Oklahoma virtual charter school board partners with agency for quality and accountability


OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board (SVCSB) has announced a precedent-setting partnership with the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability (OEQA). Accoding to a press release, the goal is “to take a leading role across the country in defining best practices for online classrooms and ensuring Oklahoma’s online students receive the highest quality education.”
This partnership will allow collaboration in two significant areas: school performance reviews and school data collection/analyses. Comprehensive performance reviews of the state’s virtual charter schools will be conducted by the OEQA, the same organization responsible for creating school reports cards for all other schools in the state. In addition, the agency will provide data collection and analyses in academic and operational areas such as achievement, growth, college and career readiness, and recurrent enrollment.
“We are pleased to have the OEQA enlisted to help make sure that Oklahoma’s virtual charter schools are transparent and accountable in their educational offerings and school operations,” said Rebecca Wilkinson, Ed.D., executive director of the SVCSB. “This is an opportunity for Oklahoma to provide national leadership in the virtual charter school oversight process. This effort has been developed to help ensure educational quality in virtual classrooms and best practices in virtual charter school operations.”
The first comprehensive performance review was recently presented. Two other virtual charter schools are currently in the OEQA comprehensive school review process.
“School report cards have been around for more than 20 years, but this is a big deal,” said Daniel Craig, Ed.D., executive director of the OEQA. “The SVCSB is going above and beyond their statutory requirements in order to hold Oklahoma’s virtual charter schools to the highest standard. We have given ourselves the opportunity to be national leaders in setting best practices for virtual classrooms.”
The creation of the performance framework will allow appropriate school data to be produced annually,according to the press release from the two groups. Annual reports will allow interested parties to compare and contrast virtual charter schools alongside one another or alongside their brick and mortar counterpart.

About SVCSB:The state’s virtual charter school board was created to authorize statewide virtual charter schools. SVCSB a comprehensive authorizing process that allows it to sponsor schools that meet standards for academic performance, organizational capacity and financial management. In addition to authorization and oversight of full-time statewide virtual charter schools, the SVCSB is also the state agency responsible for certification of online courses aligned with Oklahoma academic standards and utilizing best online instructional practices, as well as the negotiation of fair course costs for school districts. For more information visit www.svcsb.ok.gov.

NOTE: Editor Patrick B. McGuigan contributed to this report.