April 20, 2001
The New York Times
Schools Are Now Marketers Where Choice Is Taking Hold
By JODI WILGOREN
FORT MYERS, Fla. — Erica Pacetti picked a public high school according to family tradition: her parents and
grandparents went to Fort Myers High.
Derek and Kim McDaniel chose their daughter Kaelin's kindergarten for its location: it is near her grandma, who will watch
her after school.
Linda Knopf's decision was based on a mix of start times, uniform policies, educational programs, even cafeteria menus.
"It's something you have to study," she said as she listed choices 1 through 10 on her son's application.
These are the new school consumers, no longer assigned a school based on where they live but instead facing an
education marketplace. Here in Lee County, a sprawling, racially mixed area with 58,000 students on Florida's Gulf Coast,
as in an increasing number of school districts around the country, the neighborhood school has been replaced by a
dizzying menu of curriculums fiercely marketed to a largely uninformed public.
With President Bush championing the use of public money for private school tuition, and with charter schools multiplying,
school choice and the competition it creates are often hailed as the surest path to educational improvement.
The number of students enrolled in public schools of choice jumped by 2.5 million from 1993 to 1999, a 50 percent
increase, and today at least one in four American children attends a school other than the one nearest home (including
the 10 percent in private schools).
But if parents are clamoring for choice, those who already have it say they sometimes feel more confused than
empowered. Many lack the time to research options, or the expertise to evaluate them, and are instead swayed by a
principal's greeting or a building's facade. As they filled out forms at Lee County's parent information center here on a
recent Saturday morning, many families, longing for the days of simple sign-up registration, marked the old neighborhood
school as their No. 1 choice.
"I think all schools should be equal," lamented Dick Hanley, whose youngest child is in eighth grade. "Then you wouldn't
have to pick."
Market theory suggests that schools competing for customers will be forced to improve performance. While studies of
limited choice programs show that parents who choose schools are generally more satisfied than they were before choice,
and while their children's test scores often rise, there is little evidence of improvement in districts or systems as a whole.
What does tend to improve immediately, though, is salesmanship, placing public school educators in an unfamiliar and
sometimes uncomfortable role.
In Milwaukee, home of the nation's largest voucher program, the public school district loses money for every child who
chooses a private school; so this year it produced a 30-minute infomercial on itself for cable television, and Englewood
Elementary lured parents with a chili dinner and door prizes. In Arizona, which has far more charter schools than any
other state, the Mesa district, east of Phoenix, advertises in movie theaters. Here in Lee County, one middle school
distributed 5,000 promotional CD-ROM's, while another spruced up its brochure, turning a plain white photocopy into a
multicolored glossy, though changing none of what it says inside.
Such marketing "asks schools to cater to the lowest common denominator," said Alex Molnar, a professor of education at
the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, noting that it drains time and money from the traditional work of teachers and
principals. "Schools need to show themselves to be with it, irrespective of whether that with-it-ness represents anything
that is educationally important."
But Richard D. Kahlenberg, author of a new book advocating public school choice, said that "the pressure to market a
school is not a bad thing," because "it requires school leaders to think hard about their missions and what they're trying to
accomplish, what makes them distinctive."
In Lee County, almost all the schools, like many others around the country, have adopted themes like technology, global
studies or performing arts. The first bell ranges from 7:15 a.m. to 9:45, and the district has created some K-12 schools
and others serving Grades 6 through 12. In response to parent surveys, a rural high school added an agriculture program.
After the first year of choice, 26 of the 57 schools improved their grades in a statewide evaluation system, while the
grades of 4 declined. (The 27 others held steady, including 4 with A's.)
Suncoast Elementary, which failed to fill its seats after getting an F from the state in 1999, got a new name, a new
principal, a tear-down renovation and an arts curriculum mimicking the county's most popular school. Dunbar High is
enclosing its open-air walkways to allay families' safety concerns. Fort Myers Middle, the school that gave its brochure a
makeover, now plans a program for gifted students.
