Joe Freidhoff: My name is Joe Freidhoff, and I'm the author of Michigan's K-12 Virtual Learning Effectiveness Report for 2020-2021.
Joe Freidhoff: In this presentation, I'll communicate some of the key trends and statistics observed in the report, which provides a comprehensive picture of virtual learning for the 20-21 school year.
Joe Freidhoff: These findings may help us ask new and important questions when evaluating and improving virtual learning programs.
Joe Freidhoff: The data for this report come from what Michigan schools reported to the state as part of the Michigan Student Data System collection.
Joe Freidhoff: It's comprehensive in nature and represents the various types and providers of virtual learning occurring in the state. Because of the self reporting by schools, the findings should be treated as estimates that, generally speaking, convey the trends observed for the year.
Joe Freidhoff: In the 2020-2021 collection, there were nine different statuses a school could select when declaring the final completion status for an enrollment.
Joe Freidhoff: Only one of those, Completed/Passed, represented that the student both finished the course and met minimum expectations for passing the course.
Joe Freidhoff: This report continues to use the same formula for calculating the virtual pass rate as previous ones.
Joe Freidhoff: To calculate the virtual pass rate, we counted the number of enrollments with the completion status of Completed/Passed
Joe Freidhoff: and divided that number by the total number of virtual enrollments. As is likely evident, if some of these statuses were excluded from the calculation, say for instance Audited or Withdrawn/Passing enrollments,
Joe Freidhoff: the virtual pass rate would change. Appendix G of the report provides data to allow readers to estimate the impact of this methodology.
Joe Freidhoff: Let's start by looking at students, schools and enrollments.
Joe Freidhoff: For the 20-21 school year over 418,000 Michigan K-12 public school students were reported as having taken at least one virtual course. This represented about 29% of the total Michigan K-12 public school student population.
Joe Freidhoff: Over half of the students who took at least one virtual course passed every single course they took virtually. Sixteen percent of the students didn't pass any of their virtual courses.
Joe Freidhoff: The 16% represented more than 67,000 students. For this group, 25% only took one or two virtual courses. Almost 41,000 did not pass five or more virtual courses, and over 9,400 students did not pass 11 or more of their virtual courses.
Joe Freidhoff: Further analysis of students failing all their 11 or more virtual courses showed 92% of them had just one school reporting data for them.
Joe Freidhoff: To be clear, I don't mean one school reported 92% of the students, rather I want to emphasize that for 92% of the students, a single school had the full picture of the child's virtual learning performance.
Joe Freidhoff: Over 80% came from part time virtual programs 17% were using special education services and 80% were in poverty.
Joe Freidhoff: And even deeper dive shows that these students had 41% of their virtual enrollments assigned the completion status of Completed/Failed,
Joe Freidhoff: which was about four times that of the general population.
Joe Freidhoff: We also saw huge numbers of these enrollments ending in Withdrawn or Incomplete statuses. For instance, the percentage of enrollments ending in an Incomplete for students who failed all 11
Joe Freidhoff: or more of their courses was three and a half to four and a half times that of the general population, and the sum of the Withdrawn percentages was around 50% to 60% for these groups—much higher than the 12% for all virtual learners.
Joe Freidhoff: 707 Michigan school districts reported at least one virtual enrollment. This represented close to 80% of Michigan public school districts.
Joe Freidhoff: In terms of the number of schools, over 2,200 schools reported having at least one virtual enrollment.
Joe Freidhoff: Over 80% reported 100 or more virtual enrollments. While one would expect the higher enrollment schools to have a larger impact on the data, we think it's important to keep in mind that 99.6% of the state's virtual enrollments came from these schools with 100 or more virtual enrollments.
Joe Freidhoff: To get an idea of where these students were coming from, the report also includes a couple of maps. The map on this slide shows the percentage of students in each ISD or RESA
Joe Freidhoff: that took at least one virtual course from a non-cyber school in the 20-21 school year. The darker the blue, the higher the percentage of students who took a virtual course.
Joe Freidhoff: Since cyber schools, do not really have their own resident district, but rather draw students from other districts to attend their schools,
Joe Freidhoff: this map shows where the cyber school students were actually located. The darker the orange, the higher the number of cyber school students from that area.
