PRESS RELEASE:

Public schools confront the challenge of competition

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09/05/2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

As families, teachers, and administrators get ready for a new school year, some districts are taking on the threat of public and private competitors who would lure their students away.

A new study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington reveals how two markedly different school districts, Milwaukee and Dayton, are confronting the pressures of competition. No Longer the Only Game in Town: Helping Traditional Public Schools Compete discusses what Milwaukee and Dayton are doing to survive in this environment and explores the barriers that impede their efforts to compete.

“Milwaukee, the larger of the two districts, chose to decentralize its system, while Dayton chose to centralize,” explains co-author Kacey Guin. “But both districts focused on the basics: monitoring performance, making connections with parents, providing schooling options that fit different needs, and intervening in chronically low-performing schools.”

The competition for students in these cities is real: 25% of students in Milwaukee and almost 30% in Dayton use public dollars to attend schools outside the traditional system. Unlike districts with growing enrollments that can use choice as a pressure valve, Milwaukee and Dayton have experienced declining enrollments for years.

According to the report: “When Milwaukee and Dayton district officials were asked to offer advice on how other districts could help traditional schools compete, they had a simple message: public schools need to wake up to reality. ‘The district, as a whole,’ said a top Milwaukee official, ‘needs to be more conscious that you’re operating in a market economy.’ A Dayton official concurred: ‘My advice to districts is don’t take your students and enrollment for granted, because what might be a half million dollars [in revenue lost to choice schools] this year could be a million next year and could be two million two years from now.’”

“Whether districts improve under competition, or are brought down by it, depends at least in part on their own response,” says co-author Michael DeArmond.

“Rather than create wholly new pressures requiring new responses,” continues DeArmond, “choice, especially in the broader context of enrollment decline, appears to shine a light on the challenges that districts already face and the need to confront them sooner rather than later.”

The study includes three chapters that offer concrete advice to districts facing similar pressures:

• “Strategies for Competing” discusses reaching out to parents, offering more choices of academic programs, and taking seriously the oversight of schools.
• “Barriers to Helping Schools Compete” looks at how such existing problems as poor information systems, state financing systems, transportation costs, and facilities that have become ill-suited to the contemporary needs of each district can act as impediments to change.
• The study concludes with specific guidelines for what districts and individual schools, state policymakers, and philanthropies can do to help traditional public schools adapt successfully to the emerging competitive environment.

“Of course, our report is most relevant for districts facing school choice pressures,” observes coauthor Christine Campbell, “but really any district struggling with declining enrollment—regardless of cause—can benefit from our research.”

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (www.crpe.org), at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, studies major issues in education reform and governance in order to improve policy and decision-making in K-12 education.