Supplementary Materials

1. Ensure Both Quality and Innovation

Foster Transparency

Educators, interest groups, and policymakers have called for stricter scrutiny of virtual schooling. This scrutiny is needed, but it shouldn't compromise the innovative aspects of virtual schooling. The right way to increase scrutiny is to demand greater transparency and more accurate ways to measure student learning in virtual schools. Regulating the wrong inputs—class sizes, seat time, or any other number of traditional measures—will not guarantee quality, and may stifle the innovation and flexibility that gives virtual learning its strength.

The charter schooling community's experience over the past decade shows that unless the public can differentiate the differences between strong and weak programs, all virtual schools will be publicly tainted by the worst examples in their midst. Many virtual school programs are new and reluctant to publicize data about their programs until they have a chance to establish themselves. But, virtual schools’ level of public prominence and growth makes the lack of transparency not only unwise, but likely not possible.

Virtual schools, therefore, must develop rigorous and universally accepted ways to measure learning—at the course, grade, and/or specific standards level. They must also dramatically improve assessment to include measures for more advanced skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving.

Virtual schools should:

• Participate in consortia to standardize, make public and provide timely reporting around student demographics and course enrollments, learning outcomes, test results, and other critical data. A nascent University of Florida project to develop standardized methods and tools for evaluating the effectiveness of online education by synthesizing data across southern states' programs is a promising example.

• Research, develop, and implement new measures to assess student engagement and demonstrate skills such as critical thinking and collaborative work.

• Encourage (and make it simple for) parents to access students' course requirements, progress reports, and test results online.

Policymakers should:

• Make it their primary goal to use virtual schooling to significantly improve student learning outcomes and not as a measure to save costs. Pursuing virtual schooling solely as a means for cost savings will likely lead to lower quality programs.

• Ensure that states' and districts' traditional student information systems can easily integrate with virtual programs’ data systems and report on students' progress in a coherent manner.

• Provide incentives for virtual schools to publish timely, accessible, and relevant data about their programs.

• Fund research to develop reliable indicators and demonstrations of more advanced learning skills.

• Ensure that schools funded on a performance-based system, like Florida Virtual School, have a strong, transparent accountability system to ensure the proper alignment of incentives. Such systems will help policymakers who are overseeing programs with funding contingent on performance (i.e., where funding is based on student performance) mitigate against potential financial pressures to lower academic standards.

Accelerate Innovation

The value of virtual schools as laboratories of reform lies beyond merely transferring current classroom practices to the Internet. In the words of Marshall Smith, director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's education program and a member of Education Sector's board of directors: "Don't optimize based on the current paradigm."

A broad range of new and emerging technologies—from immersive simulations to cognitive tutors—are being developed to engage learners and improve teaching. The "Learning Science and Technology R&D Roadmap," a 2003 report from The Learning Federation, a project of the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists, notes: "For the first time in history, technology exists that can make vastly improved learning systems routinely available. But this goal can only be achieved if we are willing to undertake a long-term, large-scale effort to develop, test, and disseminate tools for building advanced learning systems."

But district- and state-run programs are not by themselves able to pay the cost of expensive research and development of new teaching methods and course materials.

Policymakers should:

Create a Federal Virtual Schooling Innovation Fund: The federal government should create a $120 million Virtual Schooling Innovation Fund to spur innovations at the high school level that could be extended to hundreds of thousands of students easily and rapidly.

The fund would not focus on basic research or current course development, but instead on the development and application of entirely new technologies to improve the online learning experience, teaching and assessment methods, and course materials.

The fund would be administered by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement. Grants would go to district- and state-run virtual schools, nonprofit and for-profit organizations, and academics working with these institutions. Each grantee would have to develop a plan to pilot test, evaluate, and replicate a project in one or more virtual school program within two years. Over time, grantees with the strongest records of having their innovations adopted by others would get preference for additional funding. All materials, methods, technologies, and data developed through the fund would be available for adoption via a public and freely available open source model.

Reduce Fragmentation and Capitalize on Economies of Scale: Virtual schooling curriculum, along with interactive lessons, simulations, and multimedia can be expensive to develop. Thus, district, state, nonprofit, and university-based programs should take advantage of economies of scale and remove barriers to cross-state or joint development and updating of course components. The federal innovation fund proposed above could be used to provide incentives for joint funding of new courses and innovative practices.

In addition, districts and states should remove categorical barriers and restrictions on the use of funds in traditional classrooms that could be better used for virtual schooling. For instance, money dedicated solely to purchase hard-copy textbooks might be better allocated toward the development of virtual classes.

