Marcey Morse had unwittingly found herself smack in the middle of a costly and bitter feud, pitting state authorities and mainstream charter school organizations on the one side, and virtual schools on the other. The latter have the support of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and some state-level politicians.
Unlike for the rest of the nation’s charter school students, virtual schools take place entirely online. The students are generally at home, on laptops, reading material, doing exercises, taking tests. The teachers are reachable by online chat, video conference and telephone. No after-school programs, no uniforms, no school nurse, no playground, no buildings at all. The only supervision comes from parents.
The main issue at stake in the fight is this: Virtual schools’ test scores and graduation rates have, consistently, been very low. So low that their performance, along with, at times, disputes over attendance, have led them to be shut down or placed at risk of closure in states including Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.
The travails of virtual schools have split the charter school movement. The national organizations representing traditional charter schools have sought to put daylight between themselves and virtual schools, going so far as to question “whether virtual schools should be included in the charter school model at all,” in the words of NACSA.