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Get Parents to Choose Your Schools:
Today's families are hungry for information about education. Are you giving them what they need?
American School Board
Journal, 2005
"You Do the Math," said the subdivision brochure. "Discipline problems, school crowding, and poor student performance are causing budget requests to skyrocket in the [Charlotte]-Mecklenburg County School System. This means higher property taxes for everyone. ..."
The solution? Come to Verdict Ridge, N.C., a "golf and country club community" some 15 miles north of Charlotte. Here, in homes priced from $300,000 to $1 million, your tax rate will be lower, and your children can attend the first-rate Lincoln County Schools, where people "care about your child's education."
"It made my blood boil," says Louise Woods, a school board member for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
But was it true?
"We're just stating the facts like anyone else," says Scott Knox, the development's general manager, referring to the newspaper insert he distributed this spring. "We just probably state them more bluntly than most people."
"More bluntly" is right. While "the facts" can be endlessly debated -- Woods contends students have comparable test scores, and can get just as good an education, in Charlotte-Mecklenburg -- Knox's irreverent brochure tapped into a nationwide phenomenon in an age of accountability and school choice. Parents are more sophisticated than ever about selecting schools for their children, and school districts must be more attuned to their needs.
Shopping for school
William Bainbridge, CEO of SchoolMatch, says today's parents "want to shop for a public school just as they do for consumer products." And Bainbridge's company is one of several on the Internet that help in the search by providing families with data on schools.
Of course, school quality has always been a major consideration for families looking for new homes and neighborhoods. But a number of factors have made the decision seem more critical today. We live in a more competitive society -- indeed, a more competitive world -- than we did 20 or 30 years ago. We are more mobile, both geographically and professionally. The notion that we would stay in one town, one state, or one career for our entire lives has less currency than it did for past generations.
In such an environment, education becomes more important than ever. A high school diploma, once the ticket to a stable blue-collar job, is no longer enough. Studies document the growing gaps in earning power between workers with college and graduate degrees and those with mere high school diplomas.
And all the while, the accountability movement is focusing attention on school quality and the perceived differences between schools. More information is out there for the public to see in newspapers, on the Internet, and on the evening news.
When SchoolMatch was created in 1986, there was a widespread belief that all public schools were essentially the same, says Steven Sundre, the company's executive vice president. Now, questions of quality and accountability have "really focused attention on the fact that schools -- public schools -- are different from one another."
Competing for kids
This realization has fostered a competitive environment that many educators say they welcome. At the same time, it has put increasing pressure on school districts that have fewer resources, more indigent children, and fewer affluent students than their neighbors.
"Schools are about marketing now and about competition," says Charlotte Sherman, deputy superintendent of educational services for the Wayne-Westland Community Schools outside Detroit. "Schools of choice have forced schools to market themselves and be more competitive. And that's not a bad thing -- that's a good thing."How We Did It: District's Outreach Tragets Real Estate Agents
But the competition has created challenges for Wayne-Westland, a 13,000-student district in an older suburban community that is losing 100 to 200 students a year. Bordered on the north by a newer suburb with bigger homes and wealthier families, Wayne-Westland has worked hard to court real estate agents, some of whom are rumored to be steering families elsewhere.
"I think there are Realtors who are doing this -- who are turning people away from certain districts," says Chris Peterson, of Century 21 Dynamic Realty in Westland. Or, she adds, the real estate agents might have said: "Go ahead and buy in Westland, but send your children to private schools or charters."
"They associate smaller homes with not-so-good quality schools," says Wayne-Westland Superintendent Gregory Baracy. "I think that lends itself to how materialistic we've gotten in our society. Bigger [is] better."
Reaching out to parents
The Paradise Valley School Unified District, near Phoenix, Ariz., is fighting bigger homes on its northern border and its neighbor's cachet -- what Judi Willis, the district's public affairs officer, calls the "mystique about Scottsdale."
Arizona has open enrollment throughout the state, though parents have to provide transportation to schools outside their district. Still, Willis says, when new arrivals are looking for homes in the Phoenix metropolitan area "they may say to the Realtor, 'I don't care where [I buy], but get me into the Scottsdale School District.'"
Paradise Valley has responded with a comprehensive program to market itself to the public. The district has revamped and expanded its website, trained its central office staff to be more customer friendly, and reached out to real estate agents through e-mail newsletters and face-to-face meetings. It has created numerous "choice" options, including elementary schools that offer the Core Knowledge curriculum or Spaulding Reading, a phonics-based program.
