Online learning isn't failing — online programs are. And it's time for a change.

  Half of online students wind up leaving their virtual schools within a year of enrolling. Online schools produce three times as many dropouts as they do graduates. Millions of dollars are going to virtual schools for students who are no longer attending classes.

  Those are the hard facts in a scathing account of the state of Colorado’s virtual school industry from the I-News Network investigative journalism consortium and the nonprofit Education News Colorado. The report concluded that the “churn” of students in and out of online schools is drawing tremendous resources away from public schools, which are often left holding the bag when virtual schools fail to meet students’ needs and expectations. 

  Let’s be honest and let’s be clear: These problems are not confined to the Centennial State. It’s reasonable to expect that similar investigative efforts in other states will produce similarly blistering results. 

  How could this have happened? After all, it was just two years ago that the U.S. Department of Education published a meta-analysis of more than 1,000 empirical studies on online learning. The analysis showed that, on average, students in online learning classes performed modestly better than those in face-to-face settings. 

  We know that online learning can work. So why are so many online schools failing?

  One possible answer: Hubris. 

  Good-intentioned people saw the transformative power of online education — and in many cases they also saw a market opportunity. They rushed in. They ignored critics. And instead of learning from veteran teachers and administrators, they sought to compete with them. 

  And compete they did. Colorado’s first virtual school opened with 13 students in 1995. Today, tens of thousands of students are studying online in Colorado, and hundreds of thousands more are taking virtual classes across the nation, mostly in programs that are independent of traditional schools and which actively seek to draw students away from those institutions.

  That’s a flawed model. Our public schools may not be perfect — far from it — but treating traditional education and traditional educators as the enemy is a one-way ticket to failure. Inside all that brick and mortar is experience, expertise and passion that should be celebrated and cultivated, not derided and ignored.

  At The American Academy, we do things differently. Across the nation, we work with school leaders to enroll dropouts and other at-risk students into online learning programs that we facilitate at the direction of the district — giving local leaders the power to identify which students most need our help. In turn, students get the flexibility they often need to continue with their studies.
 
  But make no mistake: The very notion of online learning is a misnomer. Just sitting students in front of a computer isn’t enough. For online learning to work, computer-based curriculum must be coupled with multiple layers of flesh-and-blood support. In our program that means credentialed teachers, online mentors, 24-7 tutors and local advocates who keep in regular contact with their students.
 
  Do we lose some? Yes we do. Far more than we’d like. These are, after all, young men and women who have some very substantial obstacles in their lives. They are often poor. Many are second language learners. Some are parents. Others are sick or taking care of ill family members. They have dropped out at least once before and thus are more likely to drop out again.
 
  But when that happens, we don’t take the money and run like the programs cited in the Colorado report. We put a lot of time, effort and money into supporting our students in a way that keeps them actively engaged, but if they’re not making progress toward graduation, we don’t get reimbursed for our efforts. And sometimes the best thing we can do for a student — sending them back to a brick-and-mortar school — is the worst thing we can do for our bottom line.

  We do it anyway, and we’re very proud that, when it happens, schools retain the funding they need to serve these students. 

  Our approach makes it easy for school leaders to see us as partners, not competitors. And those partnerships are the reason why, together, we’ve been able to change the lives of students across the nation. 

  We’ve never claimed to be a silver-bullet solution to the nation’s dropout epidemic. And we don’t claim to have a model that eliminates the problem of “churn.” Virtual learning isn’t for everyone — even with layers upon layers of support. 

  But used as a tool for helping students instead of a weapon for competing with districts, online learning can be an effective part of the fight to end the nation’s dropout epidemic. 

  And it should be.

Gregg Rosann is president and co-founder of The American Academy, Inc.