A new study by researchers from WestEd uncovers the little-noticed growth of a different type of high school in California: the independent-study high school.
Researcher BethAnn Berliner describes independent-study high schools as schools in which at least 75 percent of students in grades 9-12 are engaged in full-time independent study. By Berliner’s count, more than 4 percent of California’s 2 million high school students—more than 88,000 students in all—are enrolled full-time in independent study and most of them attend 231 of these special schools. That’s up from 63,582 students in 2001-02. Read more about the schools, which may well be unique to California, in my blog, Inside School Research.