Charter school advocates call on “virtual” charter schools to improve

A coalition of charter school advocates is calling on some of their own to up their game, citing research that found online charter schools had turned in “large-scale underperformance.”

"If traditional public schools were producing such results, we would rightly be outraged. We should not feel any different just because these are charter schools," says the report, "A Call to Action to Improve the Quality of Full-Time Virtual Charter Public Schools."

It is authored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and 50CAN, a school quality advocacy group.

Georgia has several online charter schools, including the Georgia Cyber Academy, with more than 13,000 students. The report does not address Georgia —it's focused more on Ohio, with its many "virtual" schools. But it does discuss K12, Inc., the publicly-traded for-profit corporation with operations in Ohio that also manages the publicly-funded Georgia Cyber Academy.

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