A look at Stride, Inc Schools

Rachel Adams-Heard, Joe Lovinger:

Welcome to Hallsville, Texas: population 4,628. Home to one of the biggest public schools in the country.

Almost 25,000 third through 12th graders attend the Texas Virtual Academy, part of the Hallsville Independent School District (ISD), and the vast majority of them will never step foot in this small East Texas town. They don’t start their days with biscuits and gravy at Miss Minnie’s Place or cheer under the Friday night lights at Bobcat Stadium. Instead, they log in for class from hundreds of miles away.Hallsville, home of the largest public school in Texas.Photographer: Jake Dockins for Bloomberg Businessweek

Nationally, about 612,000 public school students, or 1 in every 80, were enrolled in an online school in the 2024-25 academic year, the most recent period for which data is available. Nowhere has the expansion happened so quickly as in Texas. Two dozen virtual public schools operated in the state during the last school year, enrolling almost 75,000 students. Changes to state law have made it easier for kids as young as kindergartners to receive their education entirely online.

Stride Inc., the publicly traded company that runs Texas Virtual Academy, has carved out a lucrative niche in the years since pandemic lockdowns lifted, capitalizing on a school choice wave that has contributed to the decline of public school enrollment across the country. During the 2025-26 school year, Stride was responsible for educating more than 240,000 students nationwide, the vast majority in public schools. Some 43,000 of those were at the company’s schools in Texas, making it the biggest operator in the state by a long shot.

The Texas Legislature gave virtual schools a tremendous boost last year when it mandated that virtual schools get the same per-pupil funding as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. That’s despite their lacking the physical plants, maintenance staff and bus fleets, and many of the extracurriculars, that make up a big chunk of the costs of a neighborhood school. Stride doesn’t need to put unspent money back into its schools as traditional public schools would. That gives the company more for things such as advertising and executive compensation — and for a healthy operating profit, about $450 million across the whole company in the most recent academic year.