Virtual High Schools as Laboratories of Reform

Washington, D.C. — Spreading rapidly, virtual schools are leading innovation in areas that traditional schools have struggled for decades to improve. They are personalizing student learning and extending it beyond the traditional school day. They are creating new models for teaching—with opportunities to easily observe, evaluate, and assist instructors. And they are pioneering performance-based education funding models.

But this important trend in public education has gone largely unnoticed in the cacophony of policy proposals and solutions being put forth to improve the nation's public schools. In a new Education Sector report, Chief Operating Officer Bill Tucker shows how the practices found in virtual schools are bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools and prompting educators and policymakers to question and change key components of our traditional, classroom-based public system.

Tucker spotlights some of the most successful models of virtual schooling and provides policy recommendations, for both school reformers and virtual school leaders to help improve quality, spur innovation, and use virtual schooling to strengthen current reform efforts.  

Read "Laboratories of Reform: Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education."

Please join us for an important online discussion on June 20, 2007 to learn about "Laboratories of Reform" and virtual schooling more broadly with report author Bill Tucker, Barbara Stein, coordinator of the NEA's Guide to Teaching Online Courses, and Liz Pape, CEO of Virtual High School.

Education Sector is an independent education policy think tank devoted to developing innovative solutions to the nation’s most pressing educational problems. We are nonprofit and nonpartisan, both a dependable source of sound thinking on policy and an honest broker of evidence in key education debates throughout the United States.

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