What Happened When Los Angeles Parents Got Better School Choice Information
Last month, I met Maria for coffee at our usual spot in Silver Lake, her 5-year-old son Javier digging into a blueberry muffin across the table, a plastic dinosaur stomping through the crumbs. A year ago, that same coffee table was covered in crumpled school profile printouts, screenshots of Facebook rants, and a folded district map with half the options crossed out. Maria was days away from submitting her kindergarten choice application, and she had no clue what to pick. Back then, the information we had as LA parents was a mess: official district pages only listed test scores, popular charter schools’ websites only posted their best testimonials, and the only other info you got was secondhand from a friend whose cousin’s kid went there. If you had a kid with specific needs, like Javier’s ADHD, it was almost impossible to find the details that actually mattered.
Last year, our local parent volunteer group teamed up with a small local education non-profit to put together a different kind of guide. We sent volunteers to every public elementary school within 10 miles, and asked for specific numbers no one published: average special education caseload per teacher, daily recess time, cost and waitlist for before and after care, percentage of teachers who’d been at the school for more than two years, whether the school had a full-time on-site counselor. We put it all in a free, one-page-per-school guide, no fancy jargon, sorted by neighborhood, and shared it everywhere from parent Facebook groups to library bulletin boards and Head Start waiting rooms.
That guide is what kept Maria from applying to the trendy charter school everyone in our group was obsessing over that year. On paper, it was a top 10 school in the city, but our guide listed its average special ed caseload at 27 kids per teacher, and recess only twice a week, cut short for extra test prep. The neighborhood school 10 minutes from her apartment, the one no one ever talked about, had a caseload of 12 kids per special ed teacher, 40 minutes of recess every day, and a part-time counselor who specialized in neurodiverse kids. She applied there, got in, and now Javier comes home every day talking about dinosaur digs in the school garden.
We surveyed 200 parents who used the guide during last year’s application season, just to see what changed. Before the guide, 7 out of 10 of us were applying to the same 15 oversubscribed “top ranked” schools, even when those schools didn’t line up with what our kids needed. After the guide, that number dropped to 4 out of 10. More than half of parents who used the guide picked a school within 2 miles of their home, instead of planning to drive 30 minutes across town for a “better” school that didn’t fit their kid. I talked to the principal of that little neighborhood school Maria chose, and he told me their incoming kindergarten class jumped from 22 kids to 38 last fall. The difference wasn’t just more kids, it was that every family who enrolled knew exactly what the school did well, and what it didn’t. No one showed up surprised that there’s no gifted and talented program for kindergarten, because we listed that right on the profile. That cut down on parent questions and complaints at back to school night, and let teachers spend more time teaching instead of re-explaining the school’s program to confused new parents.
Even the oversubscribed popular schools saw a benefit. The head of the parent teacher association at one of the most sought-after charters told me their waitlist dropped by almost 40% last year. That meant the parents who really wanted what that school offered – a strict, STEM-focused program for older kids – had a much better chance of getting in, instead of getting bumped by people who applied just because it had a good reputation they’d heard online.
This experience made it clear that most of our school choice stress doesn’t come from too few good schools – it comes from bad information. Most of us have been conditioned to chase the same generic “good school” label, instead of looking for the good school for our kid. What I tell other parents now, regardless of where you live, is to do two simple things before you start applying. First, write down three specific non-negotiables for your kid, no vague stuff. Don’t write “good teachers” – write “before-care starts by 7:30am because I work full time” or “has a full-time special ed case manager” or “bilingual Spanish instruction for my kid who speaks Spanish at home”. Second, email or call the school’s front office and ask for those specific details directly. Official websites rarely list this stuff, but most front office staff will tell you if you ask specifically. If you want to go a step further, start a shared Google sheet with three or four other parents in your area, and have everyone add the answers they get – you’ll have a guide just like ours in a couple of weeks, for free.
It’s not a perfect solution. We still haven’t figured out how to get this guide to every parent, especially parents who don’t use social media, don’t come to parent coffee meetups, or don’t speak English as a first language. Last month, I met a single mom at a Head Start program in East LA who told me she had no idea the school two blocks from her apartment had a free after-school program – she’d already put her name on the waitlist for a school 45 minutes away because that was the only one she’d heard of. Better information doesn’t fix all the problems with school choice in LA, like chronic underfunding at high-poverty schools or segregation by income. But it does take a little of the stress out, and it helps more kids end up in a place that fits them. Javier still has hard days at school, and Maria still worries about next year when he moves to first grade. But it’s a lot better than sitting at a coffee table covered in messy printouts, guessing which school is the right one.
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