In the course of a small study with Tricia Maas about the “backfill” issue in charter high schools (question: What are the schools doing to offer vacant seats to transfer students, and how are they helping the newcomers come up to speed?), I’ve been struck again by the importance of informed choice. Choice is a lot more than a sorting mechanism: it can create the candid and demanding relationships among teachers, parents, and students that are necessary for effective schooling.
This point is what got me interested in chartering in the first place. I thought chartering would allow high schools to define themselves, to stand for something in particular, and to make specific promises to families about how and what their children would learn. I hoped choice via chartering would also strengthen both families’ commitment to the schools they had chosen, and students’ bonds to their schools.
I thought that was extremely important in big cities, where most teachers and students in traditional public schools must find ways of coping with a situation that none of them chose.
Charter high schools like KIPP and Democracy Prep have proven the point. But, as we are seeing in the backfill study, as charter high schools come to serve a representative cross-section of students, choice could come to mean less. Quotas and mandatory assignment of students could short-circuit the choice process.
This doesn’t have to happen, if transfer students and their parents fully understand what choosing one school vs. another means, and schools are still forthright about what levels of effort, attendance, and citizenship lead to success.
Maintaining informed choice will challenge the designers of lottery and placement systems, especially for students looking to transfer in the middle of a school year. But there is no good alternative: we already know that transferring schools is a big risk factor and that students who conclude they won’t succeed in their new school are likely to drop out. A student who is willing to work should be able to lottery-in to any school, however, no youngster should think that teachers need to make commitments but students don’t.
These thoughts led me to the CRPE archives, to an article I wrote that was published in Phi Delta Kappan in the days before everyone was taking about charter schools. The following mercifully brief excerpt lays out the educational advantages of choice:
How Choice Defines a School
Choice can make the difference between schools that are apathetic providers of routine academic courses and schools that are true communities.
Schools of choice need to attract students in order to survive. Though some can rely on a reputation for exclusivity or superior quality, not all schools can credibly claim to be the best. But every school can offer something that gives it an identity—a specific curriculum, social climate, or extracurricular program—that attracts the interest of parents and students. Once a school has established an identity, it must deliver on its promises well enough to keep current students from transferring out, to create brand loyalty among families with several children, and to attract enough new families to fill the entering class each year.
If a school is forced to close because too few students want to attend it, all teachers have to find new jobs, no matter how well they have been teaching their own classes. Teachers, therefore, have strong incentives to keep their own work in line with the school’s mission, to help one another, to identify weaknesses, and to ensure that variations in teacher performance do not harm the school’s ultimate product and reputation.
They are also reluctant to give up on a student, knowing that too many stories of failure can wreck a school’s reputation. Even when the student population changes because of worsening economic conditions or demographic shifts, teachers and administrators in schools of choice have the incentive to maintain the level of student performance.
How Choice Affects Parents
As James Coleman has pointed out, parents who choose a school for their child give the school a grant of parental authority. Though the parents might change their minds if things go especially badly, the child knows that a change of school can upset and inconvenience the parents. Most children, not wanting to risk an upheaval at home, have a strong incentive to succeed in the school their parents have chosen for them.
This grant of parental authority greatly increases the school’s leverage over its students. A student who skips school, does not study, or displays a sullen attitude is risking a confrontation with a parent. School staff members are therefore able to use the parent’s grant of authority to make demands on the student, as did one principal who told a student, “Your mother didn’t send you here to hang out in the rest room. She sent you here to learn.”
Chosen schools also have leverage in dealing with parents. Schools can make demands—related to the reason parents chose the school in the first place—to monitor homework, ensure student attendance, and see to it that the student comes to school fed, rested, and ready to learn.
Because parents have chosen a school and because the school has an incentive to be as helpful as possible, a relationship of trust is created. Any relationship of trust can be misused, but major benefits accrue to all parties. Schools can feel confident in exhorting parents to become more important forces in their children’s lives and to reinforce the school’s opposition to the harmful elements of students’ peer culture.
How Choice Affects Students
Students in schools of choice benefit from teachers’ and principals’ need to create a defined image and reputation, and from the fact that their parents chose the school. They also gain in two other ways, from being in a situation in which they must make commitments and take them seriously; and from observing adults working in a common enterprise in which performance matters and both success and failure have real consequences.
Students may prefer not to attend any school at all, but if they have a preference for the school they attend over other alternative schools, they are susceptible to influence. This is true even if the school preference is based on nonacademic factors. It is especially important if students have knowingly chosen a school that offers a particular academic emphasis or makes special demands on effort and performance. When students make such a commitment, they implicitly affirm that the chosen school is more attractive than the alternatives. Though they may prefer not to do everything the school requires, they know that acting on those impulses could result in their being forced to leave the chosen school and go to another one that is less attractive to them.
When a student knowingly enters a demanding school, the school gains leverage: teachers and administrators can assign homework, take attendance, grade performance, and administer consequences just as they had said they would. Armed with this power, schools can exercise their authority confidently—not in a harsh or morally superior way, but matter-of-factly, as the simple consequence of a well-understood bargain. Teachers can say, “You made an agreement when you came here—now live up to it.”
The adults in schools of choice are not necessarily more virtuous than teachers and administrators elsewhere, but because they are linked in a common enterprise they have incentives to work together and to hold one another accountable. The version of adult life and responsibility modeled in such schools is very different from that evident in schools that lack a clear mission and in which staff members do not have to perform in order to keep their jobs. The message to students is that adults depend on and influence one another and that they care about whether they and others are contributing to the success of a broader enterprise.
There are many teachers and administrators in compulsory attendance schools who offer sterling personal examples. But these individuals are forced to overcome the context in which they work, whereas teachers and administrators in schools of choice are reinforced by everything about their working environment.
Conclusion
As educational environments, schools of choice are profoundly different from compulsory attendance schools. Even when their academic offerings are not much different from those of compulsory attendance schools, schools of choice become places in which parents and teachers are collaborators, bargains among adults and between adults and children are made and kept, effort is rewarded, and actions have consistent consequences. Such environments motivate student effort in the short run. In the longer run, they socialize students into the values and attitudes required in real adult life.
