance of a newly hired choice and innovation chief, Amy Anderson, who began work Aug. 29.
Part 2 in a three-part series
- Education News Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network spent 10 months investigating achievement, turnover and oversight at the state’s largest full-time online programs.
- Part 2 examines the programs’ poor academic results. Part 1 analyzed high turnover rates while Part 3 reviews oversight efforts.
- Compare performance of online vs. non-line students
Poor achievement has done little to stem the popularity of virtual programs, with online enrollment growing last year at a pace seven times faster than that of traditional schools. Online schools in Colorado are expected to receive $100 million this year in public funding.
“We know online in general does not do as well as traditional schools,” said Randy DeHoff, a former State Board of Education member who now works for GOAL Academy, one of the state’s newest and largest online programs. “That’s because so many are coming in so far behind. Online tends to be kind of their last option.”
DeHoff’s program targets, at least in part, students who have struggled in conventional classrooms. In 2009-10, nearly 400 GOAL students identified as homeless.
The analysis of state data shows, however, that most online school students do not appear to be at-risk students. Only about 120 students of the more than 10,000 entering online programs last year were identified as previous dropouts returning to school, and only 290 entered online schools after spending the prior year in an alternative school for troubled youth.
In addition, the analysis looked at the 2,400 online students who had taken a state standardized reading test in a brick-and-mortar school the year before. More than half had scored proficient or better.
Shifting demographics of online programs
Online programs as a group have become more diverse as the population has grown. However, they still serve fewer poor and minority students than the state as a whole.
Online student scores on statewide achievement tests are consistently 14 to 26 percentage points below state averages for reading, writing and math over the past four years. The gap in reading and writing has remained about the same between 2008 and 2011, and the gap in math has risen several percentage points.
“I think the achievement gap that your data shows is very alarming,” said State Board of Education member Elaine Gantz Berman.
Enrollment in Colorado's online schools is growing seven times faster than that of the state's traditional schools.
Colorado Virtual Academy, the state’s largest online program with more than 5,000 students, has seen its poverty rate double to 19 percent and its minority population rise to 22 percent in the past five years.
Those figures are still below state averages – as are COVA’s test results.
A mom who represents one segment of virtual families, traditional homeschoolers, said she simply isn’t interested in test scores.
“You’ll find that most homeschoolers don’t care about tests,” said Liese Carberry, who has enrolled her three children in COVA and Kaplan online programs. “That’s because we have seen learning happen for the sake of learning, not for the sake of a few points on a graph.”
Timothy Booker, who chairs the charter school board overseeing COVA, said families who enrolled prior to the recent growth explosion in online tended to have at least one involved parent and homeschooling experience.
“That has changed over the years,” he said. “We’ve kind of been discovered by kids who … we might be the school of last resort, they’ve tried brick-and-mortar and they’re not getting anywhere.”
Between 2004 and 2011, COVA’s reading scores dropped six percentage points and math results flatlined. Academic growth indicators put student progress at 29 in math and 36 in reading, far below the state average of 50.
During those years, a state law requiring online students to have previously attended a brick-and-mortar school was repealed and enrollment in COVA – which targets homeschoolers – more than doubled.
Booker described board members as “very concerned” about the school’s progress and said they discussed ending their contract with K12 Inc., the Virginia-based online provider that operates virtual schools in 27 states. In 2009-10, K12 Inc. received $22 million in public funding to operate COVA.
But Booker said a one-on-one conversation with the head of K12 Inc. led to a sharper focus on professional development for COVA teachers, emphasizing the need for more student interaction.
“We’re not happy at all,” he said of overall academic results, but after discussions with his school’s corporate leader: “We’re starting to be hopeful.”
Online students declining performance over time
The I-News/EdNews analysis also looked at the test scores of students in online schools over time, finding performance declined. Key points:
- Students in online programs who took state reading tests in both 2009 and 2010 saw their proficiency rates go down. Of the 2,729 online school students who took the tests both years, 60 proficient were proficient in 2009. But that fell to 54 percent the next year.
- Students making the switch from traditional public schools to online also saw their scores drop. Some 2,414 students took the reading exams in traditional schools in 2009, then in an online program the next year. Their proficiency rate declined from 58 percent to 51 percent.
Online schools also had among the highest dropout rates and lowest graduation rates in the state over the past two years. In 2010, fewer than one in four online school seniors graduated compared to nearly three of every four high school seniors statewide.
The dropout rate in the top 10 largest online programs last year was 12 percent – quadruple the state average of 3 percent. Colorado’s online schools produced three times more dropouts than graduates. That’s the opposite of the state average, where there are three graduates for every one dropout.
Other studies of Colorado online students have found similarly poor results:
The state’s annual online school report released in June found that “results indicate achievement of online students consistently lags behind those of non-online students, even after controlling for grade levels and various student characteristics,” such as poverty, English language ability and special education status.
The I-News/EdNews analysis pulled apart the data to see how online schools fare with students by income level. The finding: Students eligible for federal lunch assistance in online programs perform worse than low-income students in traditional schools on state reading, writing and math exams.
