Education navigators are an investment in social capital

Ten years ago, when Florida launched the nation’s second education savings account program, a beautiful thing happened. Friedrich Hayek would have called it “spontaneous order.” Parents, within days, began forming a multitude of Facebook groups where they traded advice on how to access the accounts, how to use them, and what learning options were available in their area.

Parents helping parents. What could be better?

In those days, Florida’s ESAs, then called Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts, were exclusively available to students with special needs. The parents who applied were often highly engaged. They were used to fighting for their children, overcoming objections from decision-makers who misunderstood them, and having to do their own research or assemble their own solutions.

These high-agency parents played a critical role in the early days, helping stave off a teachers union lawsuit and convince legislators to increase funding each year.

Looking back, the self-organized parent groups made other essential contributions. They provided what marketing gurus call “social proof.” They shared their experiences and showed potential skeptics that this new program that allowed them to direct public education funding to options of their choice was legitimate and valuable. They often provided more actionable how-to advice than official information sources.

And they made visible a reality about education that is often invisible. Parents’ social networks often play a critical role in discovering information and solving problems, from finding out which schools are the “good schools” to working the system to get children what they need.

Not every parent has access to the same social networks, however. And demographics often predict who gets left out. This is a problem in education generally, but it’s especially salient with education savings accounts, which place parents in charge of their children’s educational destinies, even more so than conventional school choice programs, since they allow parents to mix and match a panoply of learning options that could include one school, multiple schools, or a fully customized education with no full-service school in the mix at all.

Recently, researchers with Tyton Partners interviewed ESA parents in Florida and Arizona, the two nation’s two most mature programs of this kind. They found that, compared to families making more than $150,000 per year, families earning less than $50,000 were less likely to be aware the ESA programs even existed and less likely to sign up for them.

Among those who did sign up, the lowest-income parents reported less desire to re-enroll. They were less than half as likely as those in more affluent households to indicate they were “highly likely” to recommend the programs to others.

This disparity underscores the value of folk knowledge. Information about what programs exist and how to derive the most benefit travels through social networks, which disproportionately benefit affluent and highly engaged parents. This need has generated growing enthusiasm for organizations that exist to make this information accessible to everyone: education navigators.

A new series of reports from Bellwether, “Charting a Course,” identifies four functions of navigators:

• Understanding students’ needs, interests and goals.
• Identifying potential learning options.
• Addressing logistical barriers to access.
• Building families’ confidence in their choices.

This year, Florida made the nation’s first effort to support education navigators in an ESA program, defining choice navigators in statute and making their services an eligible expense for scholarship families.

So far, roughly 200 individuals have signed up to offer navigator services, many of them tutoring companies or homeschool consultants. Under Florida law, navigators need to show they hold credentials or can document expertise sufficient to serve as a classroom teacher.

These small, parent- and educator-run businesses are mostly helping families with the first two functions Bellwether identified: setting learning goals and identifying options to meet them. Receiving this help from a qualified educator has clear potential value for a parent directing their child’s education.

But it’s no replacement for the value more fortunate parents glean from their social networks: the information necessary to make informed choices, the resources to overcome logistical barriers (from carpools to ad hoc childcare), or connections to fellow families who can help build confidence in their choices.

For one thing, there’s still a chicken-and-egg problem. What about the families who don’t know the ESA program exists or that navigator services are available? What about the families who don’t have ESAs but still need help navigating the hidden curriculum of public education? Some of the most valuable contributions of navigators, in other words, do not lend themselves to fee-for-service business models and will require other forms of support.

Additional Bellwether reports unpack the potential policy and funding solutions that make navigation services sustainable. Each model has its drawbacks. Philanthropy is hard to sustain long-term and at scale. Dedicated public funding relies on the support of policymakers who must weigh competing priorities, like addressing learning gaps exacerbated by the pandemic after federal funding expires.

Some models that get tried don’t work out. The Bellwether report cites Ed Navigator’s efforts to offer navigator services as an employee benefit. There, again, the chicken-and-egg problem surfaced. In economically diverse workplaces (think a hospital that employs doctors as well as food service workers), the more affluent employees were more likely to take advantage of navigation services.

There won’t be a single solution, but each experiment with education navigation our understanding about the mix of solutions that might work. It’s time for states and local community organizations to experiment with diverse models to invest in building the social capital of families who otherwise find themselves left out of the spontaneous order.