Are the digital learning policy battle lines shifting?

Political and policy disputes have been a key element of K-12 digital learning for most of the two decades or so that online schools have existed. Some signals now suggest that those battles may be shifting. This is the first of several posts looking at the background of the battles, and some of the signs of a shift.

The tl;dr version: for many years the primary policy disputes in digital learning focused on full-time online schools, which were mostly charter schools. A fairly common perception was that the online charter schools stood as a separate segment, specific to online learning, separate from mainstream district digital learning, alt ed, state virtual programs, and other parts of the education system.

Now, however, many mainstream districts are starting their own online or hybrid programs—perhaps as many as 1,000 in the past year. These district programs and those that already existed are often finding themselves aligned, in policy terms, with the online charter schools. Therefore, the lines of dispute are being re-drawn such that digital learning advocates, including districts and state virtual schools, are more likely to find themselves on the same side as the online charter schools.

Given that education policy of course varies state by state, these statements are generalizations, with exceptions. But to the extent that this re-alignment becomes more clear and more entrenched, it will be important and impactful.

For the full explanation, read on!

As noted above, many of the early online learning policy disputes centered on virtual charter schools. These disputes have generally taken two forms. The first is around funding. The very short version of the funding issue is that—just as with brick-and-mortar charter schools—some traditional public school advocates argue that online charter schools are drawing students out of traditional public schools, leaving less funding for the traditional public school system. These advocates further argue that traditional public schools have significant fixed costs, which makes planning for lower funding levels particularly challenging. Charter school advocates argue that students and parents should have choices within the public education system and that to ensure choice, funding must follow the student.

Both of these interpretations are substantially correct. The argument may appear to be about facts, but it’s really about values and interests. There’s no doubt that a family selecting to enroll their kids in a charter school is exercising a choice, and also no doubt that in many of those cases the students and/or family have found the traditional public school to be lacking in one or more ways that leaves them looking for an alternative. It’s also clear that, over time, fewer students enrolled in traditional public schools will result in lower funding for those traditional public schools.

(Note that the “over time” is a key phrase in that sentence, because states often bolster funding for districts with falling enrollments, shielding those districts from immediate impacts of lower student numbers. But eventually, if enrollments remain lower, funding will drop relative to other schools.)

The counter argument is essentially that public education should limit the options available to students and families, primarily because of the public/government interest in having more control over a smaller number of schools—which would usually mean one option for most students. Advocates believe that a higher level of centralized control equates to higher quality and that having all students in one system creates economies of scale that also support higher quality.

The merits of charter schools vs traditional public schools have been argued since physical charter schools were first introduced. Online charter schools upped the ante, however, for a few reasons. First, they often drew students from across an entire state. No longer was the local school district competing just with a local charter school. Second and related, the chartering entity was almost always a different district or state-level authority, meaning the local district had little or no influence on the charter authorization decision. Third, there’s no clear limit to how many students an online school can enroll. Where a physical charter school would have an obvious and hard to overcome enrollment limit based on the size of the school building, an online charter school would have no such limits unless they were imposed by the state, the authorizer, or the school’s own board.

These factors led to relatively high-profile political and policy disputes in several states, including Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California. In some states (e.g., Colorado) the disputes seemed to flare early and then die down, and in others (e.g., Pennsylvania) they still seem to be an annual event, at least up until recently.

A second dispute was around the effectiveness of online schools. As in the funding disputes, these arguments often appeared to be based on two sides talking past one another. The argument that online schools were not effective was mostly based on studies of proficiency and graduation rates, measured in the same ways as these metrics were applied to all public schools. Deeper studies looked more closely at comparisons between student groups in online schools versus traditional public schools and/or brick-and-mortar charter schools, and often found that the online charter schools showed lower student performance in the aggregate.

The counter from online charter school advocates was based on two lines of argument. First, many of their students had issues related to mental or physical health, bullying, or other issues that caused both the switch to an online school and lower academic achievement. None of the studies that compared online schools to other schools fully captured these differences, and the most cited studies did not control for student mobility. Second, advocates argued that the ultimate decision-makers should be students and families. Only a small number of students and families chose online schools, but for these students such schools were a lifeline. At the extreme, the argument amounted to stating that it might not matter even if a particular school wasn’t especially good academically as measured by the state, because the alternative might be a school where the student felt unsafe, or was being bullied to the point of despondency. Some parents value their children’s health, safety, and opportunity to pursue interests more than the state’s rating of the school.

Until the pandemic hit two years ago, these conflicts were fairly predictable, sometimes quiet, sometimes flaring due to a new report or political attention. During the pandemic, the issue seemed to take a back seat to other concerns.

Now that the pandemic phase of COVID-19 appears to be ending, will these battles flare again? Perhaps not, or at least not in the same way, based on some early signals. The next posts will look at some signs that perhaps the disputes are shifting to a new form.