Willis knows these efforts won't stop some parents from looking elsewhere, but she believes they will at least make Paradise Valley more competitive. "We have religious schools. We have charter schools. We have private schools that we're all competing with," Willis says. "I'm good with parents making one of these choices, as long as it's an informed choice."
Test scores and beyond
With all the information out there today -- test score data, graduation rates, teacher/student ratios, per-pupil expenditures -- it would seem that parents have more opportunity than ever to make informed choices. But data can also overwhelm, and it can be contradictory. Take, for example, the schools that have been honored by their states for excellence and subsequently failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind. How does a parent make sense of that?
Average test scores tell you something, but they can hide the problems of students at the margins. Even data that is disaggregated according to race and income level, as specified by NCLB, won’t give the whole story of a school's or a teacher's contribution because it ignores value-added gains -- that is, the gains one group of children makes from one year to the next. In Practice: Six Steps to Better School Communications By Edward H. Moore
Louise Woods, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg board member, offers this hypothetical example: Say the local paper reports data showing that 90 percent of students are at grade level at a particular elementary school. If 95 percent of those students entered school at grade level, this school could be doing far worse than one with, say, 65 percent on grade level.
"If only 50 percent entered that school on grade level, and you got them to 65, you've done a tremendous job," Woods says.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg has had well-publicized problems raising the test scores of children in poverty. In some district schools, higher-performing students are gaining more than a year academically over the course of a school year, Woods says, but "it's sort of hidden," and the district doesn't do much to publicize it.
"If the first thing we put out was the percentage of growth for children below and above grade level," she says, "that would go a long way toward giving another part of the picture that is not often in the hands of parents who are trying to figure it out."
Peer groups and home prices
Still, urban districts like Charlotte-Mecklenburg are up against the allure of wealthier suburban districts, where facilities are generally newer and families more highly educated. That these districts also tend to be less ethnically and racially diverse does not necessarily mean that the more affluent who choose them don't want their children to go to school with minorities or poor children (although, of course, it could). Rather, these parents want their children to go to school with a critical mass of similarly situated peers because of the educational benefits such a population offers.
This phenomenon has the effect of raising housing prices even more in wealthy neighborhoods, which, in turn creates more wealth for these school districts. Researcher David M. Brasington noted the importance of peer groups in choosing schools in a 1999 study titled "Which Measures of School Quality Does the Housing Market Value?" in the Journal of Real Estate Research.
"The results suggest that the housing market values proficiency test passage rates but not value added by a school distinct," Brasington wrote. "Therefore, it may be that parents do not choose schooling based on which school districts are best able to improve students' academic achievement; instead, they appear to choose school systems based on peer group effects, valuing the type of children who attend the school district."
Conversely, when well-educated parents talk about "bad" schools -- places they would not want to send their children -- they may be referring not to the quality of instruction (for how do they know what kind of extraordinary efforts might be occurring behind the scenes?) but, uncomfortable as this may sound, to the kind of children who go there.Case Studies: 8 Districts to Watch
This perception can further exacerbate income disparities in neighborhoods and their schools. Where the schools are perceived to be better, housing values tend to be higher as well, several studies show. In a recent study of school boundaries in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Dartmouth College economist Douglas O. Staiger and two colleagues document the impact of "good" schools on neighborhood housing prices.
"Having a good school raises property values in part because it changes the population living in the neighborhood," Staiger told ASBJ via e-mail. "In our paper, we find that along with house prices rising on the 'good school' side of the boundary, you also see building quality rise and household income. Similarly, we find that when a neighborhood is redistricted to a better school, the demographics of the neighborhood change (e.g., the neighborhood becomes more white and affluent). Thus, the impact of schools on housing values appears to be largely indirect, through the residential sorting that goes hand-in-hand with school boundaries and reassignment.'
In another study, Cleveland State University economist Michael Bond calculated that houses sold in Ohio in 1994 brought $471 more for every percentage point increase in passing rates at nearby schools, according to USA Today. The newspaper's own study found that houses in the attendance areas of highly rated schools were worth at least 10 percent more than similar houses across the street that were in the attendance area of lesser ranked schools.
The choice factor
Economist Sandra Black, formerly with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, reported in 1998 that a house in an inner-city Boston neighborhood would appreciate 14 percent in value if families had the right to send their children to public school in suburban Belmont.
