The quality of Hope Co-op Online Learning Academy’s academic program cannot be assessed from one year of CSAP data, education analysts said Monday.
Officials at the fast-growing online school said last month that students had shown “dramatic improvement” in math and science scores on Colorado Student Assessment Program tests after enrolling at Hope.
However, a recent analysis by the Colorado Children’s Campaign reached the opposite conclusion, saying that Hope student performance declined.
Neither analysis is sufficient because the students had only a year at Hope, which opened in the fall of 2005, and factors other than CSAP scores could have affected the performance of Hope students, according to Charlie Brown, an analyst hired recently by Hope to reassess the data.
Brown and two other education experts hired by Hope cited “weaknesses” in Hope’s original analysis. The Children’s Campaign analysis is “more methodologically sound,” the analysts said.
The analyses were based on students’ CSAP scores while they were in Hope in 2006 and while they were enrolled at other schools in 2004 and 2005.
The data showed students were already below grade level when they enrolled in the Hope online charter school, but after enrolling “they get a little farther behind,” said Alex Medler, vice president for research and analysis at the Children’s Campaign. Medler was asked to assess the data by The Denver Post.
However, Medler and Brown caution that scores from about 600 students are not enough to draw any hard conclusions about the quality of the school’s academic program.
“One year’s worth of data is not enough to arrive at a firm conclusion,” Brown said. Analysts Jim Jacobs and Phyllis Resnick worked with Brown to assess the data.
In a report, the three wrote that they found “some methodological concerns with the Hope analysis that incorrectly led to the conclusion of performance improvements.”
Brown said Hope’s original analysis contained some inconsistencies in how scores were compared from one year to the next.
Still, he said, analysts would need to look at three years of a student’s performance at Hope to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Hope founder Heather O’Mara said Hope used one of several possible approaches to looking at the data. “There were some things we could have corrected,” she said.
She agreed with Brown that “it’s really too early to look at the data.”
Hope, which was criticized in a state audit of online schools last year as having poor oversight, has been working with the Douglas County School District to create a more accountable program, said O’Mara.
She said she believes her students are performing better after enrolling in Hope based on their attendance rates and how they perform on other tests in school.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-954-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
