Student outcomes at virtual charter schools are lagging behind brick-and-mortar charter schools and traditional public schools. While stakeholders acknowledge the complex situations and difficult dynamics that can drive online school enrollment, the Statewide Charter School Board is taking notice.
At the board’s meeting July 13, Chairman Brian Shellem referenced the lackluster performance highlighted in a recent report published by the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy.
“I think every one of us is concerned with the direction we seem to be going with a lot of our virtual schools,” Shellem said.
Released in May, the report (embedded below) found that virtual students’ results on the ACT lag behind students at traditional public schools and in-person charter schools. Their results are lower in English, math and reading, but they are on par in science. However, science scores from career and college readiness assessments also lag behind, while virtual students’ history scores surpass those from traditional public schools.
According to the report, 21 Oklahoma charter schools serve high school students statewide. Seven of those schools are virtual charter schools, which enroll nearly 18,000 students. The report found that 64 percent of those students are enrolled in Epic Charter Virtual High School. According to SCSB’s data dashboard, Epic Charter Virtual High School served 14,517 students in the 2024-2025 school year.
“Virtual charter schools likely deserve greater scrutiny. They serve a majority of Oklahoma’s charter high school students, yet their outcomes are weak, and in some cases, highly concerning,” OCEP executive director Adam Tyner wrote in the report. “Their ACT composite scores are lower than those of both traditional public schools and in-person charter schools. Their [career and college readiness assessments] composite scores are far below those of the other sectors. Their four-year graduation rate is an alarming 54 percent overall and 49 percent for economically disadvantaged students.”
Epic Superintendent Shaun Ross said tests show a “snapshot” of a student body derived from myriad circumstances, including kids who left traditional schools owing to bullying, mental health challenges and complex family situations. Still, he acknowledged that virtual charters are “behind the curve” compared to traditional public schools.
“Epic Charter is on its 16th [year] and so, we are behind the curve, but we are also young, and again it is important for us to see what those scores are, take stock of what they are,” Ross said. “The reality is we have those scores and really do our dead-level best — use our professional judgement, make those best-case decisions — in order to help support the wide swath of kids that we have.”
He also acknowledged that Epic’s graduation rate — in its history — has not “crested 60 percent.” He chalked that up — in part — to the makeup of the students the school attracts.
“We have a lot of kids that just come in that are significantly behind credit-wise. We mirror Tulsa Public Schools and Oklahoma City Public Schools in the number of kiddos that we have that are behind academically as far as high school credits go,” Ross said.
He suggested that Epic has a unique advantage it needs to lean into more — credit recovery. He said the school has two credit recovery options: one that has “the same exact curriculum” and an “ancillary” option that he said has some of the non-essential “fluff” taken out.
“It is one of those things that we have had, but we have had some self-made barriers that have kept kids in credit-deficient positions,” Ross said. “So one of the things that we are working on this year is eliminating as many of those barriers as we can.”
Although he has only been leading the school since December, Ross said Oklahoma’s most well-known virtual school had not been meeting students’ needs.
“In short, our product was not matching the needs of our clients. We have got to do better at supporting kids’ learning,” Ross said. “I know we are a virtual setting, but we still have certified teachers that meet and connect with kids. It does not need to be a checklist — ‘We have checked on Jimmy.’ It needs to be, ‘We work with Jimmy in order to close the gaps that we are seeing through his academic data.'”
Ross said Epic is in the process of reversing that course by hiring additional reading specialists, counselors and social workers while also increasing support offerings in math and English language arts.
“I guess the best way I could put it would be, we need to be a one-size-fits-one instead of a one-size-fits-all,” Ross said.
Meanwhile, the OCEP report also cited a longer-term study that found lagging outcomes are not a new phenomenon in Oklahoma.
“A longitudinal Oklahoma study using data from 2016 to 2019 and focusing on students in rural areas likewise found large negative associations for virtual school students, with especially large losses in math and negative effects for all grade bands,” Tyner wrote. “[Center for Research on Education Outcomes’] 2023 national charter study found similarly large negative results for virtual charter students, including especially large math losses.”
In an interview, Tyner put it plainly: The performance lag goes beyond Oklahoma, according to CREDO reachers” findings.
“They are at Stanford, and they have done a bunch of work comparing charters to traditional public schools and breaking out virtual charters, and they pretty consistently find — and this is national work — that virtual charter schools underperform other sectors. So it is not just an Oklahoma finding to find underperformance of virtual charter schools,” Tyner said. “That is something that we find nationally, relatively consistently.”
SCSB’s data dashboard also reflects lower performance by virtual charter schools. Composite proficiency for virtual charter schools was lower than brick-and-mortar charter schools and traditional public schools.
