Back in January, the Education Research Alliance (ERA) for New Orleans released a study looking at patterns of parental choice in the highly competitive education marketplace. That report showed that non-academic considerations (bus transportation, sports, afterschool care) are often bigger factors than academic quality when parents choose schools. It also suggested strongly that it was possible for other players in the system (e.g., city officials, charter authorizers, the SEA) to assert the primacy of academic quality by a number of means (e.g., type and style of information available to parents, a central application system). A new report from ERA-New Orleans follows up by examining school-level responses to competition, using interview and survey data from thirty schools of all types across the city.
Nearly all of the surveyed school leaders reported having at least one competitor for students, and most schools reported more than one response to that competition. The most commonly reported response, cited by twenty-five out of thirty schools, was marketing existing school offerings more aggressively. Less common responses to competition included improving academic instruction and making operational changes like budget cuts so that the need to compete for more students (and money) would be less pressing.
These latter two adaptations are typically the ones that market-based education reformers expect to occur in the face of competition, yet just one-third of surveyed leaders said they responded in these ways. That low level of response in this hypercompetitive market should be worrying. While advertising is an obvious first response to competition in any competitive sphere, it won’t make academically weak schools stronger; neither, when everyone is shouting at the same volume, does it make academically strong schools stand out for parents. And we must assume that both strong and weak schools are in that default reaction category.
There are, however, two other important takeaways that may show signs of hope for competition-driven quality: First, the school leaders were more apt to respond to competition strategically when facing more intense competition (either from the number or higher quality of competitors). Second, a central school application system has the potential to be a game-changing tool by making schools more easily comparable along quality lines. In New Orleans, the OneApp system was only in its first year of operation during the period under study here, and the authors suggest that the common information source and application system could be used by outside players (especially charter school authorizers) to ratchet up the competition to a high enough level that schools have incentives to focus on academic improvement, not just marketing themselves to stand out.
Nevertheless, authorizers should take note. If parental choice is not likely to be an effective quality control mechanism, then aggressive oversight is essential.
SOURCE: Huriya Jabbar, “How Do School Leaders Respond to Competition? Evidence From New Orleans,” Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (March 2015).
