Charles' talk was focused on the School Choice Wizard, a collaborative between Civicore, the Piton Foundation, and 9news. The Wizard is being developed by Civicore as an extension of the Piton Foundation's education policy work in making data and tools to support informed decision-making more widely available. It seeks to help parents find the best school for their children utilizing a simple interface that asks parents to rank their priorities for potential school environments, as opposed to merely listing statistics, rankings and charts.
The "Colorado School Choice Wizard," presented Wednesday at the conference, seeks to help parents find the best school in a different way. With its simple interface, it doesn't rely on statistics, rankings and charts -- at least, not on the dashboard. That's all under the hood. "The approach," according to Naumer, "is to help parents determine what factors are important, then find the school that matches those priorities."
Charles' presentation was extremely well received, and caught enough attention to get its own news story on Poynter Online, which you can find here.
Keep your eyes open for the School Choice Wizard's launch in October '09 on the 9news website!
