Twenty-one percent of U.S. schools offer courses that are entirely online, without any brick-and-mortar activities, and charter schools are much more likely than traditional schools to offer such courses.
The Teacher and Principal Survey, released last week by the National Center for Education Statistics, reports that in 2015-16, 20 percent of the country’s 83,500 traditional public schools and 29 percent of its 6,900 charter schools offered courses that took place exclusively in cyberspace.
Charter schools have waded in more deeply than have traditional schools: 14 percent of charter schools offer all their courses in an online-only format, compared with 5 percent of traditional public schools.
The report marks the first time the NCES has collected data on the use of online-only courses.
