There is an article in the Denver Post about state testing data for both online and traditional schools. It appears that the online schools are lagging behind the traditional ones. However, as the article points out, one of the problems is that the online schools are growing so rapidly, it’s difficult to interpret their data. The other problem is who ends up going online. Because there are so many new students, their academic backgrounds are unknown (as opposed to the traditional students where this multiple year data).
The article begins:
Many of the state’s online schools celebrated students’ gains – from the incremental to the impressive – on the 2007 CSAP.
Still, data show that in many of the cyberschools, the percentage of students scoring either “proficient” or “advanced” on the three tests continues to lag behind the state.