Home education has a deep and rich tradition predating any other educational model. Despite this, it became illegal in many states after they began passing compulsory schooling laws in the mid-1800s. Parents who chose to educate their children at home even faced jail time. In the 1970s and 1980s, the homeschooling movement really gained steam, and many states passed laws to legalize it. In 1996, Michigan became the last state to officially recognize homeschooling.
While homeschooling was on the rise in the 1980s, it was difficult to find a curriculum that worked in the home setting. “Publishers were not willing to sell to home educators because they were concerned that they wouldn’t do it well, and it would hurt their reputation,” explains Jessica Parnell, CEO of Edovate Learning Corp. “My parents had the vision to say, ‘You know what, we’re going to make it available. We’ll create an academy, we’ll purchase the curriculum, and we’ll make it possible for home educators to get [a] curriculum.’”
Jessica’s parents, Robert and Linda Salzman, were already operating a warehouse in Pennsylvania that provided a curriculum to schools along the East Coast. In 1989—one year after Pennsylvania passed its home education law—the Salzmans created what would become Bridgeway Academy, one of several divisions now under Edovate. Founded in their basement, the academy provided textbooks, lesson plans, and support for families who were essentially homeschooling pioneers, at least in the modern era.
Bridgeway is designed to offer truly personalized education. “One of the things that makes Bridgeway Academy unique is [that] every student who enrolls with us starts with an assessment of their learning style, their personality style, and their academic level. That helps us to get to know them,” says Jessica. “Then they have a personal advisor who talks with parents to say, ‘Tell me the dynamics of your home. Are you travel schooling? Do you want to be highly engaged, or do you want your kids to be independent? Do you want online? Do you want textbook?’ From all that information, we help tailor exactly what that student needs, and then we support them all year long.”
Jessica says Robert was an amazing visionary. “My father was very much an advocate for school choice. And actually for him, it was Christian education, so he absolutely wanted families to be able to access that,” she says. “Long before anybody was thinking about online education, he was working with an organization to build online education. From the start, he’s always been at the forefront of innovation in education.”
Bridgeway was one of the first to offer online education and eventually built a full online suite to expand what was offered. Jessica says they were also the first to offer live online classes as well as dual enrollment as a home education option. “Because we were always focused on home education, we didn’t have any of that bureaucracy of ‘What does a school need? How do we make sure this meets all of the standards?’ We intended to exceed standards—our students from the start have typically scored 25–30 percent above their peers in any standardized tests.”
In light of the varying needs and wishes of homeschoolers, Bridgeway Academy has many different enrollment options: full-time, full-time with only textbooks, full-time online, full-time with live online classes, and à la carte. They’ve developed a one-to-one instructor guide for every course, whether it’s their own or an outside publisher, so parents aren’t having to navigate a classroom teacher’s guide.
Jessica purchased the company in 2006 after having been involved with it from the early days, and she has continued to innovate. As far as Jessica is concerned, if they design a curriculum for a student and the student is still struggling, it’s Edovate’s job to solve that. “We’re not going to tell the parent, ‘You need to go buy something else,’” she says. They began creating instructor guides geared toward skill building and remediation that offered a different way to reach students who were having difficulty with a specific concept. These were initially delivered to parents via email, but in 2014, they put the entire library online and called it Elephango.
According to Jessica, the vision for Elephango was to make it the Google of homeschooling. If a student is struggling and the parent goes to Google for help, they’ll get thousands of results that may or may not be helpful. She wanted to offer a resource that worked with their curriculum and was written for students rather than for classroom teachers. Elephango is a subscription-based model that gives families access to all the lessons and the ability to build personal study lists for each student.
Another key aspect of Elephango is that the lessons are tied back to life, which is inspired by Jessica’s background in neuroscience. “When you can connect it to something you recognize, you will retain it longer. So every lesson has to connect back to life. ‘Why does this matter? Where will I use this?’ And it’s written without skill or drill, so any assessment that you decide to do is very project oriented, student exploration, digging in,” she says. “We really designed it around the neuroscience of learning with the dopamine hits from success, the gamification, as well as that initial presentation of information that sparks their interest, sparks their curiosity, gives them a problem to solve, or humor to draw them into the lesson, and then again to tie it back to life.”
Edovate added another division, the Discover! curriculum, in 2019. Jessica explains that they’d started to see interest in formal online elementary education. There weren’t many providers offering elementary education online since sitting in front of a computer all day isn’t ideal for kids. “Everything shows [that] kids need to be moving, they need to be hands on, they need to be talking, they need to be writing,” says Jessica. “So we said, ‘Let’s build a responsible online elementary program to meet the demand that parents think they want but to deliver it in a way that really leverages how the brain best attains and retains information.’”
Discover! includes textbooks that can be used independently or with the online portal, which includes characters that guide the student. Depending on the lesson, the portal may direct students to a workbook, to a parent, or to do a hands-on or online activity. It gives students some independence while keeping the connection with the parent.
With Bridgeway Academy, Elephango, Discover!, and Curriculum Express, which continues the Salzmans’ original mission of providing homeschoolers with access to high-quality curriculum options, Edovate was well positioned to support the growing ranks of homeschoolers when the pandemic hit. “We more than doubled during COVID,” says Jessica. “We actually had to stop accepting enrollments at one point. We could have continued to allow people to enroll, but we wouldn’t have delivered the quality product that we wanted to deliver, so we had to put a pause on it.” While there has been a dip since the COVID-19 high, their numbers remain much higher than pre-pandemic.
Another unique program Jessica highlights is for students with special learning needs, which includes trying to find the actual cause of the issue. “If it’s dysgraphia, dyslexia, these are symptoms, right? What is the cause? Is it auditory processing? Is it visual processing? Is it output? What is the actual issue?” she says. “We want to also address advanced learners. How do we help them thrive? Because many times gifted kids hit a brick wall when they first experience concepts they don’t understand right away because everything has been easy for them.”
Jessica and her team continue to innovate and create new solutions for families. There are resources for anyone interested in launching a microschool or learning hub powered by Edovate. They are also participating in many school choice programs, which allow state education funding to follow students to educational options beyond their assigned district school. For anyone who is interested in personalized education for their children, Edovate has tools that may help.
