Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

> on average their outcomes are worse than the alternatives.

Very much not true.

The worst alternative by far are online charter schools

"CREDO’s 2015 study in coordination with Mathematica Policy Research and the Center on Reinventing Public Education revealed that students of online charter schools had significantly weaker academic performance in math and reading, compared with their counterparts in conventional schools." - https://credo.stanford.edu/our-impact/

"We found that students who switched to virtual charter schools experienced large, negative effects on mathematics and English/language arts achievement that persisted over time and that these effects could not be explained by observed teacher or classroom characteristics" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090981...

View on HN

Those studies seem to point out the differences between virtual and brick-and-mortar charter schools. It's not surprising to me that virtualized classrooms have worse outcomes. We're all very aware now of the limitations of video chat.

That's rather my point, yes? Public schools are not the worst teaching alternative.

They compare online charter schools with in-person conventional schools. Hardly a fair fight. The biggest disaster of all is online conventional schools.

> The biggest disaster of all is online conventional schools

Do you have any evidence that online charter schools are worse than online conventional schools?

Because pre-COVID the evidence from online charter schools that they are, overall, a disaster, as in (quoting https://www.edweek.org/technology/cyber-charters-have-overwh... )

] Statistically speaking, the gains that online charter students saw in math were so limited, it was “literally as though the student did not go to school for the entire year,” said Macke Raymond, the director the Center for Research on Education Outcomes

As far as I know, students in public schools who switched to online during COVID still had a gain in math education.

You'll see from the same source that the student:teacher ratio for online charters was 30:1 "compared to 20:1 for brick-and-mortar charters and 17:1 for traditional public schools. At the high school level, more than one-third of the online charters surveyed reported typical class sizes of 50 or more."

Conventional schools did not fire half of their teachers when switching to online.

For your statement to be true would mean the negative effects were wide-spread, severe, and obvious, and it would mean that doubling the number of teachers per student makes no difference - contra all evidence.

>Do you have any evidence that online charter schools are worse than online conventional schools?

I wrote exactly the opposite. Perhaps your poor reading comprehension makes you a less than ideal candidate for critiquing education?

That was a typo, which I did not catch during proof reading.

"Assume good faith." - my intent is easy to understand from the rest of my comment, and citation.

I'll ask again, where is your evidence that online conventional schools are a bigger disaster than cyber charters?

Remember, jamesgreenleaf in the g'parent at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31419272 said outcomes are worse in public schools than the alternatives. My point is that's simply not true, given how bad cyber charters are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com