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Purpose This study aims to explore virtual leadership work within educational settings in the light of social disruption. In 2020, a global pandemic changed the way we work. For school leaders, that involved running a virtual school overnight. Although there is a stream of research that explores leadership in solely virtual communities, there is a gap in the literature regarding practices that transition from analog to virtual practices and the changes in leadership in those types of work practices. Design/methodology/approach The data gathering method constitutes a questionnaire to explore school leaders’ experiences of virtual work and virtual leadership in light of social disruption. One hundred and five Swedish school leaders answered the questionnaire covering both fixed and open questions. Findings The results show that school leaders’ general experiences of transition to virtual school have worked relatively well. We show how the work changes and shift the focus in the virtual workplace. Originality/value The author’s contributions include theorizing about leadership affordances in virtual schools and providing implications for practice. The authors summarize our main contribution in five affordances that characterize virtual leadership, including a focus on core activities, trust-based government, 1:1 communication with staff, structure and clarity and active outreach activities. The results could be interesting for understanding the radical digitalization of leadership in the digital workplace.

Full-time K-12 online learners faced little impact when schools had to rapidly transition to remote learning in March 2020. Essentially, everyone found themselves in the same position that full-time K-12 online learners had been prior to the pandemic. It is the experiences of supplemental K-12 online learners, those students who normally have school-based supports as a part of their course and personal communities, who have the potential to provide lessons for future short-term and long-term school closures. This article reports on a case study of K-12 students in one rural school engaged in online learning in a supplemental program, and the process that they undertook when they needed academic support.

Existing research on facilitators in K-12 schools has focused on supplemental online programs where on-site personnel work with online students in a local brick-and-mortar school. While some insightful research exists focused on online facilitators at full-time cyber schools, additional research is needed to examine facilitators using synchronous support. The purpose of this study was to determine whether and how the role of a facilitator in a full-time cyber school could help to address students’ cognitive, behavioral, and affective engagement needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted qualitative interviews with two administrators and four advocates during Spring 2020, using the Academic Communities of Engagement Framework as a lens to understand the advocates’ role. Findings confirmed the need for a facilitator role to support online student engagement. This type of research will provide insights to full-time cyber schools and will be insightful to those seeking to engage students during emergency remote learning.

Virtual schooling in America is a complex notion, one riddled with simultaneous claims of provenance coupled with poor achievement results when compared to other forms of schooling. Recruitment practices for virtual schools, specifically available television-length advertisements from a national list of fully online schools, comprised a data set around which this study revolved. We examined how virtual school television-length advertisements represented or misrepresented their approach to schooling by utilizing a cultural studies technique of performing preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings. Qualitative analysis-including an independent interrater process-led to findings that often directly contradicted the messages present in the television-length advertisements, as well as currently available research on the performance and practices of virtual schools. Thus, virtual schools should consider the manner in which race, student performance, and teacher quality are portrayed in the teaching, learning, and collaboration of their television-length advertisement recruitment efforts.

This two-stage qualitative-dominant sequential mixed-method study, using an online survey of elementary and secondary school English language teachers ( N  = 73) and follow-up interviews ( N  = 10), collectively explores how teachers in Hong Kong adapted their instruction to online teaching in responses to COVID-19. The findings indicate that teachers used a variety of asynchronous and synchronous digital technologies and instructional approaches to facilitate students’ learning, assess learning, and communicate with students and parents remotely. The findings suggest that a blend of asynchronous and synchronous modes are seen as optimum to support student learning online. A model is proposed on how teachers can blend asynchronous and synchronous digital technologies and instructional approaches within a sequence of learning.

As researchers continue to examine the growing number of charter schools in the United States, they have focused attention on the significant heterogeneity of charter effects on student achievement. Our article contributes to this agenda by examining the achievement effects of virtual charter schools vis-à-vis brick-and-mortar charters and traditional public schools and whether characteristics of teachers and classrooms explain the observed impacts. We found that students who switched to virtual charter schools experienced large, negative effects on mathematics and English/language arts achievement that persisted over time and that these effects could not be explained by observed teacher or classroom characteristics.

In all countries where the evidence is available, the educational performance of children looked after away from home falls markedly below that of their peers. In the recent years this has become a subject of intense debate. Is it an inevitable consequence of the adversity they have suffered before coming into care, and only to be expected given the characteristics of their families of origin? Or does the care system itself bear some responsibility? This question is not simply one of academic interest. Longitudinal research on social exclusion has shown the strong association between low levels of education and negative adult outcomes which disproportionately affect those with a background in care. This paper argues that efforts to narrow the gap in achievement between children in public care and their home-based peers will meet with little success as long as the problem is only tackled at the individual level. In an attempt to bring about systemic change, the English government in 2006 introduced a new concept: the Virtual School for “looked after” children. The Virtual School encompasses as pupils all children and young people in a particular area who are in public care, but has no physical existence other than an office base. The children continue to attend their own schools, which are responsible for their progress. Initially a difficult concept to grasp, the model now seems to be fully accepted and all local authorities in England are legally required to appoint a Virtual School Head (VSH). The article reviews the limited available research and offers an illustrative case study. In conclusion, it suggests that the virtual school may be a model with potential to help raise the attainment of children in care in countries other than England.

Early evidence indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced public school enrollment in many states. However, little is known about the underlying patterns of these declines. Using new district-level data from Massachusetts, we find that these declines were concentrated in traditional districts while charter, virtual, and vocational districts increased their enrollment. Though the enrollment declines in traditional districts were widespread, we also find that the percent declines were significantly larger in smaller districts and those serving higher concentrations of White and economically disadvantaged students. The implications for understanding the pandemic's effects on learning opportunities and the anticipated fiscal stress on public schools are discussed.

Substantial research has already examined how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected in-person schooling, but no prior work has explored its effects on cyber schools. Here, Robert Maranto, Dennis Beck, Tom Clark, Bich Tran, and Feng Liu compare the students entering a large national cyber charter school network in spring 2020, during the pandemic, with students entering in 2019 and 2018, before the pandemic. They find that the COVID cohort resembled prior groups demographically but reported greater success at their prior in-person schools and exhibited greater measured success in cyber schools.

In June 2023, the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board approved the establishment of a charter school by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. This amounts to state funding of a religious school. Robert Kim discusses how this decision goes against Oklahoma’s constitutional and legislative history, why allowing religious charters is not the same as allowing vouchers for religious schools, and the potential implications of allowing direct state funding of religious schools.