Data analysis by Kae Petrin
Remote learning during the pandemic was a nightmare for some students, but others have stuck with it, new data shows.
Just over 600,000 public school students attended fully virtual schools in the 2024-25 school year, the most recent data available. That’s about 1 in 80 public school children — a twofold increase since before the pandemic.
This reflects the growth of school choice: In more places, families who want to opt their children out of traditional schooling can and are doing so with public funding. Many families seek out online education because traditional schooling isn’t working for a variety of reasons. Yet prior research has raised pointed questions about the quality of virtual schooling. These concerns once drew significant attention, but ironically they have faded from the national discourse even as digital schooling has rapidly grown.
Virtual school enrollment spiked in the 2020-21 school year in the midst of the pandemic. Some families may have believed that a stand-alone virtual school would be better than the makeshift online programs that many school districts were standing up. This was not just a one-year blip, however, as the new data shows.
A majority of fully virtual students are in charter schools. Two companies that run online schools, Stride and Pearson, account for a large chunk of virtual enrollment. A recent earnings report from Stride said its virtual schools, known as K12, now enroll over 240,000 students in public and private schools. “Demand for educational choices remains strong,” the report said. In recent years, more school districts have also launched their own online options.
Among high school students, 1.6% were in fully virtual public schools, compared to 0.8% of students in grades 1-8.
The Education Department used to regularly report on the number of virtual school students, but like many other statistics, it has not updated these figures recently. Chalkbeat calculated up-to-date numbers, which had not been previously reported.
An additional 195,000 students were enrolled in schools that are categorized as primarily online with some in-person opportunities.
The federal numbers may undercount online school enrollment. For example, according to that data, 1% of Indiana students were in fully virtual schools in the fall of 2024. A Chalkbeat analysis using more detailed state data pegged enrollment at virtual schools at about 3% that year. States vary in the share of students in virtual schools, though differences in response rates and program structures mean cross-state comparisons should be interpreted with caution.
(State-by-state figures are available here.)
Several studies, based on data from before the pandemic, have found that students tend to make much less academic progress and graduate at lower rates in virtual charters. In 2016, prompted by concerns about quality, a trio of pro-charter school groups issued a high-profile call to close low-performing online charters. Reporting in states including Indiana and Colorado has raised concerns about misspending and inflated student enrollment in certain virtual charters.
Patrick Wolf, a University of Arkansas professor, noted that existing research may not be able to adequately account for the type of students who opt into virtual schools when assessing the quality of the education in these settings.
“Students who learn remotely may also perform somewhat lower than expected on in-person state assessments, not because of instruction quality, but because the testing environment itself is unfamiliar,” said Brooke Gabbert, a spokesperson for K12 virtual schools. “These students typically learn and test at home.”
A teacher at New York City’s district-run online school previously told Chalkbeat that students go virtual for a variety of reasons, such as disabilities that make attending a regular school challenging; flexibility for students who are caregivers; and difficulties in a prior school.
“Many of our students face social and personal challenges, so our work extends beyond delivering content,” said the teacher, Jude Julien.
Wolf says if test scores are a priority, online schooling is probably not a good option for most. “Parents should be informed about that reality and factor it into their decision making,” he says. The growth of virtual schooling is a sign of the times, though: The priority in education policy in recent years has been responding to parent demand rather than raising test scores.
Since online schools have grown rapidly, up-to-date and better research about the quality of education they’re providing seems like an urgent priority.
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