Oregon Online School
There is an article in the online version of The Oregonian about the success of and controversy surrounding a new online charter school. Demand is outstripping the school’s capacity, despite heavy reliance on parents being the student’s “learning coach.” What probably ups the controversy is the fact that the school is run by a for-profit company from Baltimore named Connections Academy. They are now running 11 schools nationwide.
60% of the families currently signed up for the Oregon Connections Academy were already homeschoolers . (The school has a really cool acronym -ORCA. We’d be stuck with WACA. Better than Colorado, though - I’m not sure how many parents would sign up their kids for COCA. But I digress.) I have been saying for a number of years that technology is going to provide parents with many more options for homeschooling, and I’m sure programs like this will only add to the trend.
Whether online schooling is good or bad isn’t really important. If parents and students perceive that it’s good, they will take that opportunity. We can provide it through public education and maintain that connection with our community, or leave it to private schoools or for-profit companies and become increasingly irrelevant to larger numbers of constituents. I don’t see a postive outcome to the latter choice.