Will a new tool support informed school choice in Florida?

To make meaningful school choices, parents need useful information about school performance – information that’s often buried on government websites and hard to find.

The Florida Department of Education is trying to address that problem. This week, it unveiled a new online tool that allows parents to compare school performance data and read up on their options.

The new site, a joint project with the Florida Education Foundation, will likely break down some, but it all, of the information barriers parents might face when they try to pick a new school for their child.

“I commend the department for responding to the needs of Florida’s families with this informative, intuitive and transparent website, and I look forward to its continuous development,”  state Board of Education chair Marva Johnson said in a press release.

There have been lots of efforts — local and national, public and private — to help parents make informed school choices. Some cities, like New Orleans and Washington D.C., have created unified enrollment systems that allow parents to apply to all public schools in their geographic area. Their online choice applications also include school performance data, and studies have found parents do use that information.

But in many cases, school performance data is incomplete or not connected to other information parents might need to select schools for their child.

To understand how the Florida tool might help, consider a parent whose child attends struggling Campbell Park Elementary School in South St. Petersburg, and is using the new site to look for other options. The comparison tool might show her that students at nearby Fairmont Park perform slightly better in math, English and science, and also make larger gains in reading (though Campbell Park students make slightly larger gains in math).

The same tool could also reveal that students at A-rated Perkins Elementary score significantly better across the board. And the parent could also look more deeply at individual schools to explore data points like what percentage of the schools’ teachers are certified in their field.

But she’d have to look elsewhere to learn that Perkins is home to highly sought-after magnet program that draws students from elsewhere in the Pinellas County school district, and has a long waiting list as a result. If she were interested in a charter school, there’d be another layer of complication. In Florida districts, each charter school network has its own application system, which is separate from the district’s.

For now, though, parents will have a better way to compare the performance of different public schools, which might make the process easier navigate.