[This abridged version of a New Yorker story describes the goals, challenges and benefits of a full-time, all-virtual school for children up to the eighth grade. See the original version for more details about the founders and operators of OptimaEd and the politics involved. –Matthew]

Virtual-Reality School Is the Next Frontier of the School-Choice Movement

The conservative education activist Erika Donalds envisions a world where parents can opt out of traditional public school by putting their kids in a headset.

By Emma Green
September 1, 2023

It’s 6 a.m. A little girl, who looks to be about ten years old, hits the button on her alarm clock. She eats a bowl of cereal and brushes her teeth and hair before going to school. In class, she takes notes while her teacher, Mrs. Marty, gives a lesson. Then everyone puts on spacesuits and helmets, and the class relocates to outer space.

This is the vision for a new kind of education sold in a promotional video for Optima Academy Online, an all-virtual school that was launched in 2022. The little girl, like most of her classmates and teachers, spends a good part of her day in a Meta Quest 2 headset—a set of one-pound white goggles that extends in a single band across her eyes. She wears the headset on and off for about three hours, removing it to read a book, eat a sandwich, and hot-glue some sort of tinfoil art. Her classmates are scattered across different towns, and her teachers live all over the country. In the video, the little girl doesn’t have a single in-person interaction.

The virtual school is part of OptimaEd, a company in Florida founded by Erika Donalds, a forty-three-year-old conservative education activist. During the past school year, the academy enrolled more than a hundred and seventy full-time students up to eighth grade from all over Florida—a number that OptimaEd will roughly double this fall. Starting in third grade, full-time students wear a headset for thirty to forty minutes at a time, for four or five sessions, with built-in pauses so that the students don’t experience visual fatigue. (Younger students do something closer to regular virtual school, using Microsoft Teams and Canvas.) In the afternoon, kids complete their coursework independently, with teachers available to answer questions digitally.

OptimaEd is possible because of Florida’s distinctive education-policy landscape. The state was one of the pioneers of the school-choice movement. Ever since Jeb Bush was governor, in the early two-thousands, Florida has provided various kinds of vouchers to students from poor families, and later to those with disabilities, allowing them to purchase courses from companies like OptimaEd. Governor Ron DeSantis expanded that program by making all students eligible for education vouchers, funded with the money that would otherwise go toward their public-school education. This legislation has made it even easier for parents to use state dollars for OptimaEd’s products. But the company is also quickly expanding beyond Florida. This fall, it’s providing V.R. services to students in Arizona—another state that has embraced school choice—and parts of Michigan.

OptimaEd bills its education as classical, with an emphasis on the intellectual traditions of Western civilization and the liberal arts. Younger students learn phonics and diagram sentences. Older ones read the great books and the Constitution. Teachers talk a lot about virtues, such as courage and self-government. “It’s a very traditional, back-to-basics education,” Donalds said on a podcast recently.

Donalds comes from the world of Florida school-choice activism. She’s well known in Florida political circles: a few of Donalds’s closest activist allies founded the group Moms for Liberty, which has become the leading conservative voice in the movement for parents’ rights in education, and Donalds serves on the group’s advisory board. She is also married to a congressman, Byron Donalds, a rising star in the Republican Party, who was briefly a contender for Speaker of the House in 2023. (A number of Republicans in Florida have encouraged him to run for governor once DeSantis is out of office.) The movements for school choice and parental rights sometimes dovetail with the classical-school movement, which has been experiencing a revival in America since the nineteen-eighties. Whereas the former often focusses on the shortcomings of public schools, the latter offers an alternative vision for education: a way of teaching students that calls back to the ancient wisdom and traditions of the Western world, instead of instructing them using progressive pedagogy and frameworks.

Erika Donalds has built an experiment in total parental control over education. “I see a huge and growing industry of à-la-carte education options—the ability to customize the experience both physically and geographically,” Donalds said. “We’ve been told that only certified teachers in a traditional classroom environment can deliver instruction. And we know that’s just not true.” She believes that virtual-reality school hits many of the benefits of in-person learning—real-time instruction, classmates, field trips—while letting families build the schedules and communities they want. If parents aren’t satisfied with whatever ideas their local public school is pushing, they can opt out by putting their kid in a headset. “If you entrust your child with us, you know that the curriculum is not going to be contrary to what you’re teaching at home,” she said.