However, according to the data dashboard, one virtual charter — Oklahoma Connections Academy — outperformed or matched traditional public school performance in the 2024-2025 school year. Part of Pearson with a national headquarters in Baltimore, Oklahoma Connections Academy served 560 students during the specified school year and outperformed traditional public schools by 11 percent.
‘The hybrid option is really where the future is’
While House Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R-Bristow) said he had not seen OCEP’s new report, he believes face-to-face interaction with a highly qualified instructor cannot be supplanted by virtual instruction.
“Now, that does not mean that there is not a place for [virtual schools],” Hilbert said. “There are certain situations where parents choose to enroll their children in virtual schools, and that is the parents’ choice. But when you are talking about traditional brick-and-mortar schools, the outcomes are going to be better in front of a teacher in person.”
Tyner hypothesized that virtual charter schools’ underperformance can be attributed to a variety of reasons, like special education students who require additional assistance or homeschool students who join a virtual school at a lower level of education than their peers.
“Some of those students are coming in way behind. Of course, traditional public schools have a lot of those issues as well, but I think it is probably a disproportionate problem in virtual charters,” Tyner said. “They are dealing with a different student population, and there is no question about that.”
He also noted what he called a “moral hazard” with virtual charter schools.
“If you think about it, you are taking a student funding formula that is developed for brick-and-mortar schools that kind of assumes that you are going to have a lunch lady, a school nurse and a building and all of this stuff, and then you are kind of putting this technology on top of it. The marginal cost of 100 students in a brick-and-mortar school is significant. (…) I think that those [virtual] costs are probably much lower at the margin,” Tyner said. “Behind most of these virtual charter schools, there is a for-profit company that is really trying to minimize costs and raise revenue. So that means more students with less money delivered to them. Of course, they are run by nonprofit boards, but there is typically a for-profit company behind them, and that nonprofit is more or less a shell that is just there to facilitate this governance structure. I think that there is a reason why virtual charter schools have gotten into a lot of trouble across the country. We are talking about outcomes, and I think it is related to that.”
Shellem suggested that the lag in performance could be attributed to a lack of engagement.
“I do not think that the level of intelligence is the real factor here,” Shellem said. “I think it is the engagement process that is the problem.”
Shellem noted that virtual charter schools have been successful for some, such as for the state’s youngest registered nurse, who graduated from Epic and received recognition at an SCSB meeting in May. To tackle the engagement element of education, Shellem said a screening process for enrollees could ensure they are set up for success.
“That is what I am advocating for. [Do] we need to change some legislation and say, ‘You know what? There should be a screening process so that parents engage,'” Shellem said. “I think the fundamental thing is, I believe a lot of kids can learn. Some are going to have different learning challenges, of course, but it is typically the engagement part. We have all heard that showing up is half the battle. Well, if we can get the kids to show up and engage, there are some phenomenal teachers out there that can do amazing things.”
Such a screening requirement could pose a heavy lift legislatively and legally.
“There are schools today that turn away students. They are called private schools,” said Rep. Andy Fugate (D-Del City). “If it is public school, it should be open to all kids in the state of Oklahoma.”
Shellem also floated the idea that virtual options with requirements for one-day-a-week, in-person meetings could offer a solution and a possible course correction moving forward.
“The idea is (…) these kids are going to be engaged with a real person. There is going to be a relationship there, not just through a screen,” Shellem said. “I love that concept, more than 100 percent virtual. Because typically kids — and this is a proven fact — kids do not typically rebel against authority. They rebel against a lack of relationship.”
Ross, Epic’s superintendent, said he tends to “agree with the premise” that a more hybrid model “is a viable, potentially realistic sense of what education will be in the not-so-distant future.”
“I think if you point toward the push of [career tech] and post-secondary and college career readiness and really getting certifications for students, I think you are going to have to open up to those opportunities where kids can go work with vocational schools or kids can go work and work with organizations, companies and get that real life experience and still have their academic needs met,” Ross said.
Shellem acknowledged that such a shift could be a heavy burden financially and logistically, although he suggested that “underutilized resources” like closed school buildings or vacant classrooms could offer opportunities.
“You could have these different things that [require] they are going to come and they are going to meet there once a week. And if it is once a week, then maybe another school meets there once a week, and there is five days during the week. I am throwing out ideas. I am not saying they are right. I am saying we should be exploring all avenues of how we can come up with solutions that will meet the need,” Shellem said. “The first, easiest step is to go, ‘Let’s find students who are going to be really self-driven.’ Let’s keep that target going because it is obviously doing very well for a handful. And then you go, ‘Where are we missing, where the vast majority — some of these kids probably should not be in virtual at all — and how do we get them plugged back into either a brick-and-mortar or a specialized school that meets their needs differently?’ (…) I think the hybrid option is really where the future is.”
Read the full OCEP report