Joe Freidhoff: For the 20-21 school year, there were over 3.6 million virtual enrollments delivered. That was five and a half times the number in 19-20 or an increase of almost 3 million virtual enrollments.
Joe Freidhoff: Close to two thirds of those enrollments came from the core subjects of English Language and Literature, Mathematics, Life and Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences and History.
Joe Freidhoff: Michigan students also accessed 34 different AP courses providing students with options not available in many buildings across the state.
Joe Freidhoff: Let's take a look at completion rates. The state's overall virtual pass rate for the year was 74%. This was 18 percentage points higher than the 19-20 school year.
Joe Freidhoff: Over 430 Michigan public schools, or 20% of all schools with virtual learning, had schoolwide virtual pass rates of 90% to 100%. Fifty percent of schools had pass rates of 70% or greater.
Joe Freidhoff: Part-time virtual learning schools accounted for about 88% of the enrollments, whereas 12% came from students in full-time virtual schools.
Joe Freidhoff: Part-time virtual learners had a pass rate of 75%, whereas the full-time virtual pass rate was 65%. Sixty-four percent of virtual learners were classified as living in poverty.
Joe Freidhoff: This was about five percentage points higher than the prior year and 13 percentage points higher than the K-12 statewide average of students eligible for free or reduced lunch in the fall of 21, which was 51%.
Joe Freidhoff: Students living in poverty took 66% of the virtual enrollments for the year.
Joe Freidhoff: When it came to performance, students who were not in poverty had an 82% pass rate in their virtual courses. The pass rate for those in poverty was 69%. This 13 percentage point gap was five percentage points smaller than the 18 percentage point gap observed the prior year.
Joe Freidhoff: Additionally, there was a clear performance difference for students related to their non-virtual
Joe Freidhoff: course performance. To look into this, we classified part-time virtual learners with at least three non virtual courses into one of three categories based on their success in those non-virtual courses.
Joe Freidhoff: Virtual learners passing all of their non-virtual courses has a 67% virtual pass rate.
Joe Freidhoff: Students who did not pass one or two of their non-virtual courses had a pass rate of 54%.
Joe Freidhoff: And those were the lowest non-virtual success also had the lowest virtual pass rate of only 46%. Sixty percent of students with at least one virtual enrollment took 90% or more of their coursework online in 20-21.
Joe Freidhoff: The remaining 40% of students was relatively evenly distributed among the other categories, as evidenced by the orange line on this graph.
Joe Freidhoff: We continue to see the U-shaped curve for student performance where students taking the majority of their coursework in just one medium do better than those who approach more of a 50/50 split of online and in-person courses.
Joe Freidhoff: This year's report represents the 11th year of data on the effectiveness of virtual learning in Michigan. We have seen the number of virtual learners grow from over 36,000 to over 400,000.
Joe Freidhoff: The number of virtual enrollments grew from just shy of 90,000 to over 3.6 million. The number of schools with virtual learning grew from around 650 to over 2,200 schools. And for the second consecutive year, we've witnessed an increase in the virtual pass rate.
Joe Freidhoff: The large increase in learners, enrollments, and schools was likely anticipated by many, given the COVID precautions in place throughout the state.
Joe Freidhoff: But what about the 18 percentage point increase in the virtual pass rate? How should we interpret that gain?
Joe Freidhoff: It seems likely that key factors specific to COVID precautions could be responsible and that these factors may not be likely to continue long term.
Joe Freidhoff: Consider the following four observations. First, about half of the schools in the 20-21 school year did not have any virtual learners the prior year.
Joe Freidhoff: These new schools reflected almost 2 million enrollments or 55% of all virtual enrollments for the year, and they showed a markedly higher pass rate of 80%
Joe Freidhoff: compared to schools who were in the previous year's data set, which did see increased performance, but still had an overall virtual pass rate of 66%.
Joe Freidhoff: Thus new schools propped up the virtual pass rate. It remains to be seen how many of these schools will revert back to entirely in-person options in the coming years.
Joe Freidhoff: Second, the percentage of virtual enrollments from alternative education schools dropped substantially from 19-20 to 20-21.