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Donalds has also discovered that V.R. education, in particular, can be a hard sell in the classical-ed world, whose members generally pride themselves on preserving tradition, both in terms of curriculum and form. She agrees that in-person classical schooling is still the best option for kids. But, she says, “We cannot scale in-person, classical-style schools as quickly as the demand would like us to.” (Great Hearts, a prominent network of classical schools, reported that nearly eighteen thousand students were on wait lists for its schools in the 2019-20 school year, for example.) Allergies to new technologies are not new: Donalds said that Adam Mangana, her co-founder, often talks about how Socrates was skeptical of writing because he thought it was inferior to oration. “Yes, this is an innovation,” she said, of the virtual academy. “But it will allow more people to access what we believe is the greatest type of education that’s ever been offered.”

There are about two hundred and fifty custom environments in which Optima Academy Online students and teachers can gather for lessons. These places do not exist in real life; they were built by OptimaEd’s staff using virtual furniture, buildings, and natural elements. (This is one of the things OptimaEd sells: independent schools, for example, can pay to have access to these custom-built environments.) According to Donalds, Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and an early school-choice promoter, was wowed by his virtual-school demo, asking with wonder, “Where is this?” Nowhere, Jeb. It’s nowhere.

This being a classical virtual-reality school, Optima’s environments include settings in ancient Greece and Rome. Recently, the head of the online academy, Dan Sturdevant, and its academic dean, Kim Abel, took me on a tour of an “early Roman outpost.” The images were closer to an animated video game than to documentary footage. We teleported past a Roman official’s house, decked out with red-clay roof tiling, up some stairs to an open patio of black-and-white-checkered marble floors, surrounded by Ionic columns and an ivy-covered railing. Here, a teacher might spawn a set of bleachers for students to sit during a lecture on a subject such as history or Latin. The head of the virtual school’s history department, Jonathan Olson, has a Ph.D. in American religious history, and is responsible for verifying the historical fidelity of the ancient sites, bleachers notwithstanding.

Toward the end of the school year, I joined a sixth-grade science class on a field trip to an Everest base camp. The scene was elaborately staged: our group was surrounded by gray tents held up by bright orange poles; a sleeping bag was carefully tucked inside each tent, even though the students wouldn’t actually be sleeping there. A whiteboard stood to our left in the snow, covered with colorful Post-its bearing scientific terms. The teacher had taken a selfie of his avatar wearing an orange mountain-explorer jumpsuit and put it on the board. Wind whistled quietly somewhere in the background of my headset.

The teachers had set up weather-station equipment that a researcher might use, such as a compass and a barometer. The kids struggled with the lesson. When a teacher asked them where air pressure would be greatest—on the beach or at the top of a mountain—they weren’t certain how to answer. The session was chaotic. On a normal day, teachers might press a button and forcibly “seat” the students to prevent them from moving around during a lesson. But, since this was supposed to be an interactive field trip, the kids were free to zoom around at will, which they did; one of them, who had styled his avatar with a helmet, walked right through me. Roughly a dozen sixth-graders were there, but it was hard to keep track of them with all the fidgeting.

In the next activity, we attempted to scale the Khumbu Icefall, which in real life is a deadly stretch on one route up Everest. The format was a cross between a quiz show and a video game. Using the teleport function on our handheld controllers, we moved along a line of chairs set up along the icefall, occasionally passing a floating notecard with a review question. But there was also a physical rule put in place: no one could move the controller in their left hand. Otherwise, they’d fall from the mountain and force the whole group back to base camp, where we’d have to start all over again.