Choice, part of a city program at the time, helped disadvantaged children in Boston attend school in the wealthier suburbs. But other choice plans, such as open enrollment within a district, can actually exacerbate achievement differences between schools because more-affluent and well-educated families are better positioned to take advantage, says Joseph Buonaiuto, a former social studies teacher at Buckeye Union High School in Buckeye, Ariz.
"The suspicion that not all district schools are equal nurtures the belief that there are 'good schools' and 'also ran' schools," Buonaiuto wrote in the Arizona Republic:
Consider the high school perceived to be an "also ran" school. Parents, wanting what's best for their kids, and top students, wanting what's best for themselves, enroll elsewhere. If 30 students leave a school, that school loses an FTE teacher. Losing a teacher means the loss of five or six class offerings a day. A loss of five or six daily classes results in a reduced elective program. Fewer electives means the school offers less, and its "also ran" reputation grows. Meanwhile, the "good school" gets additional students, more teachers, an expanded elective program, and an enhanced perception of quality."
Even a district with a strong national reputation, such as the Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools, in the suburbs of Washington, D. C., has to work hard to maintain the image of a "good" school system, says Reginald Felton, director of federal relations for the National School Boards Association and a former Montgomery County board member.
The district has more minority students than it did 10 or 20 years ago. The students dress in baggy clothes, carry cell phones, and talk loudly in the hallways. "And yet, if you went to these schools every day," Felton says, "you'd see these are good kids, and you've been carrying around a 20-year-old story of what defines a good school.
"How do you maintain positive images of the local schools when local schools are changing, but they're still good?" Felton asks.
The communications challenge
Edward H. Moore, associate director of the National School Public Relations Association, has some answers. If families have become the "consumers" of education, he says, then schools must become marketers for their "products" But it's not a role that comes easily to many districts.
"I have seen district [websites] that lack phone numbers and addresses, and it just blows my mind," Moore says. The message, whether intentional or not, is: "We don't want people to call up."
This kind of "communication vacuum" will not serve a district well, he says. It will suck in all kinds of misinformation, exaggeration, and rumors that can give a district a bad name. "Communication takes place whether we're engaged in it or not, whether we're attempting to influence it or not," Moore says.
Better, then, to get your message out there early and often, because the challenge of public relations -- unlike the challenge of, say, reaching a benchmark in eighth-grade algebra -- is continual and, as Moore puts it, unrelenting.
"Know your numbers, know your own situation, know your message," Moore says. "And then put it out there so it's very clear to parents what makes your schools great."
To help put Paradise Valley's message out there, the Arizona district has hired its first full-time webmaster, says Willis, the district public affairs officer. In addition to regular e-mail newsletters to parents, real estate agents, and other community members, the district recently arranged a customer service survey for parents.
That survey showed that Paradise Valley, while blessed with an unbeatable name, was somewhat less than wonderful when it came to helping parents get information from the school office staff. "I've walked into school offices, and all you see is the tops of heads," Willis says. "That's unacceptable."
In fact, just 60 percent of parents surveyed felt that the schools were listening to them. "This is not a very good statistic, but it's a starting point," Willis says.
Willis has big plans for polishing Paradise Valley's image in addition to adding some needed customer service training. She wants a district website that's filled with pictures of people, not buildings.
Such innovations can help districts like Paradise Valley compete with wealthier neighbors. But, as Willis noted, if new arrivals really want to choose Scottsdale, and they can afford a house there or find the time and money to drive their children to its more-affluent schools, they will choose Scottsdale.
Meanwhile, in the face of a real estate boom that shows no immediate sign of slowing, less-affluent districts have to work harder to stay in the competition. They must offer strong, innovative programs -- and then sell those programs to families in the market for schools. Miscommunicate -- or, worse, ignore those families -- and your district runs the risk of creating angry citizens. "And that's infinitely more difficult trying to bring them in than if you got off on the right foot," Moore says.
"But let me tell you." he adds. "If they get treated right -- right out of the gate -- and they're welcomed and made to feel important, you will have created a fan."
Lawrence Hardy (lhardy@nsba.org) is a senior editor of American School Board Journal.
Copyright © 2005, National School Boards Association. American School Board Journal is an editorially independent publication of the National School Boards Association. Opinions expressed by this magazine or any of its authors do not necessarily reflect positions of the National School Boards Association. Within the parameters of fair use, this article may be printed out and photocopied for individual or educational use, provided this copyright notice appears on each copy. This article may not be otherwise, linked, transmitted, or reproduced in print or electronic form without the consent of the Publisher. For more information, call (703) 838-6739. |
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