We've written in the past about the need to help parents navigate an increasingly complicated school choice landscape.
For the past year, a new group, EdNavigator, has been helping parents in New Orleans. This week, they've been sharing lessons in a series of posts on the Eduwonk blog.
New Orleans has a OneApp system that allows parents to shop around for different schools, and gives them some information to judge school quality. In this way, it's further along than most choice-heavy communities — including school systems in Florida. But the folks at EdNavigator have found information available to parents in New Orleans is still incomplete, and parents often benefit from a little in-person help.
Publicly available information often doesn't paint a full picture of school quality, or is hard to compare across different types of schools. What does a letter grade mean, and how does it square with percentile scores, proficiency rates or learning gains? A recent study of a school choice application system in Washington found low-income parents often chose schools based on performance information that was readily available, while better-off families were more likely to track down other information sources.
EdNavigator's founders note that once parents have chosen a school, getting useful information about how well their children are doing is also a challenge.
It’s also not uncommon for families to get conflicting information from teachers themselves, who tend to soft-pedal news about students’ struggles. They may downplay a poor grade or test result, leaving parents uncertain about how significant or urgent a problem may be. And when they’re uncertain, they generally take their cues from the teacher.
