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One thing every district should insist upon is that students learning virtually must have an adult in-person who is able to supervise the learning. How schools think about cohorts and community may vary widely, as will how they think about curriculum, teaching and learning experiences, and what services and courses the schools should offer. For many others, the opposite will be true. What works in one case may not work in every case.įor example, for some students, asynchronous learning-in which they have considerable independence and flexibility as to when they learn-may be a critical component of a successful virtual school.

Understanding context will help the district’s team understand what sort of experiences a virtual school should provide for individuals to enable the students to make progress. What are they trying to escape? What hasn’t worked well in the past for them? What are they hoping for more of? Why do they prefer remote schooling? What is their home life and schedule like? Are there certain activities they do that render traditional school hours and interactions a non-starter? What sort of academic progress have students made historically? That means understanding what progress looks like for the families. Instead, the team must understand the circumstances in which these students sit and why they would prefer a full-time virtual school to an in-person one. Part of that puzzle is understanding which students the virtual school will serve.ĭuring this work stream, the team must not settle for surface-level understandings of who the school will be serving that settle at static demographic descriptions. In other words, it should start with the end in mind. It should instead start with identifying the right founding team to build the virtual school, and then having that group convene to identify what problem the virtual school is trying to solve or what goals it should fulfill for students, families, and the broader district and community. The first step in any process around launching virtual schools isn’t to start posting RFPs for technology platforms or curriculum or hardware. Such an approach would involve identifying the desired end state and considering the student and teacher experience before picking technology and curriculum vendors. The choppy remote and hybrid offerings that districts launched in response to the pandemic generally doubled down on that system and were often clunky at best.īucking the poor online experiments of 2020-21 and launching a robust virtual school as part of a broader strategy to escape today’s one-size-fits-all system can be a tremendous positive-but only if districts take a thoughtful approach. Students can skate by while missing large chunks of knowledge. Instruction happens at fixed intervals, and progress is based mostly on seat time, not mastery. Our present-day school system was never built to optimize all students’ learning. There’s plenty of evidence for this in the spiraling enrollments at online schools, from ASU Prep Digital to Florida Virtual School and from Stride, Inc. In many cases, they don’t intend to go back to full-time in-person school. According to a February survey by the EdWeek Research Center, 68 percent of districts plan to offer a “much wider array of remote learning options.”Īlthough full-time virtual school has not been ideal for a majority of families and students-and there are memes aplenty showing people’s dissatisfaction with the remote learning they’ve experienced-a significant number report that it’s been a blessing for them. Amid a nationwide push to get students back in school, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has said that school districts in his state won’t be allowed to offer virtual learning next year-even for parents who want that option.Īt the same time, more districts are signaling that they intend to offer virtual school options to meet the demand from families.