Enrolling in one of those school can net home-schooling families hundreds, or even thousands of dollars per child to cover expenses from purchasing curriculum and computers to paying for extracurriculars and sports, said Schenkenberger, who home-schools her four sons, and regularly speaks and writes about home-schooling.
Oregon is not one of the states like Arizona, where home-schooling families qualify for direct government stipends to offset the costs of curriculum and enrichment, Schenkenberger explained.
Arguably, the education money should follow the student wherever he or she is enrolled.
A decade ago, only around 2 percent of Oregon students were enrolled in virtual charter schools, which are tuition-free, publicly-funded, online-only options. Now, about 5 percent of the state’s students are enrolled in such programs, with new ones popping up each year, according to an analysis by Oregon Public Broadcasting. That’s about 27,000 students total, making virtual charter schools as a whole equivalent to the fourth largest district in the state. It’s enormous growth, particularly given that overall enrollment in Oregon public schools has dropped by about 40,000 students since the pandemic.
Charter schools plus private schools plus home schooling plus demographic decline have dropped public school enrollment significantly.
The Oregon Department of Education does not collect information on how many of its virtual charter schools offer a fully asynchronous model versus live instruction, said Liz Merah, a spokesperson for the agency. And the education agency also does not know exactly how many virtual charter schools are offering financial incentives to families, she said, though it has tried to track that information by checking school websites.
If you know anything about the Oregon Department of Education, them being clueless here comes as zero surprise.
The irony is that for many students virtual charter schools don’t work:
Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the U.S. Census Bureau in 2023 found that Oregon students who enroll in virtual charter schools have “worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor’s degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools.”
Yet parents are choosing them anyway. That’s how bad its gotten in public schools in Oregon.