“If you love the Lord and you are excited about teaching …  we would love to talk to you,” Misty Smith, principal of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, says in to prospective educators.

But with the school’s future still tied up in court, and legal disputes likely to continue, it’s unclear whether taxpayers will be picking up the cost this fall. Church leaders are having an “ongoing conversation” about whether to launch the online program as a private school if a court blocks it from receiving state funds, said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, a public policy organization.

Opponents argue that the charter, approved a year ago by a state board, violates both Oklahoma and federal laws against the government funding of religion. As the principal said in another video, the school plans to provide education through “a Catholic lens.” With rulings in two separate cases against the school pending, however, families are still stuck in limbo. Of the 218 applications the school received as of last week, over 160 have enrolled and another 35 are deciding whether to accept a seat in the school’s inaugural class.

“There are so many things up in the air,” said Joy Stevens, whose daughter Chloe secured a spot through the application lottery. As a contingency plan, Stevens registered her daughter in the Velma-Alma public schools, near their small farm south of Oklahoma City. “I don’t know if we can afford private.”

The state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a lawsuit by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond it heard in April. It’s unclear whether that decision will come down before state funds are set to be distributed to the school in August — an estimated $1.2 million, according to the virtual charter school board that approved the application. 

In the second case, an Oklahoma County district court on July 24 will hear from a coalition of parents and advocates seeking an injunction to block the school from opening and receiving those funds. They argue that the school will discriminate against LGBTQ students and those with disabilities as well as families and staff who don’t follow Catholic teachings. 

They celebrated last week when the judge in the case ruled can move forward. 

Judge Richard Ogden denied most of the claims made by defendants who wanted him to dismiss the case. The defendants, including Republican state Superintendent Ryan Walters and the state board of education, assert that the school has promised not to discriminate. 

They argue that the school doesn’t violate laws against the government establishing a religion because St. Isidore is a private organization that will exist with or without the charter.  In addition, parents don’t have to enroll their children.

“No student is required to attend St. Isidore or adopt its beliefs,” they wrote in their motion. “St. Isidore is thus not forcing anyone to ‘submit’ to religious instruction or conditioning education on any ‘religious test.’”

‘A slippery slope’

The state, however, wants to make sure that all public school students receive religious instruction during the school day if their parents wish, as long as they’re not missing core classes. Gov. Kevin Stitt last week clarifying that districts can allow students to take up to three religious-related classes each week — and receive elective credit.

Ohio-based Christian nonprofit Lifewise Academy, for example, provides “evangelical Bible education” and of the Oklahoma law. The organization will expand to offer classes in 23 states this fall, but some opponents say allowing students to leave school during the day is disruptive and puts them further behind academically. 

Walters, however, quickly warned the , which plans to make its available to students, that it is not welcome. In 2019, the IRS granted the temple , just like other churches. But Walters doesn’t consider satanism a religion.

“I know that you guys like lying, and that’s the central part of your belief system,” Walters addressed the organization in . “But you will not be participating with our schools.”

Interest from the Satanic Temple shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise to Walters or Stitt. Drummond predicted that state leaders would open the door to non-Christian organizations if they pushed for more religious freedom in public schools.

In an opinion last year, he said a religious charter could “create a slippery slope” and obligate the state to spend public dollars on charter schools “whose tenets are diametrically opposed” to the beliefs of many Oklahomans.

St. Isidore, meanwhile, is preparing to open and is “ordering what is needed for students and staff to be successful,” said Lara Schuler, senior director of Catholic education for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, which applied for the charter along with the Diocese of Tulsa. 

Teacher contracts won’t start until Aug. 1, and according to the school’s website, leaders are still looking for a fourth grade teacher and high school math, physics and chemistry teachers. At this point, the school is still well under its first-year capacity of 500 students. 

Stevens said she’s been in touch with staff to ask how her daughter can meet other incoming students and “study partners” over the summer. The school is planning two “all-school masses” during the year, according to its , and will form local parish hubs for additional worship and in-person gatherings, like field trips, for students. 

Stevens said Chloe, who has been attending public school, is worried about whether St. Isidore will be academically tougher than what she’s used to.