"If I don't fill the seats, I lose P.S.U.'s, which is money," said Louise Hollins, principal of Fort Myers Middle, using district
jargon for personnel staffing units. "It's almost like we have to go out and beat the bushes to bring kids in."
So Ms. Hollins took her jazz band to elementary schools, handing out plastic megaphones and pencils with the school
logo. Dunbar High's principal spends many spring Saturdays at middle school science fairs and, in another effort to sell
the school, recently went on a television talk show he had shunned for years. Edgewood Elementary sent two of its
teachers skydiving at a February aviation show to get publicity. And the school district is considering buying lists of
families with 5-year-olds so kindergartens can recruit via direct mail.
"We have become a sales force," said Laurie Rucks, a middle school math teacher.
School choice began in America not as a result of a conservative call for capitalistic competition but, back in the 1970's,
as a path to desegregation that avoided forced busing by attracting white students to urban schools with special
programs.
Going further, Cambridge, Mass., in 1981 adopted a "controlled choice" plan that required all families to apply for
particular schools, and doled out seats with an eye toward racial balancing. Some 20 cities followed suit, including
Montclair, N.J.; Rockford, Ill.; San Jose, Calif.; and Seattle. In New York City, students choose from an array of high
schools.
Three years ago, responding to a decades-old discrimination lawsuit and the choice movement, Lee County ended its
headache of constantly redrawing school boundaries to accommodate a fast-growing population by adopting a plan like
Cambridge's. Now the 900-square-mile district, which is 66 percent white, is divided into three zones, and families select
among the schools in their zone — or among several districtwide magnet programs — as they apply for kindergarten,
sixth grade or ninth grade. Last year about 80 percent got into their first- choice school. For schools that are
oversubscribed, a computerized lottery determines enrollment.
Some 535 buses travel 64,000 miles a day — 12 million a year — to deliver students to their chosen schools at an annual
cost of $22 million, or $385 a student (up from $335 before choice). Although this transportation is free to families, some
parents choose to drive their children to school, freeing them from long bus rides.
"I bypass quite a few schools on the way here, but it's worth it," Karen Barnes said of her daily 20-mile trek to take her
children to Edison Park Elementary, a 500-student arts school that had a 300-child waiting list for kindergarten last year.
"If it wasn't for school choice, I'd move."
But it can be difficult to differentiate, even among schools with the same themes. At Edgewood, "global studies" means
each building is named for a continent — the office, where problems are solved, is the United Nations — and the principal
stamps children's "passports" after each unit in a curriculum conceived as a 180-day world tour. At Fort Myers Middle, the
only sign of the same theme is that 30 percent of the students take Spanish, German or a class emphasizing international
culture.
Joanne Payne visited 11 schools before filling out the application for her twins, who are now first graders at Edison Park.
"When they got in," she said, "I cried."
Few do such exhaustive research. At the parent information center, a bustling hive that costs about $1 million a year to
run, families waiting for their number to appear on the "now serving" display said they had skimmed school Web sites or
relied on reputations.
Mr. and Mrs. McDaniel, who based choices on child-care needs, said they had been able to manage only a drive-by tour
of schools at 9 p.m. Teresa LeMaster, a single mother of four, picked any school without uniforms, because she cannot
stand washing them every night. Jose Moreno, an operations manager for a trucking company, put Hancock Elementary
first because that is where his boss's daughter goes.
"If you've got an ugly-looking school, I don't think she's going to learn anything," Mr. Moreno said of Oceana, 5. "You got a
brand-new school, she's going to get an education."
Such decision making is not exactly the utopia envisioned by the choice evangelists, but some experts say it does not
much matter.
Caroline M. Hoxby, a Harvard economist, said efficient markets depended on just a few well-informed shoppers who
spread the word about the best products. The key, she said, is to have financial consequences — like Lee County's
P.S.U.'s — so weaker ones improve or disappear.
"I don't think school choice is going to get us perfect schools — parents aren't perfect choosers," Ms. Hoxby said. "It's not
that our cars are all perfect, or that everybody is a perfect car consumer. But we do eliminate really bad cars, cars that
nobody would want to buy."
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