Initiative · 2019 — ongoing

TetherEducation

Digital guidance products for assignment & choice environments

TetherEducation builds user-centered, policy-facing guidance products for assignment and choice environments — school choice, admissions, centralized matching — designed for measurement and iteration at scale.

Global

User-centered guidance for school choice and admissions

I founded TetherEducation (TetherEd). TetherEducation builds user-centered, policy-facing guidance products for assignment and choice environments — school choice, college admissions, and other high-stakes matching markets. The goal is to make complex public systems easier to understand, help families make better-informed decisions, and give partners the measurement infrastructure to learn what actually works at scale.

What we build

  • Interactive explainers — clear, mobile-first walkthroughs of choice rules and processes.
  • Guided search — tools that help families explore options given preferences and constraints.
  • Decision support — interpretable summaries (admission probabilities, tradeoffs, fit).
  • Measurement-ready delivery — every deployment is wired for evaluation and iteration.

How we work

A core principle is to pair product development with rigorous evaluation, so partners can distinguish what is compelling in theory from what is effective in the field for the populations they care about. Engagements typically run as a partnership with a ministry, district, or university, combining product, data, and research teams across the project lifecycle.

Selected deployments

  • Denmark — guidance product for the national school choice process. See the Improving Equity in Danish School Choice case study for the underlying research and the design rationale.
  • Latin America — ongoing collaborations on admissions guidance, applied to the centralized school assignment systems we have studied for the past decade.

Why TetherEd, why now

Centralized choice and assignment systems are now the default in many countries — but the consumer-facing layer on top of them often lags. TetherEd's bet is that a small, focused product team working alongside researchers and policymakers can ship guidance that is genuinely usable, measurably improves outcomes, and is continuously updated as the underlying market changes.

Visit TetherEducation ↗ View Denmark deployment ↗