“Her only concern has been how rigorous the education looks. She’s worried she’s not going to be third in her class or second in her class,” Stevens said. 

Some involved in the litigation, however, think the school should delay its opening until the legal matters are settled.

“I think it’s unsettling to enroll and start students in a school, which is under court review — just seems impractical,” said Robert Franklin, chair of the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board. Though a defendant in the case before the state Supreme Court because of his position, he voted against the charter application. “Using students and families as chess board pieces seems unnecessary.”

Not only is the program — called — targeted to students who to learn remotely during the pandemic, but the study was conducted by experts who typically advocate for in-person tutoring.

“I was nicely surprised,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University education researcher and leader of the , which has been tracking efforts to expand high-dosage tutoring. “The trick is to get [tutoring] to as many students as we possibly can. Being able to do it virtually could really help in the scaling and expansion of this kind of intensive, individualized attention that many students need.”

The evaluation, conducted in 12 Texas elementary schools as part of the Uplift Education charter network, found that over 1,000 K-2 students in the program scored higher on literacy tests than students without the extra support. The results translated into 26 extra days of learning in letter sounds for kindergartners and 55 extra days on decoding for first graders with a one-on-one tutor. Second graders did not benefit as much from the intervention.

While the virtual program was still less effective than in-person tutoring, the model could be a breakthrough for schools in rural areas and those that have struggled to recruit tutors, Loeb said. Districts’ pandemic recovery efforts have sometimes fallen short because they can’t find trained educators or volunteers to do the job. And and others has found that only a fraction of students who need extra help take advantage of on-demand virtual tutoring programs. 

OnYourMark Education, a nonprofit, is a contrast to the virtual models that researchers like Loeb have long criticized. It’s offered four times a week during the school day. The tutors, which include college students, retired educators and those who have worked for other virtual tutoring companies, receive training in the science of reading.

“We’ve put a stake in the ground that our focus as an organization is to really support students to become proficient readers by the time they reach third and fourth grade,” said Mindy Sjoblom, a former Teach for America middle school teacher and principal who founded OnYourMark in 2021. 

But when the program started with Uplift as a pilot, she wasn’t sure if the tutors would be able to form strong relationships with young children remotely. 

“We had to get the timing right,” she said. The 30 minute-blocks they started with didn’t work well. “Honestly, that was too long to expect a 5-year-old to sit and attend to anything, not to mention be in front of a screen.”

Twenty minutes, she said, has proven to be the “sweet spot,” allowing tutors to have informal chats with students — about what they had for dinner last night, for example, or how their basketball game went — before diving into a solid 15 minutes of work on decoding and fluency. 

OnYourMark now works with 22 schools in seven states, and Sjoblom said she expects to add more students before the end of this school year. Last fall, Accelerate, an organization funding effective tutoring programs, $250,000 to support the research effort. The organization is also a semifinalist for the , a $1 million award that recognizes successful education providers.

‘A great option’

Loeb’s team used two common assessments to evaluate the impact of the program — Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, and MAP Reading Fluency from NWEA, a testing and research organization.

Kindergartners randomly assigned to OnYourMark recognized 3.5 more letter sounds per minute than students who didn’t receive tutoring. First graders’ mastery of sounds and decoding skills also improved.

Loeb said while the one–to-one model is clearly stronger, the program is still effective when students work in pairs with a tutor. 

“This is a great option when staffing is hard,” she said, alleviating the need for tutors to commute and get acclimated to a school. 

The results among second graders were not significant. Sjoblom sees a few reasons for the disappointing outcomes. First, last year’s second graders were in kindergarten during the 2020-21 school year, when many schools were closed for the pandemic. They didn’t master a lot of the foundational skills that most kids get in kindergarten and first grade.

Older students struggling to read, she added, get embarrassed and have a harder time staying engaged with tutors remotely.

But Loeb said to get such results from a startup is still impressive. Yasmin Bhatia, the CEO of Uplift, added that future research will focus on the specific skills tutors should focus on with second and third graders.

OnYourMark, she said, has met the network’s needs in a few ways. First, it’s hard to find tutoring companies even willing to work with younger students. Most, she said, focus on the “tested grades” — third and higher. School leaders, she added, are “putting their best talent in those upper level grade levels.”

