Dive Brief:

• A months-long investigation by Education Week uncovered serious academic and management problems that plague cyber charter schools across the country even as they are allowed to expand.
• In Colorado, GOAL Academy funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to school head Ken Crowell, even though nearly half of students didn’t even log into the school’s software for a single minute in a typical week last spring and students were given the opportunity to make up year-long classes in one week.
• When GOAL Academy had trouble with its original authorizer, the Charter School Institute, it got a new charter from Falcon District 49 and continued all its same troubling practices, including allowing Crowell to run the school and contract out management to for-profit Summit Education Group, whose only shareholder was the school head.

Dive Insight:

Virtual charter schools claim to serve a slice of the school population that has been failed by the traditional system. That is why, they say, student achievement is so low — these are students who would have been failing in their home schools, too. While it is true that some students thrive in the flexible learning environment presented by online education, the majority do not. And people who submit proposals to open new schools do not pretend they are for everybody. The problem is it is much easier to confuse priorities in a for-profit environment (which many cybercharters have), and if enrolling more students brings more profits, that can become the goal rather than finding students who are the best fit.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently updated its model charter law, adding recommendations about regulating virtual charter schools for the first time. New Hampshire’s Virtual Learning Academy has also been held up as a model for the sector and proof that online learning at the K-12 level can be done well.