VIRTUAL SPECIAL EDUCATION 1
Historical Review Outline: Virtual Special Education
Erin M. Martin
School of Education, Liberty University
VIRTUAL SPECIAL EDUCATION 2
Historical Review Outline: Virtual Special Education
Research Question: What components have proven effective in the virtual school setting for
special education students to make academic progress?
I. INTRODUCTION
A. History of virtual schools (Hornbeck et al., 2019)
B. Free and Appropriate Public Education requirements (Thurlow et al., 2019)
C. COVID-era virtual education (Kim & Fienup, 2021) (Parmigiani et al., 2021)
II. IMPORTANCE
A. Virtual school enrollment is increasing (Hornbeck et al., 2019)
B. The number of charter schools is growing (Hornbeck et al., 2019)
C. Data has shown inconsistent and low performance in virtual schools (Hornbeck et al.,
2019) (Smith et al., 2016)
III. DEVELOPMENT OF VIRTUAL SPECIAL EDUCATION
A. Forced by COVID (Kim & Fienup, 2021) (Parmigiani et al., 2021)
B. Necessity of parent collaboration in Special Ed (Parmigiani et al., 2021) (Schuck et al.,
2021)
