Enrollment at Texas public virtual schools increased 1,200 percent in 10 years. Nearly 62,200 students enrolled in full-time virtual school in 2024-25, up from just under 5,000 in 2014. The free, entirely online schools were already growing leading up to the pandemic, but after the lockdown forced families into temporary virtual schooling, many decided to stay there.
"The pandemic was really a watershed moment for full-time virtual education," said Adam Hawf, superintendent and senior vice president of online schools at Stride K12. "It caused a lot of people to have the experience of online schooling. And for many people, they didn't like it and they wanted to go back to brick-and-mortar ... But a lot of people experienced it and thought, 'OK, this is something that works well for my kids.'"
Only a few public virtual schools existed a decade ago, including Houston ISD's Texas Connections Academy and Huntsville ISD's Texas Online Preparatory School, but 24 full-time, public virtual schools were operational last school year.
That number is likely to increase.
"There's a set of states that were relatively early to kind of embrace the idea that even if the family is not a customer, we should still treat them like a customer. And, they deserve choice, and we should try to have the schools be responsive to the families, rather than vice versa," Hawf said. "Texas has been ahead of the curve. And I think that, honestly, Texas seems to be pulling further ahead."
NEW LAWS FOR VIRTUAL SCHOOLS
Bi-partisan legislation passed in the most recent session overhauled the virtual school landscape. Senate Bill 569 was crafted, in part, based on recommendations from the Texas Commission on Virtual Education, which was created during the pandemic to discuss the future of virtual education.
"The untapped potential of virtual education is immense," reads the 2023 report. "For districts, it offers the ability to offer more choice, recoup enrollment ... For rural communities, expanded access to specialty, AP, CTE, and difficult-to-staff courses. For the highly mobile and foster care students whose circumstances require frequent relocations, the ability to continue attending the same school with established teacher and student relationships."
Sen. Paul Bettencourt called it the "flagship virtual education reform bill," saying he expected virtual education enrollment to double in three years, according to a May release.
Highlights of the new legislation include: definitions of new virtual and hybrid models; a requirement that parents are informed of virtual and hybrid options during course selection; a requirement that districts cannot discourage student population from enrolling in virtual options; allowing students to enroll in three virtual courses at the district's expense, allowing charter schools to require virtual attendance in certain cases; providing an expedited pathway for existing virtual programs to expand; and forcing a district to consider a virtual or hybrid placement before expelling a student.
And while details of the law are still pending until the Texas Education Agency publishes guidance for districts in October, some leaders have already noted that they plan to use the new legislation, in part to keep their students from leaving to private schools in next year's state-funded school voucher program.
Douglas Killian, superintendent of Cy-Fair ISD, said the district wasn't previously able to capitalize on the increasing demand for virtual education, but that he plans to now, as the formerly fast-growing school district in northwest Harris County sees its enrollment begin to stagnate.
"Virtual education has been a drain on us as well, because we haven't been able to offer that. We were able to offer a little bit of that during COVID, but there were strict restrictions there, so the Legislature solved that for us," Killian said. "Well, now we're getting into it. So we're going to control that marketplace."
MEETING INCREASING DEMAND
Texas Connections Academy's Executive Director Darla Gardner said they continue to receive enrollment requests in the week before school starts.
"Texas Connections Academy has approximately 8,900 students enrolled statewide and we anticipate that number will continue to rise. In fact, our school has had hundreds of families who began the enrollment process this week," Gardner said.
Those students, no matter where in Texas they live, count in Houston ISD's overall enrollment. HISD began offering virtual education in 2009 in response to families looking for that option, including students in rural areas, those who needed to recover credit or students with health issues. That population now includes advanced students looking for more challenging courses, students who are bullied, and students with mental health concerns that prevent them from thriving on campus.
Over the years, virtual school has begun to more closely resemble in-person school, experts said, with synchronous options that provide structure for students rather than asynchronous courses that students have to be more self-motivated to complete.
In an effort to cater to the diverse needs of students flocking to virtual education, Roscoe Collegiate ISD is adding a dual-language immersion kindergarten as part of its virtual program, Lone Star Online Academy, for the first time this year.
Lone Star Online Academy is one of the largest virtual programs in the state, despite being housed under the umbrella of a district with only 570 in-person students last year. The online school is run by Stride K12, a private company that has been offering online school for 25 years. As the largest virtual education provider in the state, with about 40,000 students, Stride K12 runs four public schools in Texas : Lone Star Online Academy, Texas Virtual Academy at Hallsville ISD, Texas Online Preparatory School at Huntsville ISD and Digital Academy of Texas at Denton ISD.