2. Create Dynamic Models for Funding and Accountability

The traditional, seat-time based school schedule is reinforced by current student funding models. The dominant model, which is based on average daily attendance, is not flexible enough to enable the exponential number of variations—including accelerated or expanded time for learning activities—required to implement true personalized learning. As students mix both online and offline learning, they might take courses or components of courses from a variety of providers. New student funding models, no longer based on rigid attendance counts, must evolve to support this integrated set of blended and fully online course and school providers. Otherwise, virtual schools will struggle, as individual schools' ability to personalize is constrained by a funding stream that cannot support an array of multiple providers. Without mechanisms that enable funds to easily flow across district, state, and national lines at more discrete levels, the field as a whole will be stunted by a lack of scale and market-based incentives.

In addition, many states' funding provisions artificially cap the number of students that can enroll in a state-led program. Bill Thomas of SREB notes that "in a number of states, demand is much higher than funding can allow."

One solution is the development of weighted student funding models to account for various differentials in time and effort. Individual schools would no longer control a student's mix of classes and services, and funding would not merely follow students to their schools. Instead, funding would be allocated by course or, if a course contains both online and offline components, to each provider according to its role (for instance, an online virtual school that also employs school-based mentors).

Likewise, accountability for student outcomes would follow funding streams at this more discrete level. Florida's model, which allows students to take their funding for one or several courses to the virtual school, is a good example of this evolution. Other states will likely follow Florida's lead. Rick Melmer, South Dakota's State Education Secretary, has already suggested that the state's new virtual high school could lead his state to fund schools on a credit-by-credit basis. He "wouldn't be surprised if funding in South Dakota boils down to being by credits."

A different funding model would give much more spending responsibility to individual schools or small consortia of schools. Schools would be accountable for students' overall performance and have discretionary control over the vast majority of funds. These schools would then be enabled to "purchase" the appropriate mix of classroom-based and virtual-based instruction. This model would likely lead to much more blended learning, as successful schools provide a mix of online and offline offerings based on student needs and available teaching expertise. Member-schools of Virtual High School's collaborative are an example of this model, as they "purchase" seats in VHS' online courses by allocating a classroom-based teacher's time to VHS.

3. Enable True Reciprocity for Certified Teachers

While virtual schools can eliminate geographic barriers to employing highly qualified teachers, licensing issues across state lines continue to limit virtual schools' ability to recruit and teachers' options to teach. In some states, teacher licensing policies restrict teachers to providing online instruction to students in states where the teachers are licensed and certified to teach, regardless of the teachers' academic qualifications or experience. Other states may claim to offer reciprocity, but in reality, excessive fees, additional testing requirements, or the time required to process applications create barriers. These subtle barriers are even more acute for virtual schools, which educate students across state borders and which need to be nimble in responding to shifting student demand for courses.

In response, states should allow teachers living in and certified in one state (for example, Michigan) to teach for a virtual school located in another state (for example, Utah) without having to get certified to teach in the virtual school’s home state (in this example, Utah).

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, supports this reciprocity for online teachers. In its 2006 "Guide to Teaching Online Courses," it writes: "Those instructing online should be licensed in a subject area, but if they are teaching across state lines, failure to be certified in a specific state should not block their authority to teach online in that state."

4. Integrate With Other Reform Efforts

Virtual schools' strengths are particularly well aligned with one of the country's most prominent reform efforts: high school reform. A recent analysis of K–12 distance education research published by Learning Point Associates, a nonprofit educational research organization, underscored the opportunity for virtual schooling to accelerate high school reform: "Virtual schools may represent the best hope for bringing high school reform quickly to large numbers of students."

For example, many states are attempting to raise graduation standards and increase the level of rigor in their schools' curriculum, but are not yet considering how virtual schools could further these efforts. Statewide virtual schooling programs can ensure access to consistent high quality teaching and course content across an entire state's regions.

Educators, advocates, and policymakers pursuing other reform efforts, especially at the high school level, should consider how virtual schooling can be used to supplement or enhance those efforts. For example:

• Reformers looking to add rigor to high school curriculums, especially in advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, can use virtual schooling options to ensure access to courses for rural and otherwise underserved schools.

• Small schools can use virtual schooling options to maintain the broad menu of course subjects offered by large, comprehensive high schools.

• Educators focused on improving students' transition to college can use virtual learning to help students experience the more self-directed, collaborative form of learning most likely found at the post-secondary level.

• To prevent drop-outs, schools can use virtual classes to offer rapid remediation and credit recovery—before the year ends and a student fails a course.

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