EDITORIAL: Take a Closer Look: Online Charter Schools Should Be Subject to Better State Oversight
By The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
Feb. 12–The Ohio Department of Education should make sure that online charter schools are delivering the education that taxpayers are funding.
Online schools, which allow students to obtain course materials and submit assignments over the Internet, usually from home, are among the most popular of charter schools.
The idea makes sense for students whose health or social and family circumstances make attending a conventional school difficult.
Experience suggests, though, that the state hasn’t figured out how to eliminate all the opportunities for unsupervised, long-distance schooling to go awry.
The latest issue involves techniques used to get new e-students started on their studies.
Most online schools provide their students with computers, but delivering these machines can take weeks after a student enrolls. The Education Department is concerned that students are sitting at home doing nothing while they wait for their computers, instead of attending their old schools.
Online schools say students shouldn’t consider themselves officially enrolled until they have their computers, but many students are likely to lose any sense of obligation to their old schools as soon as they sign online-school enrollment papers.
A solution is for online schools to get computers to students faster and to make clear that students aren’t officially enrolled until they take delivery of a computer and log in.
In the bigger picture, the state needs to take greater pains to monitor what is and isn’t happening for onlineschool students.
Thousands of students are spread across the state, each having minimal personal contact with school officials, and state officials have no practical way to observe what students do.
Thus, online schools essentially operate on an honor system.
The state already is investigating 11 online schools that inaccurately reported “attendance” rates of 100 percent, even though numbers of students had been unenrolled because they rarely logged on.
Last year, one of the largest schools, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, closed some of its computer-lab centers, including one in Columbus.
Students assigned to the centers weren’t visiting much and, after initially claiming that the students did their work on home computers, ECOT eventually acknowledged that none of the 52 students involved had received computers at home.
Online learning offers great opportunity to nontraditional students, but those who promise to provide such education, using taxpayers’ money, should be held as accountable as any other public school.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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