The Impacts of Virtual Charter High Schools on Secondary and Postsecondary Outcomes: Opening Up the Black Box

Joseph J. Ferrare; Richard Waddington; Ron Zimmer; Mark Berends

doi:10.3102/0013189X251337417

The Impacts of Virtual Charter High Schools on Secondary and Postsecondary Outcomes: Opening Up the Black Box

Joseph J. Ferrare, Richard Waddington, Ron Zimmer, Mark Berends

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

As demand for virtual schools continues to grow in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a pressing need to understand how these schools influence long-term student outcomes. Utilizing administrative data from Indiana, this article estimates the impacts of virtual charter high schools on high school graduation, dropout, and college enrollment and contrasts these results to the brick-and-mortar charter high schools in the state. Using a matching cell fixed-effect design, we find that students who switched from a traditional public school in eighth grade into a virtual charter high school experienced large, negative impacts across all these outcomes. A mediation analysis found that variation in class size and school-level course-taking patterns explain a substantial portion of these impacts.

Original language	English
Article number	0013189X251337417
Journal	Educational Researcher
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X251337417
State	Accepted/In press - 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 AERA.

Funding

Author order was determined randomly; each contributed equally to this article. Please direct all correspondence to Joseph Ferrare, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington Bothell ( [email protected] ). This article was supported by the Institute for Education Sciences under award R305A190340 and the University of Notre Dame\u2019s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity and Institute of Educational Initiatives. We are grateful to the Indiana Department of Education for providing access to the state administrative records and for supporting independent analyses. We are also grateful to Lam Pham, the anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team for their constructive feedback.

Funders	Funder number
Institute of Education Sciences	R305A190340
Institute of Education Sciences

Keywords

econometric analysis
educational policy
educational reform
high schools
longitudinal studies
policy analysis
quasi-experimental analysis
regression analyses

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Education

Access to Document

10.3102/0013189X251337417

Cite this

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The Impacts of Virtual Charter High Schools on Secondary and Postsecondary Outcomes: Opening Up the Black Box

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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