But the gaps between online students who are not low-income and their peers statewide are much larger, particularly in math. The math gap between poor students in online versus brick-and-mortar schools was 20 points in 2010 – but it was 37 points that year among more affluent students.
Slowing growth leads to higher achievement
One of Colorado’s oldest online programs, Branson Online School, is also its highest-performing. But to get there, the school had to cut back.
“If you’re looking for easy, it’s not us.”
– Judith Stokes, Branson Online
* * *
“If we’re not careful … kids become a victim of the choice rather than a beneficiary of it.”
– Diana Sirko, State education dept.
In 2005, the Branson school district on Colorado’s southeastern border with New Mexico ran the state’s third-largest online school, enrolling more than 1,000 students. By 2010, the school had dropped back to sixth in size, enrolling 427 students.
Branson assistant superintendent Judith Stokes, who oversees the online school, said the growth and lagging scores – combined with a critical 2006 state audit of online programs – prompted the ranching community’s school board to slow down.
“We had grown very, very rapidly at one time, before the audit, and at that point, we pulled back,” she said.
Stokes said growth slowed when the school focused on ensuring families understood the online program before enrolling because, “If you’re looking for easy, it’s not us.”
In spring 2011, Branson online students beat the statewide average in proficiency in reading and were six percentage points short in math.
DeHoff, the former State Board of Education member, said online schools need to do more to show academic progress. He believes they’re trying.
“We’re figuring out that most kids need more than just a course over the computer,” he said. “So online programs are doing much more in the way of field trips and social gatherings … more movement, like GOAL has, of teachers having face-to-face contact – not just virtually but in the same location.
“You really do need both.”
Sirko said the state’s comprehensive review will attempt to look at what’s behind the numbers.
“I think the market-driven environment in having choices and options for kids is a very good thing,” she said. “But I think this is one of those unintended consequences, if we’re not careful, where kids become a victim of the choice rather than a beneficiary of it.”
Contact Burt Hubbard bhubbard@inewsnetwork.org or Nancy Mitchell nmitchell@ednewscolorado.org.
Click on map to see distribution of online students by district
This map shows the number of students from each school district who went to online programs as of October 2010. The line “funding change” refers to state money that went to online programs rather than brick-and-mortar schools in that district. Click and drag to center the map. Use the plus (+) and minus (–) keys to zoom in and out of the map.
This series of reports on online education in Colorado raises many questions for lots of different parties. Alex Medler brought forward some of my questions / concerns in his comments on the first story. A couple of the other questions I have for now are below.
First: “The analysis of state data shows, however, that most online school students do not appear to be at-risk students. Only about 120 students of the more than 10,000 entering online programs last year were identified as previous dropouts returning to school, and only 290 entered online schools after spending the prior year in an alternative school for troubled youth.”
Since when is the definition of “at-risk students” confined to dropout recovery or transfer from an Alternative Education Campus (AEC)? If school districts started receiving “at-risk” funding on this basis, there would be a justifiable outcry. Elsewhere inferences are made about the relative number of poverty (FRL) students enrolled in online vs. brick-and-mortar, but no data are provided for comparison.
Second: “The dropout rate in the top 10 largest online programs last year was 12 percent – quadruple the state average of 3 percent. Colorado’s online schools produced three times more dropouts than graduates. That’s the opposite of the state average, where there are three graduates for every one dropout.”
This certainly needs clarification for the average reader. It appears that one is referring to a one-year dropout rate vs. a four-year dropout rate, but it doesn’t come through clearly. This statement from the COVA Board sheds some light that provides context and calls into question the shocking claim: http://www.k12.com/cova/who-we-are/board/statement-grad-rate
Are full-time online schools for everyone? No. Can online schools improve? Yes. But I think we can dig a little deeper to make a fair and honest assessment of the situation. I hope future editions of the series offer more substance.
What I find most disturbing is that it took investigative journalism to bring these issues to light. Where is CDE in all of this? How is CDE assessing on-line schools and what are the consequences? Where is the oversight and accountability?
Strange as it may seem, I agree with both Ben and Mark. It is unfortunate that it takes investigative journalists to shed light on the finances and achievement of Colorado online schools. Thankfully we have independent journalists at EdNews and elsewhere that are still doing this important work.
There is undoubtedly a place for online courses and schools for some, maybe many Colorado students assuming the schools are meeting student needs and helping them reach state standards. My concern with CO online schools lies with what seems a total lack of oversight from districts and the state. You’d think that policy makers, CDE and districts would have learned few things from the early days of charters, think AZ and OH along with the recent Caesar Chavez debacle.
I also worry along with probably many others in the school reform community that these EdNews stories will be used by those that are protecting the status quo to thwart any future choice and innovation initiatives in K-12. I’m sure the anti-school choice folks are salivating over these stories.
