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.
This is why some school choice advocates say it’s crucial to get information not just to help them compare schools, but to judge how well their children are doing once they enroll. EdNavigator’s on-the-ground efforts in New Orleans reveal parents can sometimes use a little help sifting through that information.
Our Navigators sit with families on a regular basis to walk them through academic records. Frequently, these are hard conversations; our Navigators may be sharing news that the student shows signs of substantial challenges that may have gone undiagnosed or unaddressed for years. In those instances, parents are understandably frustrated that no one told them what was happening sooner.
Surely we can do better than this. Let’s get to work designing simple report cards that communicate information to parents clearly, help teachers be candid as well as kind, and increase engagement rather than multiplying confusion.
The bottom line, from today’s Eduwonk post:
For states, don’t use ESSA as an opportunity to pull a California and turn your school report cards into Rubik’s Cubes. Families, not system insiders, are your most important audience. We’ve shared specific thoughts on how to do this in another post. For communities, don’t build systems predicated on parental choice and neglect to invest in helping parents choose. It’s like baking bread and leaving out the yeast. You won’t be happy with the result.
Empowering families with better information on public and private schools — as well as other options that might exist in the virtual realm, or through education savings accounts — is a challenge the school choice movement needs to address. And better online report cards might not be enough. Parents might need help from a third party, who has their children’s interests in mind.