Uplift, she added, serves a high-poverty population that typically would be unable to afford a private tutor. And when the network offered at-home virtual or afterschool tutoring, participation was inconsistent. Bhatia called OnYourMark “another way to support parents” and ensure young readers are getting the extra help they need.

“We view it as such a high priority,” she said, “that we made it a part of the school day.”

Disclosure: Overdeck Family Foundation provides support to OnYourMark Education and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

A bill moving through the Oregon Legislature could help students who want to attend virtual charter schools.

Supporters of want to streamline communication between school districts and families seeking to leave brick-and-mortar districts and enroll children in virtual charter schools. The student’s home district has to approve the switch, and districts with 3% or more of their students enrolled outside their in-district options can deny the request.

The bill would require districts to notify families of a denial within 10 calendar days of their request. Advocates said some kids have been out of school for a month and a half before they hear back.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

Supporters also want to hold districts accountable for demonstrating whether they’ve reached the 3% limit.

Proponents claim there are 30 brick-and-mortar school districts over the 3% mark and 13 of them haven’t updated their figures since 2020. If their data isn’t updated and accurate, they argue, it’s possible a district could improperly deny a student request.

The bill is tentatively scheduled for a vote on Thursday in a Senate committee that includes a Republican who has not participated in the that’s brought work on the Senate floor to a halt.

If the bill passes, districts would need to calculate, at least twice each year, the percentage of students attending virtual charter schools that are not sponsored by the district.

While advocates see this as a step in the right direction, it doesn’t address their larger issues with Oregon’s current transfer model.

COVID enrollment spike

The number of students in virtual charter schools across the state rose for years until it in 2020-21, according to data from the Oregon Department of Education.

Many parents spoke out during the pandemic about school closures and frustrations with how districts were handling COVID, saying virtual charter schools seemed like a better option at the time.

The boost in students going to virtual charter schools was also seen nationally. During the 2020-21 school year, an additional 175,260 students enrolled in virtual charters, bringing the total enrollment nationwide to 483,871, according to the .

That shift accounted for more than 70% of the increase in charter school enrollment between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.

The policy center noted last year that these schools have “long been the worst-performing schools in the charter sector.”

In Oregon, virtual charter enrollment has declined since the 2020-21 peak, possibly due to the return of in-person learning. However, it is still higher than the pre-pandemic levels.

There are about 15,700 students in Oregon’s virtual charter schools this year. Online enrollment makes up about 30% of and nearly 3% of all Oregon students. About 552,000 students attend public K-12 schools statewide.

Support for the bill

House Bill 3204 was presented this year to lawmakers with backing from a consortium of virtual charter schools across Oregon.

There is no organized opposition to the bill. It passed the House in a 47-8 vote, with five excused members, and faces a potential Senate education committee vote on Thursday. Republican Sen. Dick Anderson of Lincoln City is on the committee and has not yet taken part in the Republican Senate walkout. Floor votes are suspended but some committee work is proceeding.

In the House, parent Lorraine Blatter from rural Linn County shared her son’s experience, a second-grader at Willamette Connections Academy, with lawmakers in a recent hearing.

“Not only does he have perfect grades, but since kindergarten, Gabriel has been one to two grades ahead in reading and math,” she testified. “If there was no limit to any child having access to online schooling … I strongly feel that we would see a much higher educational success rate in Oregon among our future generation.”

Blatter and her family are planning to move to a neighboring school district soon. She worries if the next district does not have accurate data, it could jeopardize her son’s ability to stay with the academy.

The bill would allow exemption from the 3% limit for students who previously lived in another school district and attended a virtual charter.

“Right now, we can take his online school on the road with us when we travel for our small business or to visit family anywhere in the world,” Blatter said. “It would be devastating if we can’t take his school with us when we move just miles down the road.”

A first step

Despite advocates’ frustrations, this bill does not address the 3% limit.

Several bills in the last few years – and this session – have attempted to change the percentage or remove it but none has been successful.

Virtual charter school advocates see House Bill 3204 as a minimum step to help online school families.

