Minnesota’s legislative auditor released a report yesterday that, as every local media outlet noted, “raised questions” about Minnesota’s burgeoning online school market:

Even as they surge in popularity, online schools in Minnesota are troubled by high dropout rates, poor math scores and inadequate state oversight.

That’s the conclusion of a state audit released on Monday that shows how the virtual schools, whose full-time enrollment has tripled in recent years, are faring.

Sounds dodgy, right?  It certainly did in the hands of much of the Twin Cities media, who just loooove a scandal.

Well, not necessarily. The auditor – the estimable James Nobles, perhaps the single most reliable source in Minnesota government – noted an honest caveat:

It’s unclear why many online students are falling short academically, said Legislative Auditor James Nobles, adding, “We need to find out, is there anything more we can do for these students?”

I’d like to raise the same question in followup that I raise whenever flaks for the Minnesota Federation of Teachers point out standardized test scores at charter schools; measuring individual schools, or schools as a group – especially schools like charters and online schools, which cater so heavily to students who for whatever reason don’t click in traditional sit-down factory-model schools – isn’t nearly as meaningful as measuring the response and performance of individual students over time, and aggregating the individual students’ net changes over time.

During the 2009-10 school year, Minnesota’s full-time online students finished only 63 percent of the courses they started. Just 16 percent of those in high school were proficient on state math tests, compared with 41 percent in the same grades at schools throughout Minnesota. And fully one-quarter of the 12th-graders dropped out by the end of the school year, vastly more than the 3 percent of all students who did so statewide.

And without some aggregate idea of where that mass of students started academically, and what brings them to online school in the first place,  none of the numbers means much.  The figure on senior dropouts is particularly puzzling; what would prompt a quarter of seniors to drop out?  I suspect it’s something a lot deeper than “online school”.

To be fair, the Strib article I’m quoting notes this:

Advocates of online learning point out that many students are already behind academically when they enroll. “The majority of the students that come to us were struggling in their previous school, and they’ve come to us as an alternative,” said John Huber, head of Insight School of Minnesota, an online high school guided by the Brooklyn Center School District.

But dimes’ll get you dollars that MN2020 cites this report as a reason to abolish online schools (as well as charters) and drag those kids back to the factory schools many of them are fleeing in the first place.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.