At first, the students discussed the various dangers of the mountain. One suggested that we should all be quiet to prevent an avalanche, and then started screaming to demonstrate what not to do; a teacher quickly muted him. As the exercise got under way, the kids grew increasingly frustrated. “My teleport’s broken!” one of them shouted. Another couldn’t find the next chair in the line up the mountain. People must have been using their left-hand controllers, because the whole group kept falling and getting reset to the beginning of the activity. Every time, a prerecorded message from one of the teachers would say, “Oh, man! Well, hopefully we won’t make that mistake again.” Several kids sped ahead of the rest of the group; it wasn’t clear who was actually looking at the review questions.

Afterward, when I asked Sturdevant about what happened on the mountain, he described it as an opportunity for “virtue development.” “There’s a virtue in serving your peers well by not being a distraction,” Sturdevant said. “There’s a virtue in having self-discipline and being able to control your emotions. Those are the follow-up conversations that we will have with the students.” Mangana, the virtual academy’s chief innovation officer, acknowledged that the gaming aspect of the lesson may have overtaken the content. “Struggle is O.K.,” he said. “Distraction is not. If there are ways in which the technology gets in the way, we’ll correct those things.”

If the lesson wasn’t exactly polished, that may be because there are few schools trying to do what OptimaEd is doing. “If you look at V.R. in the classroom, it is very much still the Wild West,” Aditya Vishwanath, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Inspirit, another V.R. education company, told me. In our conversation, Mangana and Sturdevant argued that the students would remember much more of the material after reviewing it in a context like the Everest field trip, where they were moving their bodies through a distinctive landscape. It’s true that the students’ ability to move around in a V.R. lesson could possibly offer a learning advantage over traditional school. “A lot of people think what makes V.R. incredibly special as a medium is the fidelity of the visuals,” Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, told me. “Really, what makes V.R. special is the fact that the scene responds naturally to your body.” And in specific circumstances—like when an in-person experience would be dangerous, impossible, counterproductive, or wildly expensive—V.R. can be great, he says.

Still, there are clear downsides. Bailenson, who has taught courses in V.R. to hundreds of college students, said that “it’s hard to fathom a world in which V.R. is the all-the-time medium of teaching just yet.” In the K-12 setting, he added, “Nobody has any idea, scientifically, about what happens when a child wears a V.R. headset for hours per day, over weeks and months on end.” In his lab, where adult researchers study V.R., there is a thirty-minute rule: everyone is required to take a break after thirty minutes in the headset, to take a drink or talk to a friend. V.R. use can cause simulator sickness, a kind of motion sickness that gives some people a nauseous, headachy feeling, like they might get when they’re riding in a car. Long-term V.R. use can also lead to something called reality blurring; Bailenson told me that, in some studies, when people stay in headsets for long periods, they have trouble distinguishing between real life and V.R. Olson, the virtual school’s history expert, told me as much, describing his attempts to move furniture around with a wave of his hand after a full eight-hour workday building environments for the academy. “If anything, I sometimes forget the laws of physics!” he said.

The other potential issue with V.R. school is the lack of community. Optima tries to foster school spirit: kids can decorate their avatar’s clothing with Optima’s logo and mascot (an owl), and they’re sorted into houses, Harry Potter-style. They also have a weekly virtual social hour. But, with the students scattered across Florida, they’re not going to make friends in the way they would at a traditional school; they can’t hang out after class, go to one another’s birthday parties, or host their classmates for sleepovers on the weekends.

Reducing the social importance of school in kids’ lives is perhaps a feature of the virtual school, not a bug. Several people I spoke with mentioned that many of the students had previously been bullied, and that V.R. school can be a haven for children with social anxiety. Diana Hill, a mom in the Orlando area whose son Rylan was a sixth-grader at the virtual school last year, said that he struggled to make friends in traditional public school: “Not one time did he ask to invite someone to a birthday party.” At Optima’s virtual school, Rylan has thrived, his mom said. His parents work from home, and they like having him around, especially because Rylan used to be so anxious about the school day. “He doesn’t have to worry about a school shooter coming in,” Hill said. “He doesn’t even have to worry about the drills anymore.”

Hill told me that Rylan has plenty of in-person friends—but he met them at golf, or church, or in their neighborhood, rather than at school. As Mangana told me, “The schoolhouse is expected to provide so much. A good life for a student is more decentralized.”