Joe Freidhoff: In the 19-20 school year, close to five out of every 10 virtual enrollments were from students in alternative education schools.
Joe Freidhoff: In 20-21, only one out of 10 enrollments was from an alternative school. This is particularly important because the pass rate gaps between these two groups are sizable.
Joe Freidhoff: In both years, alternative education students had virtual pass rates in the 40s, whereas the virtual pass rate for general education students bumped up from 68% in 19-20 to 76% in 20-21.
Joe Freidhoff: Third, there was also a huge shift in the grade levels of virtual learners. Consider that in 19-20 about 80% of the enrollments were from students in grades nine through 12.
Joe Freidhoff: That number was cut in half for 20-21 with the K-5 population increasing from 8% to 38%.
Joe Freidhoff: At the same time, the trend is that students in lower grades tend to perform better than students in higher grades. In 2021 for instance, students in grades K-5 had an 83% pass rate
Joe Freidhoff: compared to 63% for high school students. We suspect that the emergency closures were the driving force behind the shift, and the drastic rise in the proportion of elementary enrollments will be temporary.
Joe Freidhoff: A final factor that we think likely contributed to the increased pass rate is that schools were simply more lenient with grading policies and workload expectations than before the pandemic.
Joe Freidhoff: The movement to virtual enrollments was enormously disruptive to many schools, teachers, students and families.
Joe Freidhoff: During the stressful period many schools emphasized giving grace, which in some cases may have included lightening student workload expectations or even being more lenient with grading policies and practices.
Joe Freidhoff: Again, the four factors that we've shared are not meant to be an exhaustive list. However, we do think they paint an accurate picture of why the rate increased.
Joe Freidhoff: Since these are all breaks from past trends and practices, we suspect that the increased virtual pass rate may be just as fleeting as the sizable increases in schools, students, and enrollments.
Joe Freidhoff: Let's take a few minutes to take a look at schools that appear to have run successful programs.
Joe Freidhoff: For this purpose, we identified schools that had an 80% or higher virtual pass rate across all of their virtual learners. We found close to 800 schools that met that entrance criteria.
Joe Freidhoff: These higher performing schools supported different numbers of students, yielded a wide range of enrollments, and offered various amounts of course titles.
Joe Freidhoff: The data showed that a third of LEAs and over half of PSAs had schoolwide virtual pass rates of 80% or higher. Both traditional school districts and charter school districts can run successful virtual programs, but the charter schools reached higher levels of success more frequently.
Joe Freidhoff: We found these higher performing schools in rural, town, suburban, and city settings, but they did occur more often in suburban and city schools.
Joe Freidhoff: These higher performing schools also showed promise for equitable outcomes for students of different races and ethnicities.
Joe Freidhoff: The pass rates in these schools for African American or Black, Hispanic or Latino, and White students were all 90%. For these schools, virtual programs appear to be approaching more equitable outcomes.
Joe Freidhoff: We also know that, across all virtual programs in the state, students in poverty had a pass rate of 69%,
Joe Freidhoff: which was more than 10 percentage points lower than it was for virtual students who were not in poverty. But for these high performing schools, however,
Joe Freidhoff: the virtual pass rate for students in poverty rose to 89% much closer to the 93% virtual pass rate for students who were not in poverty. Students in poverty experienced much more equitable success in these virtual programs.
Joe Freidhoff: School leaders looking to take the next step forward with their virtual programs may find value in the many free resources that Michigan Virtual has authored.
Joe Freidhoff: These resources include a series of practical guide to online learning designed for students, parents, teachers, mentors, school administrators, and school board members.
Joe Freidhoff: Michigan Virtual also provides quality reviews of supplemental online learning programs to Michigan schools at no cost.
Joe Freidhoff: The resource page also includes a link to the National Standards for Quality Online Learning which offer frameworks to evaluate online learning programs, online teaching, and online courses.
Joe Freidhoff: Thank you for taking the time to watch this brief presentation. The full report is available on our website through the URL on the screen.
Joe Freidhoff: We've also put together a handy infographic that summarizes some of the key figures from this report that you can access through that same page. Thanks again for your time, and please reach out to us if you have any questions.