The growing popularity and success of online learning is an important but "largely unnoticed" trend that reform-minded educators and policy makers could use to much greater advantage as they seek to improve public education in general, says a new report from Education Sector, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.

Titled "Laboratories of Reform: Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education," the report urges reformers to recognize that long-sought improvements in teaching and learning already are being applied successfully in online education.

"Virtual schooling is driving the same sorts of transforming changes in public education as Apple's iTunes has been producing in the way people collect and listen to music," the report asserts. "While the importance of effective teaching and learning has not changed, the internet has enabled educators to significantly alter the experience of schooling."

For example, the report says, virtual schools are "personalizing student learning and extending it beyond the traditional school day," as well as creating "new models for the practice of teaching--with opportunities to easily observe, evaluate, and assist instructors. And they are pioneering performance-based education funding models."

As a result, successful experiences in virtual education--which so far have been structured mostly as "supplemental" programs--are demonstrating that "innovative reforms can be readily integrated into the public school system," the report concludes.

Nationwide, two dozen states now have state-run programs in virtual schooling, mostly at the high school level, Education Sector notes. It cites an estimate by the Sloan Consortium--a group created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to improve online education--that 700,000 of the nation's 48 million elementary and secondary students were served by online schools in the 2005-06 school year. (Editor's note: America's school-age population now numbers 53.3 million, according to the most recent Census Bureau data.)