NC virtual charter schools are still low-performing. But is it as bad as it seems?
North Carolina’s two virtual charter schools remain continually low performing, but officials say their performance is not as bad as it appears.
The N.C. Charter Schools Advisory Board on Monday reviewed a new state report showing that the N.C. Virtual Academy and N.C. Cyber Academy both received D performance grades and didn’t meet academic growth targets on state exams for the 2021-22 school year.
But the new report says the performance gap is narrowing between the virtual charters and the state’s brick-and-mortar public schools.
“They are getting closer to being on par with the state,” Ashley Baquero, director of the N.C. Office of Charter Schools, told the advisory board. “I’d think we want the full state average to be higher, but it’s not as big a gap as we might think when we just look at the fact that they’re low performing.”
Last school year, the passing rate on state exams for N.C. Virtual Academy was 44.8% — 6.6 points below the state average of 51.4%. The school was as much as 16.7 points below the state in the 2016-17 school year.
Last school year’s passing rate for N.C. Cyber Academy was 41.2% — 10.2 points below the state average. The gap used to be just 4.4 points below the state average. But it’s now less than the 12.6-point gap in 2019.
Continually low-performing
Charter schools are taxpayer-funded schools that are exempt from some of the rules that traditional public schools must follow. In addition to the brick-and-mortar charter schools, state lawmakers had required the State Board of Education to approve two virtual charters.
Both virtual schools opened in 2015 in what was originally supposed to be a four-year pilot program. The new state budget will let them stay open through the 2024-25 school year, at which point they’ll be able to ask the State Board of Education to renew them.
Schools are labeled as low performing if they have a D or F grade and don’t exceed growth targets on state exams. Schools are labeled as continually low-performing if they’re low performing for two of the past three years.
The percentage of schools statewide labeled as low performing surged to 34% last school year as academic performance still hasn’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. But, with the exception of two years when the state didn’t grade schools, both virtual charters have been low performing since they opened.
As good news though, Baquero pointed to how the growth scores for both schools are improving on state exams. Both schools are still recording a negative growth index, but it’s been worse in prior years.
Members of the Charter Schools Advisory Board, which consists of charter school supporters, said they want additional data comparing how the virtual charters did against virtual students in traditional public schools.
Enrollment growth
Despite the low-performing status, both schools have remained popular.
Since 2015, enrollment has soared 143% to 3,116 students at N.C. Virtual Academy and 91.8% to 2,595 students at N.C. Cyber Academy. Both schools especially expanded during the pandemic, when the General Assembly waived their enrollment cap.
Both schools continued to accept more students this school year even though state lawmakers didn’t extend the enrollment waiver. The state board voted in August to let them keep the additional students because of how close it was to the start of classes.
State board members warned though that any future requests for enrollment waivers would be weighed against the latest state results.
This story was originally published September 12, 2022 at 2:43 PM.
