Virtual Charter Schools and Home Schooling By Carol Klein

Chapter 1

The Problem

Introduction

Today, the cry for excellence in education is strong and can be clearly noted in the emergence of many reform movements. Three powerful innovations—home schooling, charter schools, and, most recently, virtual or cyber schools—have each had an impact on our society’s contempo-rary ways of educating its young. While these have given choice and empowerment to parents, teachers, and students, they have also, perhaps unknowingly, changed the face of a once monolithic public school sys-tem. Many parents after considering the lackluster results of traditional schools, have sought alternate forms of education that could meet their own standards of excellence (Hetzel, Long, & Jackson, 2001).

Adding to the list of reform-oriented alternatives is a new pioneering effort that appears to have merged the above-mentioned innovations, at least to some degree. It is known as the virtual charter school.