Even as they surge in popularity, online schools in Minnesota are troubled by high dropout rates, poor math scores and inadequate state oversight.

That’s the conclusion of a state audit released on Monday that shows how the virtual schools, whose full-time enrollment has tripled in recent years, are faring.

It’s unclear why many online students are falling short academically, said Legislative Auditor James Nobles, adding, “We need to find out, is there anything more we can do for these students?”

During the 2009-10 school year, Minnesota’s full-time online students finished only 63 percent of the courses they started. Just 16 percent of those in high school were proficient on state math tests, compared with 41 percent in the same grades at schools throughout Minnesota. And fully one-quarter of the 12th-graders dropped out by the end of the school year, vastly more than the 3 percent of all students who did so statewide.

Advocates of online learning point out that many students are already behind academically when they enroll. “The majority of the students that come to us were struggling in their previous school, and they’ve come to us as an alternative,” said John Huber, head of Insight School of Minnesota, an online high school guided by the Brooklyn Center School District.

State guidance of online schools is also a problem, the audit concluded. The Department of Education, short-handed, has done little to oversee online schools or clear a longstanding backlog of applications to start new programs, the report found.

The report, requested by legislators, comes as the popularity of online learning is growing. Roughly 12,000 K-12 students — about 1.5 percent of Minnesota’s student body — took courses from state-approved online schools last year. The number of part-time students in online schools has nearly doubled in the past four years, and the number of full-time students has more than tripled.

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