Bottom line, kids as a group in virtual schools do worse, part 7

The Results, by Stephanie Saul

Mr. Packard has repeatedly delivered upbeat assessments to Wall Street about the progress of K12 Inc. students, even as many schools were performing poorly on state tests.

In a conference in March sponsored by the investment firm Morgan Stanley, Mr. Packard said that “our kids are doing as well or better than the average child in a brick-and-mortar school.”

During an investment analysts call in October, Mr. Packard boasted about results at Agora, calling them “significantly higher than a typical school on state administered tests for growth.” Weeks earlier, data had been released showing that 42 percent of Agora students tested on grade level or better in math, compared with 75 percent of students statewide. And 52 percent of Agora students had hit the mark in reading, compared with 72 percent statewide. The school was losing ground, not gaining it.

Mr. Packard said in a recent interview that he was not aware of the data at the time he made the comments. A spokesman said Mr. Packard was relying on older data.

A Stanford University group, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, tracked students in eight virtual schools in Pennsylvania, including Agora, comparing them with similar students in regular schools. The study found that “in every subgroup, with significant effects, cyber charter performance is lower.”

Devora Davis, the center’s research manager, said the group’s analysis of Pennsylvania online schools showed that students were slipping. “If they were paired with a traditional public schools student, the public school student kept their place in line, and the cyberstudent moved back five spots,” she said.

An analysis by the Carroll County Public School District in Virginia shows that the 400 students in the virtual program there performed worse than the regular students in 19 of 26 categories on the state assessment test.

The Carroll County superintendent, James Greg Smith, said he was particularly concerned about scores in middle school math, history and social sciences. In seventh-grade math, for example, only 35 percent of the online students passed a state assessment; 68 percent of the traditional students did.

It will be a while before test results are available for students at the new virtual school in Tennessee. Back in Memphis, Ms. Alhammadi is worried that her daughter, Yasmine, is moving too quickly. A computerized analysis shows that, at the rate she is going, Yasmine will be finished with all but one of her classes by March.

Red flags go up if a student is “zapping through like a rocket, lesson by lesson,” according to Tom DiGiovanni, K12’s senior director of product planning. “The teachers are instructed to drop in (by phone) and do a little quiz to kind of test students” to make sure they understand the concepts.

Five miles from Ms. Alhammadi’s home, Ms. Ubiarco has also turned her living room into a classroom. Her daughter Sabrina, 10, is in the fifth grade and her son, K.C., 6, is in kindergarten at the Tennessee Virtual Academy.

Ms. Ubiarco is giving Sabrina a math lesson — about the distributive property — on a white board in the family’s living room.

While his mother focuses on his sister, K.C. is doing his own thing — lying on the carpet crashing cars into Spider-Man and Batman action figures.

For the most part, Mrs. Ubiarco said the switch to online had gone smoothly, although she was initially stumped when she first got the K12 curriculum.

“I called the teacher the other day to find out what a simple predicate is,” she said. “She said it’s the verb. I said why don’t they just say that?”