If parents get education accounts, how can they choose schools? This site will help | Opinion
Gov. Greg Abbott’s top priority for the legislative session is to give families more freedom to choose the right school for their children. Abbott has called for lawmakers to establish education savings accounts to give parents direct control of their child’s share of school funding. Under the plan, parents would be allowed to use about $10,000 annually to pay for school tuition, tutoring or other education expenses.
For the first time in state history, all Texas parents may soon have the power to decide where their children go to school regardless of where they live. This means that busy parents will have a new important item on their 2023 to-do lists: searching for the best learning environment for their children.
The good news is that there’s already a free service that can help. In 2019, the Miles Foundation, a private charitable foundation in Fort Worth, approached the Lincoln Network looking for help to solve a problem experienced in their community. The Miles Foundation sought to help broaden awareness for the many parents and children, especially those coming from low-income areas or districts with failing schools, about the other free school options available to them, such as charter and magnet schools. The foundation believed that technology could help provide a solution.
Shortly thereafter, the Lincoln Network and the Miles Foundation began brainstorming about how we could use technology to help every Texas family find the “right fit” for their children’s education. The resulting days of whiteboarding, parent feedback and community iteration was Schoolahoop.org — a free school finder website that shows parents every educational option available for their children.
Launched in 2019 as a partnership between our organizations, Schoolahoop instantaneously shows parents a dashboard of school options based on their location and a child’s specific needs. Parents can select the type of school and learning environment they prefer for their child, and by typing in their address, they can search for schools and educational opportunities in their local community.
The service can even help provide options along their commute to work, given that transportation and time are two of the biggest challenges families said they face when thinking about a school for their child.
Schoolahoop matches parents with public charter schools, virtual schools, private schools, microschools and other options. It’s a free service funded by charitable contributions, and the service doesn’t collect parents’ or students’ data or use advertising to prioritize schooling options. The search engine is based solely on parents’ expressed preferences.
Because both of us were based in Texas at the time, Schoolahoop launched first in Tarrant County. In response to positive feedback and widespread demand from early users, Schoolahoop has been rolled out statewide. It’s also expanded to Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin and Kansas City, thanks to the generosity of other charitable foundations and nonprofits.
With lawmakers in Austin now considering a plan to offer all families the power to choose their child’s schools, more than 5 million children may be eligible to attend a broader array of schools. Based on the experience of states like Arizona that offer widespread school choice, Texas might expect about 4%-5% of students to take advantage of the kind of program that the Legislature is considering.
That means that if Abbott and lawmakers move forward with a new school choice program this legislative session, the parents of hundreds of thousands of students could soon be looking into expanded school options. Schoolahoop.org is standing by to help every parent find the best-fit learning environment for his or her child.
Aaron Ginn is a co-founder of the Lincoln Network , a national think tank that promotes the use of technology to advance liberty. Grant Coates is president of The Miles Foundation , a private foundation in Fort Worth that invests in education.
