Online charter schools have grown exponentially across South Carolina and the nation — and questions about their effectiveness are growing, too.
Today, the state has five virtual charter schools that together enroll roughly 10,000 students, up dramatically from about 2,100 students nine years ago when the state's first cyber schools opened. A 2007 bipartisan bill fueled their growth by authorizing the state's virtual schools program, and since then, taxpayers have footed the bill to the tune of more than $350 million.
Despite this hefty investment, online charter schools have produced dismal results on almost all academic metrics, according to state and district data. On average, less than half of their students graduate on time. At one cyber school, nearly a third of students dropped out last school year. Data from the S.C Public Charter School District, which oversees these schools, shows just one in two virtual students enroll for a full year.
Supporters of online education, including U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, praise virtual schools for their flexibility, innovation and reach. For struggling, home-bound or bullied students, advocates argue, these schools are lifelines.
But critics contend state taxpayers have spent tens of millions of dollars lining the pockets of the for-profit companies that manage these schools at the expense of their flailing students.
"It concerns me," said Don McLaurin, chairman of the S.C. Public Charter School District Board of Trustees. "Right now, for a variety of reasons, the virtuals are having performance problems, at least some of them. ... We may have more than we need."
On almost every measure of student achievement, virtual schools lag behind their brick-and-mortar counterparts:
In 2016, the average four-year graduation rate at the state’s online charter schools was 42 percent. That’s nearly twice as low as the statewide average of 82.6 percent. Three online charter schools — S.C. Whitmore School, S.C. Virtual Charter School and Odyssey Online Learning (formerly Provost Academy) — had lower graduation rates than all but three schools in the entire state. Two of those schools with lower graduation rates were for troubled and at-risk students, and one was an online-based school in Richland School District Two.
Those same three online charter schools also had higher dropout rates than every school in the state but one — Greg Mathis Charter, a “last chance” high school in North Charleston. At Odyssey Online, which enrolled 528 students last school year, the dropout rate was 32 percent — more than 10 times the statewide average.
On average, only about half of all online charter school students stayed for the entire 2015-16 school year. Roughly one in five students who began the school year at an online charter school left mid-year. By contrast, the charter district’s brick and mortar schools retained more than 80 percent of their students for the whole school year.
“How are these online charter schools serving their students? I’d go as bluntly to say that they're not. They’re serving their shareholders, plain and simple,” said Michael Barbour, an associate professor at Touro University in Vallejo, Calif., and an expert in virtual education.
“These aren’t education bodies; they are corporate bodies and as such, the person they answer to isn’t the students, it isn’t the parents, it’s not even the legislators or regulators that created them. It’s the shareholders,” he said. “And the shareholders only give a damn about one thing, and that’s profit."