The Rise of Virtual Schools: Selected Findings from the Third American School District Panel Survey

Abstract

The onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has prompted school districts in the United States to offer remote schooling options for their K-12 students. The authors of this report fielded the third American School District Panel (ASDP) survey in June 2021 to assess districts' plans to offer both temporary and more-lasting remote instruction options starting in fall 2021. The key ASDP findings presented in this report draw on the responses of 292 district leaders after weighting those responses to make them nationally representative. Results from the June 2021 ASDP survey suggest that K-12 remote instruction will outlast the pandemic. Remote instruction can be delivered in various forms, however, and the survey questions delved into three: a temporary option for fully remote instruction in fall 2021, fully online courses, and standalone virtual schools. The authors explore differences in districts' pre-pandemic offerings and plans to offer multiple remote instructional modes in the 2021-2022 school year by district type. Virtual schools have had the most marked growth. Only 3 percent of surveyed districts ran a virtual school before the pandemic began. Since the pandemic began, however, the number of districts running virtual schools has grown ninefold. And nearly one-quarter of surveyed districts that had no plans to operate a virtual school in the 2021-2022 school year had at least some interest in operating a virtual school sometime in the future. [For a related report, "Technical Documentation for the Third American School District Panel Survey. Research Report. RR-A956-6," see ED615291.]