Online Public High School Operated Under Apollo

I'm not sure if anyone shared this, since it's an article from 2011. However, I wasn't shocked about hearing that Apollo grabbed a piece of the pie in the K-12 spectrum.


Online public schools produce profits but some are failing students | KING5.com Seattle

The sad part of this article is that 7% of student graduated. I'm afraid that this isn't the best news for our future as a society.

 

Crap. My son does the Insight Academy through the k12 program here where we live and my daughter does the Arizona Virtual Academy through the k12 program. I was told they are regular public schools, just online. Now I need to do A LOT more research because I don't know that I like the whole for profit thing, especially if Apollo is behind it. *sigh*

 

To any of the homeschool folks- HSLDA reported several years back (more than 3) about the test scores and outcomes of charter and virtual high schools. You can look it up if you're interested, but they showed a LOWER testing score than regular public school kids. In fact, they revised their membership criteria and no longer allow member families to belong to these schools and still be covered under their legal protection. I've never used one, so I don't have any direct experience to share, but I think it's worth looking into for the families considering this route.

 

I have no numbers to back this up but I've been told (by friends who are H.S. teachers) that a lot of the kids who go to online high schools are kids who have been kicked out of the high schools in their towns/cities for various reasons. If this is true then it would definitely reduce the graduation stats.