Online Public Schools Now Enroll More Than 800,000 Students

An allk12 analysis of National Center for Education Statistics enrollment data for the 2024-25 school year counts 1,583 public schools flagged as virtual or online, and together they enroll 811,411 students. That's about 1.6% of US public school enrollment, since the same data puts 48.7 million students in brick-and-mortar public schools.

The sector is top-heavy. The 15 largest online schools hold 178,021 students between them, close to 22% of the national online total, and the biggest single school, Commonwealth Charter Academy in Pennsylvania, enrolls 29,320 students on its own.

The biggest online schools

These are the 15 largest by enrollment in the 2024-25 federal file.

Five of them enroll more than 14,000 students each. Two of those five are the same operator, because EPIC Charter in Oklahoma reports a virtual high school and a virtual elementary school as separate records, and adding the pair together gives 28,536 students, which would sit second on this list behind Commonwealth Charter Academy. How an operator splits itself into school records changes where it lands in any ranking, and nothing in the federal data forces one approach over another.

Where they are

Six states account for 13 of those 15 schools. Texas has three, holding 40,058 students across Texas Virtual Academy at Hallsville, Lone Star Online Academy and Texas Connections Academy at Houston. California also has three, with 21,877 students between Blue Ridge Academy, Visions In Education and Pacific Coast Academy. Pennsylvania's two hold 39,498 students, the two Oklahoma EPIC Charter schools hold 28,536, and Georgia's two hold 17,100.

Ohio lands one school on the list, Ohio Virtual Academy, with 15,339 students. The other two are Alabama Connections Academy in Alabama at 7,822 and Nebo Online School in Utah at 7,791.

The same brand names keep showing up

Three schools on the list carry the Connections Academy name, in Texas, Alabama and Georgia. Connections Academy is a program run by Pearson, which says it operates partner virtual schools in 32 states and puts every one of them on the same online platform. Ohio Virtual Academy runs on the K12 program sold by Stride, a publicly traded company that provides curriculum and school-management services to charter boards around the country.

Who operates a school is a real question for anyone comparing options, because two schools with different names in two different states can be running the same courses, the same software and the same staffing model. The federal data doesn't record the management company, so there's no clean way to total up how many of the 811,411 students sit inside one of these networks.

North Carolina's online schools

North Carolina has two sizable virtual schools and neither one reaches the national top 15. NC Virtual Academy enrolls 3,482 students and North Carolina Cyber Academy enrolls 2,461, so the pair together comes to about 60% of what Georgia Cyber Academy holds by itself.

Why they're missing from the score data

Not one of the 1,583 virtual schools has a test proficiency score in our data. Zero out of 1,583. We have proficiency figures for 63,437 brick-and-mortar schools.

The absence covers all 1,583 schools, at every size. A parent comparing NC Virtual Academy with the middle school two blocks away is working from two different kinds of record: the neighborhood school has a state test result attached, and the online school has enrollment, grade span, student-teacher ratio and demographics with nothing at all on how its students performed.

So the largest online schools in the country are, as a group, absent from the achievement data that every school-quality ranking is built on, ours included. There's no way to compare one of these schools against the school down the street on test results using this data, because on the online school's side of the comparison the row is blank. A site showing a letter grade or a score for one of them is pulling it from somewhere other than this federal file, and it should say where.

The data doesn't explain why the rows are empty. Virtual schools enroll students across a whole state and those students sit for state tests in scattered places, which makes them awkward to report, but our figures can't tell you which states report virtual results under some other code and which don't report them at all.

How we counted

We leave virtual and online schools out of our rankings and our best-schools lists, and the missing scores are the reason. A ranking built on proficiency can't rank schools that have no proficiency figure, and dropping them quietly while keeping the ranking's title makes the list look more complete than it is. Our data reports follow the same rule, and we track the sector separately in the report on virtual school enrollment trends.

The count of 1,583 uses NCES's own virtual flag from the 2024-25 Common Core of Data file. That flag isn't a simple yes or no in this vintage, since it separates full-time virtual schools from schools offering virtual instruction with in-person options and from schools running supplemental virtual programs, so a school with some face-to-face teaching can land inside the count. States report the flag to NCES, which means it's only as accurate as what each state filed. The figures are a single year's snapshot, so they don't show whether any of these schools grew or shrank.

What the research says

The most-cited study of online school performance is more than a decade old now. In 2015, CREDO at Stanford, working with the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Mathematica Policy Research, matched students in 158 online charter schools across 17 states and the District of Columbia against similar students in brick-and-mortar schools. The online students' annual growth came out the equivalent of 180 days of learning behind in math and 72 days behind in reading.

CREDO reports its results in days of learning, a unit it builds by converting statistical effect sizes into something a reader can picture. No student sat out 180 days of school. The comparison underneath it is between growth rates on state tests over a year, for online students matched against brick-and-mortar students with similar prior test scores and background characteristics.

The study covered online charter schools and not district-run virtual programs, and it predates both the pandemic and the enrollment shift that followed. It's a matched-comparison design, so it can't fully separate what the school did from whatever led a family to enroll there, and 158 schools in 2015 is a small slice of a sector that now runs to 1,583 schools. The finding is real evidence that online charter students in those years fell behind matched peers, and it isn't evidence about any particular school on the list above.

Enrollment climbed steeply during the pandemic. Kristin Blagg and Betheny Gross, writing for the Center on Reinventing Public Education in September 2021, found virtual enrollment in grades K-5 jumped 112% in 2020-21 while grades 6 and up rose 23%, across eight states with enough reported data to compare. Growth then leveled off without falling back to where it started, according to Joshua Goodman, an economist who studies online schooling, speaking to EdSurge in August 2025. No comparable national study of online-school achievement has been published since CREDO's, as far as we can find.

Sources
allk12 analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) enrollment data, SY 2024-25.
NCES: Common Core of Data
CREDO at Stanford: Online Charter School Study
Center on Reinventing Public Education: Surging Enrollment in Virtual Schools During the Pandemic Spurs New Questions for Policymakers
EdSurge: Virtual School Hit the Mainstream 5 Years Ago. How Popular Has It Gotten?