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Confused By Your Public School Choices? Hire A Coach


It's a familiar problem for parents in areas with a lot of school choice: charter, magnet, traditional, progressive, project-based, Montessori, STEM, STEAM, immersion ... the list goes on.


It's a relatively new job title in the public school realm. But there are now — in a growing number of cities and districts as school choice has expanded nationwide — people who've made it their business, literally, to help parents find the right fit. They offer a range of services at a wide range of prices, but basically they're offering to coach confused and overwhelmed parents through the options.

Hiring a consultant can be a boon to parents like Roth who want what's best for their kids, but some critics of school choice worry that consultants could deepen the disadvantages and inequities that low-income families already face.

A shortcut for parents

There's no way to know precisely how many public school education consultants there are, but they're hanging out shingles in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Charlotte, N.C.


"I found her name while doing a handful of hours of research, and I thought, I clearly need to talk to her," Roth says.

Roth herself is an education policy analyst and former public school teacher. She says she and her husband, Brian, were committed to the public school system, but realized they didn't have enough time to research charter schools or figure out how to prioritize them before lottery deadline for choice schools.



"Every parent wants to know what their kid is going to feel like inside the classroom, so we're all searching for that edge," Roth says. "E.V. was able to tell me about principals, teachers and parent feedback that she had heard."

Downey describes herself a shortcut for parents. A former teacher and a director of admissions for a private school, she's been immersed in education for decades.




"A lot of it comes down to just kind of making sure they're using their time wisely – that they're visiting schools they can actually get into," she says. "It's just kind of a decluttering system."


Is it money well spent?

Yes, says Roth. Without Downey, she would have never applied to the school her daughter now goes to. "I wouldn't have put it on my list because it was a complete unknown."


"It exacerbates the equity problem," says Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA and director of the Center for the Study of School Transformation. "There's not much you can do about it, because people are going to use their private resources to help their kids. That's what all parents do. But the people without those resources are always at the disadvantage."

Downey and other consultants say they're sensitive to concerns like these. And they offer their services in different ways to families from a wide range of backgrounds.


"While I offer workshops for folks, I will just as easily sit on a panel in an under-resourced school district and talk to them about school choice," says Aisha Crumbine, an education consultant who started her business advising on both public and private schools in Houston three years ago. "That's just me saying 'Hey look, there's a whole system that we are not engaging in, and here's what people are paying me to do. You have got to get in the game.' "

Some consultants say the very notion of school choice itself is biased against people who don't have the time and resources to research the often-confusing options. And they say they wish school districts did a better job of making the process simpler and easier to navigate.

"I've told more than one city official 'I look forward to the day when my services are obsolete. I would love for you to put me out of business,' " Downey says.

Getting information out


"We see this happening in some places," she says, where people with more time and better access to information "wind up at the better schools and everyone else is still fumbling around come deadline day."


"It's a very low bar to meet and yet a lot of cities don't have it," she says.


"Having a strong parent network was absolutely necessary to make sure we were gathering all of the information," says Megan Cooper Wright, one of the parents helping to update it.

Still, Wright says, the research she and her partner did to find a public school for their son took a lot of time. "It does feel like a part-time job. It can be very overwhelming," Cooper Wright says.

An expert coach




"We would argue that it's unfair to ask every parent to become an expert on education, because it's a very detailed field, and it's overwhelming to think about all the things you have to learn," says Tim Daly, a founding partner of the group. "I think the truth is that parents across the socioeconomic spectrum benefit from help and even families that have the most privilege and access are often seeking help, which I think is probably a good indicator of the need."



"I didn't know how to do the lottery. I didn't know what I was doing," she says. The coach helped her set up an account so she could apply for schools and they created a list of school options based on her son's needs. Elliott researched the schools once they narrowed the list, and her son was matched with a school she felt would be a good fit.


"This is a new frontier," Pickens says. "I think in the next five to 10 years you're going to start seeing more order and more structure around this, but right now, it's disjointed."

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