“We need to be bridging the gaps and the divides between our public schools, our charter schools, our virtual charter schools, and I would say even our private schools,” said Rep. Emily McIntire, R-Eagle Point, when testifying in favor of the bill earlier this month.

McIntire is one of the bill’s chief sponsors and serves on the House education committee.

She stressed in her testimony that if a family has made the decision to move their child – maybe because of mental health issues, educational needs, bullying or anxiety – they should have access to the needed information as quickly as possible.

“Choosing a school is massive … it’s really scary,” McIntire said. If a family sees a virtual charter school as their best option, she added, then “by all means, every single person that is attached to that child should be trying to help that child get to where they need to go.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Gonez, who raised $500,000 and major endorsements including the United Teachers Los Angeles,  last month, garnering 51.27% of the vote. Marvin RodrĂ­guez, an LAUSD teacher of 17 years with no previous political experience or major endorsements, raised just over $11,000 and trailed closely behind with 48.73%. In a message to his supporters, he  last week.

LAUSD parents, politically active Angelenos and education policy experts have suggested several reasons why Gonez’s Board District 6 win was so narrow, including her support from charter advocates and dissatisfaction with mask mandates, lengthy school lockdowns while Gonez served as school board president. 

Many of the reasons trace back to a shared theme — that her clear advantages may not have worked fully to her benefit. It’s the money that supported her and her experience on the school board that turned off some voters.

“The most interesting thing is, this is a situation where she’s getting fire from both her left and her right,” said Rob Quan, an activist and founder of Unrig LA. 

On the left, Quan said, there are those who are more inclined to support public schools and had concerns about Gonez’s position on charter schools. On the right, he said there have been two primary concerns — her  and  to scale back police presence in LAUSD schools. 

The anonymous founder of LA Parent’s Union (@UTLAUncensored), a parent advocacy group with nearly 5,000 followers on Twitter, said the group endorsed RodrĂ­guez because “he’s an outsider, right?” 

“So many people in L.A. are feeling like a career politician and the establishment is really just looking out for their own next seat and to keep their group in power,” the founder said.

They also said that for many parents in Board District 6, support for Gonez dropped when she voted to reduce school police. Many parents saw it as a threat to their childrens’ safety — a type of “political grandstanding” they also saw in her leadership through one of the longest Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates in the nation, UTLAUncensored said. 

Wavering faith in Gonez’s alliance with the people stemmed from her hefty funding, too. 

Billionaires Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, and businessman Bill Bloomfield,  of both Kelly Gonez and Nick Melvoin (who was re-elected to represent Board District 4) through the PAC Kids First. 

“I do think voters are paying attention more and more to who is supported financially by the people and who is financially empowered by the very rich,” said Kris Rehl, who voted for Rodríguez. “I believe that Marvin Rodríguez wants to be on the LAUSD board because he wants to make the lives of students and teachers better. I can’t say that I think Kelly Gonez is only running for this position for those same reasons.”

Gonez’s support from pro-charter advocates, like Hastings, as well as her support from the California Charter School Association in 2017, when she was initially elected to the seat, has some skeptical about her resolve in holding charter schools accountable. 

Although Gonez, a former charter school teacher, has attempted to distance herself from the stance of her pro-charter donors in interviews, apprehension remains. Rehl said the primary reason he voted for RodrĂ­guez was his strong anti-charter stance. 

“I really feel like LAUSD needs bold leadership that doesn’t cave into special interests like the charter school association, and I’m a strong supporter of UTLA, so I was really disappointed to see UTLA endorse Kelly Gonez, who in the past has been pretty friendly to the charters,” said Arturo Gomez, a tenant defense attorney.

The Board District 6 race was not the only LAUSD election where the politics of public school versus charter schools came to a head. In the Board District 2 race, candidates RocĂ­o Rivas and Maria Brenes, who ran on similar platforms, vied to represent parts of central and east L.A.

Rivas, who was backed by UTLA and has been more outspoken in her anti-charter stance, won with 52.49% of the votes. Brenes, backed by SEIU Local 99 — LAUSD’s second biggest union — as well as Bloomfield and Hastings’ PAC, had 47.51% of the votes. 

