In New Orleans, a nonprofit called EdNavigator helps low-income parents support and advocate for their children at school.  But as Francisco Vara-Orta explains in Ed Week,  EdNavigator’s services are paid for by employers who then offer the services — expert advice on their children’s education– to their employees as a free benefit.

EdNavigator is currently working with about 250 parents from 16 employers, Vara-Orto writes.

And amid New Orleans’ vast array of school choice and a large population of working-class families, EdNavigator’s founders saw that parents needed more information to help them make decisions about schooling.

“One of the gaps that we saw is that there was a lot of attention on the supply side of school quality, making better options available, investing in teacher quality, and so forth, but not a lot of attention is paid to how to help parents navigate those new options or interpret all data that was given to them,” said David Keeling, a co-founder of EdNavigator and the nonprofit’s communications chief.

In the Fall 2015 issue of Education Next, Paula Arce-Trigatti, Douglas N. Harris, Huriya Jabbar and Jane Arnold Lincove wrote about the wide range of schools from which parents can choose in New Orleans in “Many Options in New Orleans Choice System.” In “The New Orleans OneApp,” Doug Harris wrote about how students are assigned to schools in New Orleans.

— Education Next