Three big trends come together in this Idea of the Week: Charter public schools, providing performance-measured instruction in exchange for freedom from bureaucratic regulation; distance learning, offering educational services via television or the Internet to supplement classroom fare or extend it to students who cannot attend school in person; and more individualized schooling, best represented by the increase in support for home schooling and other customized educational options for young people.

In California, in Minnesota, in Florida, in Ohio, and in pockets of experimentation all around the country, Virtual Charter Schools are popping up, offering instruction in part or in whole via the Internet. The Choice 2000 On-Line Charter School in Perris, California offers 140 middle- and high-school students 24/7 access to comprehensive educational software. About 75 other California charter schools use distance learning via the Internet for part of their instruction. (For more information on California's virtual charters, contact Sue Bragato of the California Network of Educational Charters at 650-654-6003).

Ohio has recently authorized a statewide Virtual Charter School, called the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. Based in Toledo, the school will offer K-12 instruction over the Internet to an estimated 1,900 students around the state, beginning this fall. The target audience for the Electronic Classroom is typical of many Virtual Charters:

• Children with disabilities that make regular school attendance difficult or impossible;



• Teenagers in youth detention centers;



• Senior citizens seeking to pass high school equivalency exams; and



• Ohio's 60,000 home-schooled children.

Most Virtual Charter School advocates do not claim that online instruction can match classroom teaching, or that their services are appropriate for every student. But their enrollment will come from students who cannot easily participate in person-to-person instruction, and from students whose parents, for good or ill, have already chosen to withdraw them from regular classrooms. The Virtual Charter School may, in fact, begin to draw home-schooled children into the orbit of public schools again, while helping ensure they obtain the knowledge and skills necessary for success in adult life.

This experiment bears close watching, and is a new and fascinating example of the role charter schools are playing around the country as research and development laboratories for public education.