Gomez said he voted for Rivas because of her stance on charter schools: “I wasn’t a big fan of Brenes who seemed to have backing from a lot of charter adjacent organizations,” he said. 

On Nov. 23, Rivas took to Twitter to declare her victory, tweeting that “people power wins over billionaire money.” 

“Her message was certainly tapping into a bit of the charter school narrative, that this was charter school money trying to defeat her and that public schools won,” said USC Rossier professor Marsh. “This has happened in the past in LA Unified, that when outside money comes in, or money that’s perceived to be on one side or the other, sometimes it actually does the opposite and motivates some voters to say ‘we’re not going to let this money influence how we vote.’”

Marsh added that both the District 2 and District 6 elections show a continuation of elections “being a proxy war” for teachers unions and charter interests. She also pointed to another takeaway that stood out to her from the November election. 

“Just because you have the funding doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna win the votes,” she said. “That stands out to me in both of these races.”

This article is part of a collaboration between ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

, released by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), focused on pre-pandemic performance, looking at the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years.

It found that in the 2018-2019 school year, charter school students learned the equivalent of 64 more days of instruction in reading and 116 days in math, compared to their district school peers. Black charter school students had even bigger gains, with 86 more days in reading and 144 days in math relative to Black students in district schools. 

In a statement, Indianapolis Superintendent said the study “provides another piece of critical data in our relentless mission for all schools to be better.”

The findings reinforce the district’s belief that diving into data about academic performance at all schools helps educators “build on what works, and fix where we aren’t delivering for students,” she said.

The findings showed that Black charter school students in Indianapolis had more growth in math than the average Black student statewide; they showed similar growth in reading. Similarly, Black students in Innovation Network Schools saw growth on par with peers statewide. are a group of 20 public schools in the city that enjoy complete, charter-like autonomy over academics and operations. While seven are actually charter schools, the remaining 13 are either new schools, strong district schools whose staffs are trying something new, or struggling schools that have been “restarted” with outside partners.

But Black students in traditional district schools performed worse than the typical Indiana student in both reading and math.

The new study, part of an ongoing CREDO series examining school performance in 10 cities, follows a 2019 study finding that growth in both reading and math was weaker than state averages in 2015-16 and 2016-17.

When researchers compared student performance citywide for the current study, they found that students at charters and Innovation Network Schools outperformed district peers across subgroups: Black charter school students saw stronger growth than district students in both reading and math, and Hispanic students in charter schools and Innovation Network Schools showed similar gains.

So did low-income students at charter schools. Similarly, English Language Learners in city charter and Innovation Network Schools saw better gains than district students.

Brandon Brown, CEO of , an Indianapolis nonprofit that has launched 41 schools, said one key to the charter sector’s success in the city is that the vast majority are locally grown, with leaders “who know Indianapolis.” Most of those leaders, he said, are also people of color who directly reflect the racial backgrounds of students. 

The sector’s performance is “a direct result of schools that are created and sustained relative to what our community wants and needs. And I do think that that’s pretty unique, when you look across much of the work that’s happening nationally.”

Brown also noted that local officials look favorably upon charters – the mayor’s office is the largest authorizer in the city – and don’t see their growth as “a zero sum game.”

“There’s nowhere in the country where the school district and charters work as closely together,” he said. 

Darius Sawyers, principal of Paramount Englewood, a 5th-8^th-grade school that’s part of the Paramount Schools of Excellence network, said the sector’s small scale allows him to collaborate regularly with other charter leaders, in a kind of ongoing principals’ consultancy. “We’re talking best practices, we’re talking data, we’re talking, ‘What are you doing to move the data or move the needle?’”

He said being part of a local network has advantages. “Everybody’s right here,” he said. “If not in the same building, a block or two away.”

Austin Hauser, director of Academic Accountability at Herron High School, said his small network of three Herron Classical Schools is “absolutely homegrown,” founded by a local teacher with more than 30 years of experience. “It was started really as a neighborhood movement.”

Being homegrown, he said, allows teachers and administrators “to focus on exactly what we need in our community …. We’re not worried about who we should be in Chicago or in Cincinnati or wherever the network may be located. We are in Indianapolis.”