12 New EdChoice Website Features You Should Know About
If you’re reading this, you’re on our new website! Here’s what’s new and improved.
More than a year ago, the EdChoice team put our heads together and imagined a new, robust, interactive website that offers all the same utility of our site at the time plus a feast of new data, information and general improvements to make your experience much more streamlined. Today, we’re excited to announce it is finally live!
Here are 12 new tools and features you won’t want to miss.
1. Find Your State
This may seem small, but it’s a huge time saver. From anywhere on our website and in just one second, you can navigate to your state’s page (more on those later).
2. More Robust State Pages
Our state pages now offer much more than links to private school choice programs, though it has those, too. Now, we have breakdowns of the full school choice landscape, including information about several types of school choice—private, public, charter and homeschooling choice. You can also pull out several tabs full of all new information we never previously hosted on our site: our interactive and downloadable Fast Facts data dashboards, Policy Toolkit, private school Regulations and more. Keep scrolling to learn more about our services and to browse some materials our state team curated just for you.
3. Spruced Up Educational Choice Program Pages
If you’ve ever used our ABCs of School Choice handbook, you’ll like the changes we’ve made to our private educational choice program pages. We have a full profile for every education savings account (ESA), school voucher, tax-credit scholarship and individual tax credit/deduction in America. New this year: tax-credit ESA programs. We provide when the programs were enacted and launched, a full policy breakdown, student eligibility tests, links to apply and even some fast facts.
4. A More Streamlined Donation Experience
Our old donation form was good, but it was time to modernize. Our new Donate page has a compact new donation form that makes it easier to support our work no matter what device you’re using.
5. New ‘Types of School Choice’ Pages
We’ve always provided these definitions, but now we have new maps that show, at a glance, how widespread each type of educational choice is across the country. These new pages also include links to program profiles and links to more research and fast facts that can further inform what we know about these types of school choice programs.
All Types of School Choice >
Education Savings Accounts >
School Vouchers >
Tax-Credit Education Savings Accounts >
Tax-Credit Scholarships >
Individual Tax Credits/Deductions >
6. New School Choice in America Dashboard
Our School Choice in America Dashboard is back, but better. It will have a guided tour you can take, but in a nutshell, here’s how it works:
- Simply click the states whose programs you want to learn more about.
- Select the programs you want from the list that appears below the map.
- Filter by Year or Program Type if you wish or just go with the default: Most Recent Data Available.
- Then open the Data Drawer for all of this great information, which you can download in several formats.
7. New Research Library
Our Research Library got a facelift and some new filters, so you can find the research report you need fast. Arrow through and view research reports inline (or download them if you like). You can also filter our library by Year published, Category, State, Author and Keyword.
8. Totally Inline Interactive Research Reports
Don’t want to scroll through PDF reports anymore? Our new totally inline interactive research reports are what you’re looking for. (But for those of you who still love a PDF report, you can still download our reports that way.) With our inline reports, you can click through the left Table of Contents sidebar to go to any section of the report you want. Click back and forth between footnotes and it transports you straight to where you want to read. We have tabs with shortcuts to tables and figures and buttons that open up bonus Slideshare and podcast content related to our reports. Here’s one to try out.
9. New Schooling in America Polling Dashboard
The Schooling in America Polling Dashboard is a brand-new feature we launched today. We took the findings from our latest wave of our annual Schooling in America survey project and boiled it down to just the key charts and findings. You can pull out our Questionnaire, Survey Profile and Reports tabs to dive deeper into our methods and findings.
10. The EdChoice Fiscal Research and Education Center (FREC)
Within our website, you can find the brand-new Fiscal Research and Education Center website. FREC features two full data dashboards. The Private School Choice Fiscal Effects Dashboard allows you to choose the school choice programs you want to compare, then create a customized, downloadable data drawer. The School Staffing Data Dashboard works similarly, but on the state level. You can compare states’ school hiring trends, the fiscal costs of those trends as well as the opportunity costs. You can also access Project Nickel, a site dedicated to raising awareness about school funding. Finally, poke around our Fiscal Research Library, Bonus Content and Additional Resources tabs to expand your financial knowledge of K–12 education spending.
11. Spanish Translations
Finally, we’re excited to announce that much of our website content is available fully translated into Spanish. We didn’t just toss our content into Google Translate. We partnered with the wonderful translators at LingPerfect to bring Spanish speakers a better, more accurate experience. How will you know if one of our webpages has a Spanish translation? Look for this alert at the top of the page. If you see it, just click the box to open the Spanish version of that page. We know not everything on our site is available en Español now, but if you see a piece on our site you think should be translated, please email us at media@edchoice.org.
12. Legal Defense and Education Center (LDEC) – Coming Soon
Be sure to sign up to receive the EdChoice ENGAGE email newsletter on our homepage to learn when our new LDEC website is live. It will feature an Active Litigation Dashboard, a Constitutionality (of school choice) Dashboard, a Legal IQ Test, a Landmark Cases breakdown and, finally, bonus resources where users can dive deeper into the legal world of educational choice.
Thank you for your patronage! We are always striving to improve. So please, if you find any errors or bugs that negatively affect your EdChoice website experience, please email media@edchoice.org.