While it would appear that many of these online schools are not working, it should also be remembered that there are many district managed brick and mortar schools that are also not working. Let’s be careful to not only go after online schools. We know there are a few great examples of schools like Rocketship in CA that are using online as part of their overall school design to accelerate student learning. It would be nice to have a few good hybrid and online schools here to set the pace for others like we have for charters with schools like West Denver Prep, DSST and Peak to Peak.
We need to apply the same accountability lens to district managed, charters and online schools. If for example lawmakers want to change the single count day to clean up some of the online sector problems, which they should, they should apply it to all schools. District schools may not be sending the profits back to the home office when kids leave after the count day but they are supporting a bloated bureaucracy that is not doing anything to support the kids that left the school second semester. We can do better.
I welcome the journalistic prompt for the discussion, and echo the concern that these are not issues that have necessarily garnered enough attention from policymakers or those overseeing school systems. Ben is right to ask for clarifications about which drop-out and graduation measures the article is using, and Van is right to point out how the problems in online schools, and the likely solutions, should affect many other schools besides on-line charters. But those points shouldn’t keep us from acknowledging an important reality. We have thousands of kids in current on-line schools in Colorado that are producing outcomes that are unacceptable. The nuances of that performance are going to be tricky, but given the severity of the reported shortcomings, the bottom-line conclusion is unlikely to change with more data.
As we ask for clarification and seek to understand the full implications of the data, we should be clear that while it is good to understand the problems clearly, the data we see should lead us to agree there are problems, and move on to ask, ” what we should do about them?”
To Van Schoales’ point, I believe TCA’s College Pathways 7th graders had 100% reading proficiency.
It is a hybrid model.
It seems like more schools from both brick-and-mortar and online are starting to explore blended learning models. Trouble is that there is not a funding structure for hybrids.
Senator Shaffer’s list of questions regarding the audit included the one of funding. What is the likelihood that this could be rectified as part of the solution?
Alex, I am certainly not denying there are some significant shortcomings in some of the online schools, just as Van noted there are among some brick-and-mortar schools. But I want to see more appropriate context provided and distinctions made so any “solutions” aren’t worse than the legitimate problems and don’t deprive students & parents of educational options that work well to serve their needs.
When it comes to providing better accountability and oversight of digital learning programs, this recent piece by Rick Hess provides some valuable guidance in ensuring a healthy balance can be kept: http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2011/2011_CreatingSoundPolicyforDigitalLearning/20110727_QualityControlinK12DigitalLearning_Hess.pdf
Karin also raises a great point. Researching an effective funding system that would support customized student learning through effective blended learning innovations is one of the things we are looking at here at the Independence Institute. I can only hope that Senator Shaffer and other legislators are interested in taking such a constructive approach. IN addition to the previously-stated need to fix the student enrollment count system, it’s one of the major policy issues worthy of our attention as a valuable solution.
Much of the data in this report (including all three parts) could be cited as examples of “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” For example, the article states “Only about 120 students of the more than 10,000 entering online programs last year were identified as previous dropouts returning to school.” But the same year, 569 of GOAL’s 1386 students reported they had previously dropped out, and 779 reported they had missed 10 or more days of school (there are a lot of duplicates in those two numbers). How to reconcile that with CDE’s reported 120 previous dropouts? Look to the definition of a dropout, and who is responsible for reporting it.
A student who has essentially stopped attending school is not counted as dropout until the district reports him or her as such, or until that same student does not show up in any other school or district the following year. So hundreds of students who have for all intents and purposes dropped out of school, but who are still being pursued by their home school or district, and thus kept on the school roles, don’t count as official dropouts in the CDE data if they enroll in GOAL (or any other school) the next year.
Graduation rates present a similar problem. Only four-year graduation rates are reported on the CDE website. But I know GOAL and COVA (because I am associated with both) can document how many students enroll behind in credits, and continue on to graduate in five or six years. Those students don’t show up in an aggregate four year graduation rate. Nor are their home districts held accountable for just passing them on without ensuring they acquired the knowledge and skills necessary to graduate from high school or succeed in life. Online schools do a terrific job of catching many (though not all) of these students up and graduating them.
Are online schools performing as well as they need to? Certainly not, and they are addressing those issues and improving, or their authorizers are (hopefully) preparing to close them. But are online schools performing as poorly as this and other news reports imply. No, they are not, but as Alex Medler pointed out in his comment to Part 1 of this series, we need to do a better job of collecting the data that will show clearly how well or poorly we are performing, including where our students come from, how well they perform when they arrive, why they leave, where they go when they leave, and how well they perform when they leave.
Sounds simple, but anyone who has tried to assemble that data can tell you it’s a lot more complicated than it appears. But that’s a topic for another post.
Randy and Alex both have raised some very important points in these comments. It would be good for the authors of this series, and/or the editors of Ed News Colorado, to respond.
A number of people have asked questions about the data in the online series via these comment sections. I’ve tried to address all of the questions from the three parts in one document here – http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2011/10/06/25989-data-behind-the-online-education-series. I’ll post this in the comment sections of all three parts and link to it from the first-day story as well. We appreciate your close reading of what turned out to be a lengthy project and your desire to know more about the numbers.