Veronica Ronquillo has three children enrolled with Arizona Virtual Academy. Beside her is Alex Ronquillo, 9. The hand holding the hair dryer at right belongs to Anel Ronquillo, 11, who is doing an experiment for her Earth sciences lessons. The academy says it has 4,600 Arizona students enrolled this year.

Dean Knuth / Arizona Daily Star

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High school math teacher Dan Tucker no longer has to worry about whether this student's midriff is showing or that one can have bathroom privileges. And now, with his only commute being the one along the Internet's information superhighway, he has been known on occasion to work in his pajamas from his rural Catalina home.

Meanwhile, while other students are groggily getting ready for morning classes, high school senior Angie Ronquillo is off to work. Her school day, which largely takes place in the bedroom of her Rio Rico home, won't start until after most other students already are home.

The two are big boosters of the brave new world of virtual education, touted as a way to fix some long-standing education bugaboos and allow students to design their own educational experiences. Not a morning glory? Log on later. Want to take a class not offered in your district? No problem. Bored with the pace set in a traditional class? Work at your own speed. Don't like the food processor that can be the high school social scene? OK.

No longer merely for the high school student who needs to make up the occasional credit, distance learning is catching on, increasingly offered to primary school students and giving resources to parents who might consider home schooling but are panic-stricken at the idea of teaching trigonometry.

Arizona has been operating schools without walls for a decade now, with almost 27,500 students last year attending programs approved in seven districts and seven charter schools.

The biggest action is in the charter schools — the largest, Primavera Technical Learning Center, reported 8,000 students last year. Tucker and Ronquillo's school, Arizona Virtual Academy, run by K12 Inc., has 4,600 students in the state this year, with about 2,000 of them in Tucson.

Four years into it, the Tucson Unified School District program has about 600 students signed up for online learning.

Stuart Baker, TUSD's principal of distance learning, said students likely will experience some form of online learning in postsecondary education, so early exposure is helpful.

"Virtual education is the wave of the future. It's exploding everywhere, and it's being looked to as a real way to deliver education quickly and efficiently to kids all over the world," he said. "I don't know what form it will take ultimately, but it's not going away."

Seventeen-year-old Ronquillo sees no downside to the choice she made in her sophomore year to go wholly online. It allows her to work full time, and while she initially was wary of computers, she now considers herself solidly technologically literate.

With a full class load that includes two Advanced Placement courses, she finds the work more challenging than that in conventional classrooms.

Her mother agrees.

"It takes a lot of discipline to succeed in these classes," said 33-year-old Veronica Ronquillo, whose 9-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter also attend Arizona Virtual Academy. "All through school, at parent-teacher meetings, her teachers would always say she was one of their best students and always at the top of the class," she recalled.

Some parents might think that was encouraging. Veronica Ronquillo had another take.

"I thought it was too easy for her, and she really wasn't being challenged," the mother said.

OK, but what about missing out on the prom or football games, or interacting with other kids? The school hosts occasional get-togethers, and Angie Ronquillo said she has a full social life. Last year she was the editor for both the newspaper and the creative-writing club. She now leads the school Bible club and mentors younger students.

"Before I started the program, I didn't really understand online friendships," she said. "It seems odd to have friends and never see them, but I've learned in this program you can have meaningful relationships without ever actually speaking."

Ironically, she said, she feels she has more one-on-one time with her teachers. And she's exposed to a more diverse group of students than she would if she went to her neighborhood school — online classmates hail from as far away as Flagstaff and Yuma.

But even as their popularity grows, online programs are raising questions among some observers who are looking for greater accountability and are squeamish about sinking tax dollars into for-profit ventures.

A recent auditor general report shows there is indeed room for improvement on the accountability front.

Auditors found that in 2006, the state overpaid by about $6.4 million because of funding errors, partly because schools were receiving full payment even when students split their time with conventional bricks-and-mortar classes. Auditors also found the schools as a whole were inconsistent in reporting expenditures, making it difficult to compare costs and evaluate cost-effectiveness.

And, they noted, the effect on student achievement was similarly inconclusive, with a sample of high school students getting 48 percent fewer instruction hours than what is required.

David Safier, a Tucson blogger and a retired teacher, is critical of K12, which reported on its latest quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has more than 42,000 students in 17 states. The latest prospectus showed more than 10 percent of revenues — reported at $141 million in fiscal year 2007 — came from the Arizona operations.

Safier broke the news on his blog that K12 had outsourced grading to India, a practice the provider has discontinued.

The story came to light after some parents noticed mixed-up pronouns on graded papers. Safier accuses the company of breaching the trust of parents and students. He said he isn't convinced that the Indian workers, who weren't subject to fingerprinting, didn't have access to student data, although a K12 spokeswoman said the data were scrubbed of identifying details.

Safier also has concerns about quality, fretting that some online providers, using what he dubs "lesson plans in a can," are flirting with replacing teachers altogether.

"There's this ideal out there that if you can teacher-proof education, you've reached nirvana," he said. "If you aren't paying the costs of bricks and mortar and attendance clerks and counselors, that reduces a huge cost in running a school. You can't convince me that the costs are equal."

State auditors side with Safier on the cost question. On average, with lower costs for transportation and food and with a smaller special-education population, online charter schools spent $6,140 per pupil, while a conventional-school pupil cost $6,700, according to the report. Arizona Virtual Academy reported per-pupil expenditures of $5,792.

Mary Gifford, a K12 regional vice president, said the outsourcing began in fall 2006 and was designed to help teachers meet workload demands. Gifford, who said teachers still had the final word on grading, said few teachers actually used the service, but it was available because the school commits to returning graded essays within three days. That's a really fast pace, she said, especially given that English teachers generally have a class load of about 180 students. Online students need more timely feedback, she said, because teachers can't walk around a classroom and see who's getting it and who isn't.

This year the company is using two highly qualified Arizona English teachers who work part time reviewing essay drafts. And the school now will standardize communication so parents will be universally informed if someone other than the teacher reviews class work.

John Wright, the president of the Arizona Education Association, has reservations. While he sees value in online course work, he applauds states such as North Carolina and Kansas for setting up strict controls on how and what the schools teach.

"Where you get into trouble is that in Arizona, the philosophy on regulation is very libertarian, and it's more about letting the market meet the need and create innovation. But what you get are for-profit shops setting up that are much more interested in the bottom line," Wright said.

But Tucker, 37, who spent seven years teaching at a charter school and is now in his second year as a virtual instructor, said the concerns are unfounded. Teachers always will play pivotal roles, he said, although the instruction definitely looks different. At a session Monday morning, very few students showed up for his online lesson, where he was able to manipulate a triangle to show different angles, sharing what was happening on his screen with the class members. They could hear him, but he couldn't hear them back, so they typed smiley faces when they got the concept.

Most of them work through the modules and listen to the class recordings on their own time, so he spends the bulk of his time working one-on-one with students. And because the course work is somewhat scripted, he saves time on lesson plans and can focus more on instruction, he said.

There are some trade-offs. There's no more venting with peers in the teachers lounge, and the benefits aren't comparable to those of the public system. But he can eat a warm cookie that his daughter baked while he's answering students' questions. And he doesn't have to do the part-time acting and the stand-up comedy that it often takes to hold the attention of 35 students for an hour.

"I don't think online will ever replace traditional school, but the fact is, you get out of high school what you put into it," he said. "And that's true whether you're working in a virtual environment or not."