After a series of amendments that North Carolina lawmakers have made over several years to the charter school review and approval process, stand-alone remote charter schools are on the rise.
The Charter School Review Board approved several new institutions earlier this year that will be started by existing charter schools but will operate independently — like Mountain Community Online School, a tuition-free, statewide, fully remote charter school.
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It’s another layer added to already convoluted arguments surrounding public school funding and school choice as North Carolina grapples with what some view as disparities across school districts in light of legislation that favors private schools and charter schools over traditional public schools.
Changes to NC charter school process
Despite a veto from Gov. Josh Stein and a strongly worded condemnation from Superintendent of Public Instruction Mo Green, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill last summer that transferred even more authority on charter schools from the State Board of Education to the Charter School Review Board, a body introduced in 2023 to establish rules for operations and oversee approval of charter schools.
Senate Bill 254, An Act to Amend Charter Schools Laws, made it so the CSRB didn’t just recommend rules and policies for charter schools but could solely approve them. It revoked certain powers from the Superintendent of Public Instruction and placed them with the CSRB, which critics like Public Schools First NC say is stacked with charter school advocates.
The bill also allows for charter schools with existing remote academies with 250 or more pupils to launch stand-alone remote charters with an expedited path to approval. Legislation like this gives charter schools further flexibility, said Jeff Morris, executive director of The Mountain Community School, a brick-and-mortar charter school opening a remote charter school this year.
Mountain Community Online School was just one of the fully digital charter schools approved by the CSRB earlier this year, as well as Pine Springs Preparatory Virtual Academy and Innovation Career Academy via the Franklin School of Innovation.
Not every proposed online charter program wins approval. The CSRB denied a pitch from Alamance Community School, which has struggled with low-performance consistently.
MCOS’ approach
MCOS is being formed as a response to the increasing demand for a charter school education, Morris told Carolina Public Press — a 2024 report showed a waitlist as long as 85,000 students, although that figure could include duplicate students on multiple lists. MCOS is statewide, though Morris expects to enroll students primarily in Henderson County and nearby districts.
In his 20 years working at charter schools, families have continued to express that they are looking for flexibility. For many, traditional charter schools are the answer. But for others, flexibility means something different than a school building.
“We hear the need,” Morris said. “We hear families looking for something different. There are students that are struggling with just being in the traditional school environment. I think Covid taught us that we could look at things a little bit differently. And unfortunately, Covid also taught us a lot about what doesn’t work, so we had to really evaluate and take the best parts of it.
“... Charter schools are in that unique spot where they can really focus in on a specific mission. They’re not going to be everything to everybody, and that’s what school choice is about, right?”
MCOS, like others that CSRB approved this year, will partner with online learning platform Edmentum, which will provide North Carolina licensed teachers to provide real-time lessons that will also be recorded and saved for later if needed.
Students will also have access to a success coach who will build a personal relationship with each student to ensure they are engaged in coursework and their “Climb Higher” projects — quarterly cross-curricular assignments meant to build communication and collaboration skills and get them outside, away from their computers. The success coaches will ideally be certified teachers with a positive, growth mindset who can be there to “coach” students through their education, Morris said.
The North Carolina Virtual Public School, not a charter school but the state’s first venture into virtual public schooling, is nearing its 20th year of operation and continues to be the second-largest virtual public school in the United States. Since then, education has only continued to shift, Morris said.
Fully online charter schools have been operating in North Carolina for about 10 years now. Those stand-alone remote charter schools are not connected to any existing school like the newly approved charter schools will be, though those will also be stand-alone institutions.
It was immediately clear there was a demand for the remote charter options once they began, but those initial programs were largely focused on simply doing the coursework, not building relationships, Morris said.
The relationships are what can make or break an education, particularly an online one, Morris said.
Research has consistently shown students perform worse when learning online than they do in a classroom setting. Morris thinks that is essentially true, but it doesn’t have to be the case.
“My experience with online learning has been, if you have a positive relationship and you can create the avenues to support the student, then there’s no reason it can’t be as successful as in-person classes,” he said.
“... A lot of in-person schools … are not doing well either. ... You’ve got some students that are doing really, really well when you look at the number of students at the high school level right now that are doing dual enrollment programs, that are taking classes online. That program has been nothing but a success. …
“There’s a lot of evidence there that these things have worked, and we just have to really focus on the way we build relationships and make sure that we’re providing the supports to students.”
While studies do show students don’t perform as well in online learning, it can be difficult to determine whether that is because of other factors, such as the students who are inherently more likely to seek such opportunities, said Robert Bifulco, a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs who researches school reform, school finance and magnet and charter schools.
“A lot of virtual schools are set up for kids who either don’t do well, are at risk of dropping out or for some other reasons aren’t able to participate in regular in-person schooling,” Bifulco said.
“So, not exclusively, but a lot of the schools are set up to serve this kind of population that has trouble in school, so it’s difficult to sort out whether the students don’t do as well in virtual schools because their students that select-in are the types of students that are having trouble in school, or whether the schools don’t serve them as well.”
A complex political history
Charter schools were founded in the late 1980s by pro-union educators as a way to operate independently from the normal school district governance process so teachers could have more professional autonomy in designing and operating schools, Bifulco said.
Despite charters’ union roots, conservative-leaning lawmakers took to the idea of charter schools in the mid-1990s because of the impression that public school districts were run and influenced primarily by Democrats, and that they were doing so poorly. Conservatives also liked the economic whims to which charter schools are inherently subject.
“The idea is that they would set up charter schools, again to operate independent of school districts and a lot of regulations, and instead they would be held accountable by market forces because their funding would be tied to how many students they could attract and students wouldn’t be assigned to them,” Bifulco said.
“And also, perhaps in some cases, performance-based — how well students do on various objective measures of student outcomes.”
With Republicans becoming supporters of charters for their “anti-government and pro-market” qualities, teacher unions became opponents because they saw charters as a way of taking control away from school districts, where unions tend to have a lot of influence, Bifulco said. Thus, charter schools became a hot button wedge issue.
While union power is limited in North Carolina, the political lines in the sand mimic Bifulco’s assessment. As with private school vouchers, Republicans tend to support charter school funding more so than Democrats. In North Carolina, charter schools are often criticized by public school advocates, despite being a form of public schools themselves, for receiving public funds — currently more than $1 billion — but not being subject to the same regulations as traditional schools.
Still, individual charter schools don’t receive “equivalent funding” to traditional public schools, Morris said. But the money they do receive can go farther per pupil.
“They have access to more dollars than we do,” he said of traditional public schools. “We also don’t carry some of the bloated central office staff that tends to happen — and I’m not knocking that, because it is necessary with the number of employees, number of students, number of things that are happening.”
Bifulco compared a charter school like his to a major public school district, such as Wake County.
“There’s no way Wake County could operate like we do,” he said. “They’re too big of an entity, but they have a lot of staff, and we’re able to just be more efficient because we’re on a smaller scale, so I think that helps. It’s a place where we can put some student dollars and really have an impact on kids directly.”
Charter schools experimenting with remote learning and a statewide approach may not be surprising given that they are inherently a hotbed for innovation. The origin of charter schools means they are naturally a place where educational innovation is ripe to occur, both from the perspective of teachers who wanted to implement new ideas without the restraints of bureaucracy and from lawmakers who felt the markets would encourage fresher practices.
Online academies might not be the predominant faction of charter schools yet, but the movement is undoubtedly growing, Bifulco said.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.