I can't repeat often enough that averages often hide the actual story.
In the '80s I knew two homeschoolers. Both were church parents. One was a single dad with an 8th grader boy. The other a stay-at-home mom (working class family, they scrimped a lot) with a 10th grader girl, 5th grader girl, and a boy in kinder.
Both pulled the kids out because they didn't like the group their kids were falling in with. Both kids were borderline failing.
The mother made sure that every morning at 8 the girl was at her desk, had breaks, had her signed up for 2-3 sports, tested her, and if school was out, so was homeschool. Same schedule. The girl was free at the end of the day not when school let out, but when she finished the assignments--she was often done by lunch. After a year of homeschooling, the mom with the 10th grader decided to let her try public schools again. She had to take a placement test. After 1 year, her kid went from barely passing 9th grade to easily placing in 12th grade. She skipped 11th grade.
The boy who was home schooled by his father? Well, the father worked and watched tv. "Doing okay with schoolwork, Mike?" "Sure." And the dad was done monitoring. The kid turned 18 and had to take a test to be freed from school--not pass it. More of a monitoring, thing. If the score's high enough, state diploma's awarded. The kid came in at the 8th grade level for math and reading.
Same church. Town. The parents were friends with each other, lived a couple of miles apart. Both white. The father finished high school, the mother had 1-2 years of unaccredited church college. Completely different results.
Which is why reporting averages hides the real story. Distance learning is great with some kids. My kid does well with it. He finishes early. He sits, listens, reads, re-reads until he gets it. Does practice tests, turns in assignments. When there's feedback on assignments, he reviews the feedback.
Most of my kids in school don't like doing the reviews. I have to push them to do work in class when they're *in class*. Most don't read feedback. "Here's your work, pick it up" and most sits there untouched. > 69? They're ecstatic. And their parents are okay with passing.
Home schooling requires time. Distance learning requires self-discipline or effective imposed discipline. Most kids lack those things. It's a bad fit for most kids. Some kids, bless their hearts, know this and avoid distance learning.
It's a good fit for some kids. The data, as an argument for shutting down online schools, are a miss. There is an argument for being selective in who takes the courses, but it's a good fit, cost effective *and* faster, for some kids. And I'm not one of those who thinks closing racial/class gaps by limiting the right-end of the curve is an acceptable thing. Better a gap than no gap, if that's the price.
But it's a horrible fit, esp. distance learning, for most kids.
I'd venture to say that it might work even for those kids, but not at a huge cost savings. Put them in a class with the computer, a teacher/monitor (preferably one who can tutor a bit) and enforce discipline. No phones, computers are locked down to prevent cheating, etc. That might work. Don't see that researched, though.
The closest I've seen to that is credit recovery, where the kids are put together in a class, but cheating is rampant. Watching the video or seeing the text go by, they watch movies on their phones or text. There's a nice app that will grab a picture of the screen, OCR the text, search Quizlet or Brainly and return the answer. Pretty good. But the kids don't actually have to even *read* the question. And Course Hero often has screen shots of the assignments--pay for access, and the assignments are there, behind a firewall so that the proctors don't even know the kids are cheating. Thing is, it's credit recovery and the schools worry more about passing the kids who failed than making sure their grades reflect learning.
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