The Impacts of Virtual Charter High Schools on Secondary and Postsecondary Outcomes: Opening Up the Black Box

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As demand for virtual schools continues to grow in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a pressing need to understand how these schools influence long-term student outcomes. Utilizing administrative data from Indiana, this article estimates the impacts of virtual charter high schools on high school graduation, dropout, and college enrollment and contrasts these results to the brick-and-mortar charter high schools in the state. Using a matching cell fixed-effect design, we find that students who switched from a traditional public school in eighth grade into a virtual charter high school experienced large, negative impacts across all these outcomes. A mediation analysis found that variation in class size and school-level course-taking patterns explain a substantial portion of these impacts.