“Given that bleak and unpromising [virtual education] landscape, an outlier may be emerging: The online version of Great Hearts Academies is proving to be both an academic standout and popular with families.
Early returns are promising: Seventy-nine percent of GHO students are above the 50th percentile in reading; 72 percent in math. Both of those figures slightly beat the average across the network’s traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Parent satisfaction will always be the most salient metric, and here GHO shines. An internal survey shows 85 percent of parents are more satisfied with Great Hearts Online than with their previous ‘brick-and-mortar’ schools, a number that swells to 92 percent among families who came to the online classical school from traditional public school districts, according to Kurtis Indorf, who leads Great Hearts Nova, an ‘R & D’ division of the fifteen-year-old charter school network.”