"It's really a partnership with the district to where we're effectively the junior partner," Hawf said. "It's about their vision and us kind of making their vision a reality."
Stride K12 was also planning on expanding their Texas Online Preparatory Elementary school at Huntsville ISD to kindergarten through second grade, based on demand from families. But the plans didn't come to pass as expected. Leaders said they had to put the expansion on pause at the last minute due to some discrepancies in the new legislation which would require them to apply before expanding an existing program.
While they plan to go through the formalized expansion application process for next year, families already enrolled in the K-2 option at Texas Online Preparatory School will attend Lone Star Online Academy, instead.
Both Stride K12 and Connections Academy are private companies that partner with existing school districts that didn't have the time or funding to create their own virtual program from the ground up. While the programs are mostly separate from the districts themselves, they count in enrollment and accountability data. The virtual schools have their own directors and staff and create their own programs in alignment with state and district standards.
And while virtual schools maintain their own special education accommodations for students, school district leaders often look over the programs to make sure they are compliant with IDEA law, said Deputy Superintendent of Huntsville ISD Marcus Forney.
The schools also have their own funding structure based on their enrollment and attendance, although the new legislation updated the previous funding formula to change how average daily attendance is counted.
DOES VIRTUAL SCHOOL WORK?
Despite the widespread support of virtual schools in Texas, accountability data from recent years show they often lag in student performance compared to students at their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
"When you start talking about virtual education, the onus is not just on the students themselves. It's going to be on the parents as well to provide what they call learning coaches, along with the students, to make sure that the students are taking care of their business," Forney said. "From that vantage point, I would just say it may have some challenges, but not to the degree to where there will be any type of detriment or they cannot learn on that on that virtual platform."
Huntsville ISD was a "C" rated district in 2022-23, the most recent accountability data available, and its in-person campuses varied between a "C' or "B" score, however its performance outlier was Texas Online Preparatory School's virtual elementary campus, which was "F" rated in 2022-23, serving roughly 1,300 students that year. Texas Connections Academy received a "D" from the state that year, and Lone Star Online Academy, serving around 6,000 students that year, also received an "F," although notably its parent district, Roscoe Collegiate ISD, also received an F.
Still, Hallsville ISD's Texas Virtual Academy, which is the largest public virtual school in the state received a "B" for the 2022-23 school year, on par with its parent district's grade, although it was measured on different metrics than the others, according to TEA's website.
"We knew already back in 2002 from our first visits and analysis of the Pennsylvania charter school data that these virtual schools weren't working well," said Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University. "We have a really good record of evidence that nothing changes, except they grow. They continue to grow, even though their outcomes are absolutely disastrous."
Miron has been researching virtual schools for over a decade with the National Education Policy Center, publishing reports every few years looking at virtual school performance nationwide. He said he supports virtual education, but takes issue with the current corporatized model of groups like Stride K12 and Connections Academy.
These models have seen high student-to-teacher ratios and higher rates of students leaving in the middle of the school year compared to in-person public schools, Miron said. He also said he disagrees with virtual schools for young children like those in early elementary school who are still learning vital skills that can be hard to do in a potentially isolating online environment.
"Children that age, they can't even manipulate a mouse. How are they going to manage their learning?" Miron said. "Everybody continues to expand this corporate model. We need a drastically different model for virtual schools that works."
According to his most recent co-published report, Texas had the fourth highest number of virtual students, after California, Pennsylvania and Florida, yet significantly better outcomes. Of the eight schools they researched, 100% had acceptable performance by state standards in 2021, compared to Pennsylvania, where 100 percent of the state's 14 schools had unacceptable performance by state standards. But more recent performance data is not available, so it remains to be seen how Texas now 24 virtual schools would stack up against their nationwide competition.
And with 2024 and 2025 accountability ratings scheduled for release on Friday, it's possible some programs could be at-risk for state intervention in the future, as the new legislation cemented stricter rules for low-performing programs: campuses with three consecutive years of poor performance ratings must lose authorization.
The legislation also directed the Texas Education Agency Commissioner, Mike Morath, to create a specialized accountability system for virtual schools and review them on a recurring basis.
"The hybrid learning environment ... is very promising as an innovation in the future, but it takes a lot of intentional planning and thought to launch effectively," Morath said in the 2023 Texas Commission on Virtual Education report. "You can be highly effective and have a very successful track record of delivering in-person instruction, but your expertise in crafting a (virtual) environment for any number of kids might not exist at all."
Data reporter Anastasia Goodwin contributed to this report.
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