Virtual schools are one of the fastest growing educational options for students in the United States. In spite of the increase in virtual program options and enrollment, limited research has been conducted on how virtual school principals lead their organizations. This qualitative case study explores the challenges facing virtual school principals…

Considerable published research explores drivers of parent choice for in-person schools, but few studies have addressed reasons for attending full-time cyber schools, and how student characteristics affect those reasons; hence, this study's unique contribution. Here we use a large national dataset (n= 95,259) to test whether students with…

Access to public charter schools could theoretically reduce school safety problems by increasing competitive pressures, improving matches between schools and students, enhancing discipline policies, and allowing students to relocate to peer groups and cultures that discourage risky behaviors. Using publicly available data from the Pennsylvania…

This study examined how virtual middle-school teachers establish meaningful and productive teacher-student relationships in virtual environments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight virtual middle-school teachers, utilizing narrative inquiry methodology and the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework. The themes that emerged…

While K-12 online education and cyber charter schools have existed for decades, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 compelled every professor and teacher globally to participate in this mode of instruction. Four years after the pandemic, many brick-and-mortar K-12 schools have retained cyber or online classes within the curriculum to offer students more…

One of the Colorado Department of Education's (CDE) five strategic plan goals is that "Students graduate high school with knowledge, skills and experience needed for college and career success." Students who attain this goal have the potential for better life outcomes and have choices as they graduate high school. This report provides an…

Based on a current Research to Practice Partnership (RPP) between a southeastern public university and a state virtual public school in the United States, ten high school teachers from a virtual school who teach Computer Science (CS) online participated in a summer workshop to collaborate through a participatory action research project regarding…

The present study investigated the experiences of educators who taught in the virtual world Second Life®. Second Life has shown promise in the field of higher education but identified gaps exist: the identification of a set of best practices, a foundational theory, and educators' experiences using Second Life in higher education. Using a single…

From September 2021, the role of the Virtual School Head (VSH) was extended to include the strategic oversight of children subject to a Child in Need (CIN) plan or Child Protection (CP) plan or having been subject to such plans over the previous 6 years. The duty is not statutory. Non-statutory guidance was first published by the Department for…

Early evidence indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced public school enrollment in many states. However, little is known about the underlying patterns of these declines. Using new district-level data from Massachusetts, we find that these declines were concentrated in traditional districts while charter, virtual, and vocational…

"Voting with Their Feet: A State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" shows hundreds of thousands of families switched to charter schools during the first full school year of the pandemic. During the 2020-21 school year, charter school enrollment grew 7%, the largest increase in half a…

Though K-12 virtual education has been around for decades, the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly increased the number of K-12 schools offering virtual education to their students. This comparative case study's purpose was to explore secondary virtual schools within a public school environment. The focus of the study was to examine how two secondary…

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the American school system into various forms of distance learning, remote learning schools were a small but growing segment of the educational system within the United States. This causal-comparative quantitative study examined demographic variables to assess differences in K-12 teachers' views of their…

In online virtual-based learning, combining more adaptive personal student characteristics with risk factors, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student at-risk factors and mathematics achievement. Further, the study examined how personal student characteristics, which are sometimes amenable to change and…

Research has found that fall 2020 school district reopening decisions appear to be driven more by politics and teachers unions than by the local presence of COVID-19. But what are the implications of those decisions for enrollment trends? Using recently released enrollment data from the state of Wisconsin, this study goes further to show whether…