Why ‘Crisis Schooling’ Shouldn’t Be Part of Our New Normal

Amy Valentine wrote this piece in 2020, first for The Daily Yonder, to explain that the emergency remote teaching of spring 2020 differed from true online and virtual K-12 schools. A new section after the text reports current enrollment in online K-12 schools and what research says about their results.

What most kids experienced this spring was not online, virtual, or blended education. At best, it was crisis schooling. It’s time to shift to something better.

What most kids experienced this spring was not online, virtual, or blended education. At best, it was crisis schooling. It’s time to shift to something better.

When asked if schools would be able to go back to “normal,” a superintendent recently quipped, “Normal is a setting on a washing machine.” (In actuality, this is such an insightful response.)

Here’s why. Covid-19 shattered our paradigm of normality in education. It became a catalyst for change within our schools and K-12 education system as a whole. Seemingly overnight, homes were turned into classrooms, teachers transitioned to remote instructors, and parents were thrust into the role of learning coach for their children.

The goals were the same: to keep kids engaged in school, focused on learning while keeping them safe and protected from the coronavirus. Using technology was new to many educators, students and their families, and it all happened so quickly. Too quickly to educate people on what they were experiencing.

As such, the pandemic caused America to move into a state of crisis schooling.

Crisis Schooling Compared With Online Education

Crisis schooling is very different from online education, virtual schools, blended learning and homeschooling. Crisis schooling was born from exigent circumstances and empowered everyone to embrace a ‘whatever it takes’ mentality to support the needs of children—from delivering meals to preparing remote learning packets to transitioning over to the use of technology as a means of communication. During this time, 70% of teachers indicated that their main modality of communicating with families was through e-mail.

Yet online education is so much more than e-mail messaging back and forth.

K-12 online schools have been around for two decades. They are actual schools, with learning experiences that have been developed and designed to be delivered fully online. Administrators set policies; certified, qualified teachers design course content and teach students; opportunities abound for peer collaboration, and high-quality special education services are provided, among other supports.

My experiences as both an in-class and online educator of students in grades 6-12 and at the university level have given me keen insight into the different types of educational models out there. There are benefits to all of them. But if we lump them all together into one category, we will never appreciate what makes them unique, or relevant for different types of learning styles.

Online and virtual schools are getting a bad rap right now. While these types of innovative schools are not new to America, they are new to most Americans. Think about it—the average school in America has existed, relatively unchanged, since one-room schoolhouses emerged in the 1600s. How can we expect that people, especially teachers and students, would be able to adopt such major operational changes, in such a short period of time?

Covid-19 has changed all of that. Due to the swiftness by which decisions were made, we did not stop to talk about this shift at the time. Now, as districts and schools across the country work to determine what school will look like this coming year, there is an imperative need to educate our country about the difference.

Moving From Reactive to Proactive Planning

What most kids in our country experienced this past spring was not online, virtual or blended education. It was crisis schooling at best. And the time has come to shift from reactive to proactive regarding how we use technology and innovative practices to most effectively reach our students.

Understanding the nature of crisis schooling will help everyone, especially those leading brick-and-mortar schools that were catapulted into new ways of functioning. When we look forward at what the future of school will be in our country, we must do exactly that: look forward, not back.

Crisis schooling has undoubtedly challenged our education system, and now, we have an amazing opportunity to support the redesign of school to better serve the needs of all students. But this cannot be done with a frantic mindset. We must shift to the next phase of ‘new school’ in order to make this happen. Together, we can thoughtfully craft an approach toward a new normal that will get us there.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Yonder

Online K12 schools in 2026: enrollment, results and questions for families

Amy Valentine’s 2020 article above separates the crisis schooling that families experienced in spring 2020 from online K-12 schools, which Valentine describes as actual schools with certified teachers, policies set by administrators and special education services. Six years later, readers searching for online K-12 schools want to know how many students attend them, how they perform, and what a family or a district should check. This section answers those questions using federal enrollment data reported in 2026 and the best-known research on results.

How many students attend

Chalkbeat reported in August 2026 that just over 600,000 public school students attended fully virtual schools in 2024-25, about 1 in 80 public school children and about double the pre-pandemic level. Another 195,000 attended schools classed as primarily online with some in-person options. Among high school students, 1.6 percent attended fully virtual public schools, compared with 0.8 percent of students in grades 1 to 8.

Most students in fully virtual schools attend charter schools. Chalkbeat names Stride (K12) and Pearson as two companies accounting for a large share of virtual enrollment, and it says more school districts have launched their own online options. The figures come from federal Education Department data that Chalkbeat calculated itself, and the report cautions that the data may undercount online enrollment: for Indiana, the federal data list 1 percent of students in fully virtual schools in fall 2024, while a Chalkbeat analysis of more detailed state data put the figure near 3 percent.

What research says about results

The most-cited national study of virtual charter schools is the 2015 Stanford CREDO analysis, which covered online charters in 17 states and Washington, D.C. The Fordham Institute’s summary reports, and Education Next agrees on the figures (reading -0.10 standard deviations, math -0.25), that virtual charter students learned the equivalent of 72 fewer days in reading and 180 fewer days in math than matched peers in traditional public schools, and that in no state did online charters outperform traditional schools in both subjects. CREDO matched each virtual student to a “virtual twin” in a traditional school with similar demographics and prior achievement.

The limits matter. The study is from before the pandemic and covers charter schools only, so it does not describe district-run online programs. Fordham’s article is commentary and takes a position, and the details here were checked against that article and Education Next’s description, because the CREDO report itself could not be opened. The Chalkbeat report adds that researchers note studies may not fully account for the types of students who choose virtual schools, and that a K12 spokesperson has argued that remote students may score lower on in-person tests because the testing environment is unfamiliar. The fair reading is that earlier results were weak on average and that evidence on current programs is thinner than the enrollment growth would suggest.

Crisis schooling versus a planned school

Valentine’s distinction still helps families judge. A school designed to be online has staff hired for it, a curriculum built for the format and policies set by administrators, which are the features Valentine lists when describing online schools. A family comparing options can ask the following.

• Who authorizes and oversees the school, and what are its published graduation and test results compared with nearby schools?
• Are the teachers certified in the state, and how many students does each teacher serve?
• How much instruction is live, and how often does a student meet a teacher one to one?
• How are special education and English learner services provided and documented?
• What happens if the student wants to return to the neighborhood school midyear?

Questions for district leaders

The Chalkbeat figures show students moving toward online options, including in high school. A district can find out how many of its residents are enrolled in a virtual school, learn why families left, and decide whether to offer its own program with a defined standard of quality. Google Trends data show searches for online K-12 schools peaking in August and May, so families are comparing options at the start of the school year and again before spring enrollment.

Further Reading

1. New York Times – New Jersey Gives Schools an All-Remote Option
2. edCircuit – Future of School Awards Scholarships to Students from 23 States
3. Los Angeles Times – Back to School in a Pandemic: The Basics of Remote Learning
    

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