New study shows online charter schools fail miserably in every way possible

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) along with the Center on Reinventing Public Education completed and released their findings on the growing "reforms" to education known as online charter schooling. Charter schools, for the most part, are a privatization scheme that show themselves to be corrupt and profoundly flawed, time and time again. The study by CREDO wanted to find out how online charter education affected students' academic growth.

• Students in online charters lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading.
• Students in online charters lost 180 days of learning in math during the course of a 180-day school year. Yes, you read that right. As my colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote in this story about the study, it’s as if the students did not attend school at all when it comes to math.
• The average student in an online charter had lower reading scores than students in traditional schools everywhere except Wisconsin and Georgia, and had lower math scores everywhere except in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

[my emphasis]

Pretty damning stuff for online charter schools. Not so, according to Neil Clark. Oh, yeah, Mr. Clark is a spokesman for ECOT—Electric Classroom of Tomorrow:

But Neil Clark, spokesman for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, commonly known as ECOT, called CREDO a “don’t-think tank” whose “methodology and assumptions remain as flawed as their previous reports full of thinly veiled, skewed data and incorrect comparisons.”

“The agenda of CREDO is clear — they advocate the systematic dismantling of e-learning in the United States,” Clark said. “However, new technologies must be accepted and used to their full potential.”

Hold on there Johnny-truism, no one says that technology shouldn't be used as a tool. Also, this study and its agenda was partially funded by pro-charter school interests, so you're electronic education sucks. Spokesman Clark points out this and that, but CREDO has a response to this and that:

James Woodworth, lead analyst for the CREDO study, said he understands the concerns about unique students, but by using test scores as part of the matches, the study considers that although two students might not have identical circumstances, they got to the same place academically.

Also, to allay concerns about unique students, researchers compared students’ academic growth in a traditional school to what happened once they entered an online school. And for students who left an online school and returned to a traditional school, those results also were compared.

In all methods of analysis, Woodworth said, the negative results for online schools were similar.

Woodsworth also points out (I imagine he does this while patting the ECOT people on the head) that the results are so monumentally bad and there is so much data that in order for CREDO's results to be that far off one would have to assume that the researchers studying the data would have had learned to read and do math from an online charter school—and that would be farcical. Not as farcical as saying your reforms for education would include abolishing teachers' lounges, but close.