N.O. school leaders admit, in a study, to using selective enrollment practices
13th April 2015 · 0 Comments
By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer
With the majority of public schools in New Orleans now run as businesses, a recent study looked at how school leaders are responding to competition and market pressures.
As one school leader was quoted in the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans’ second published report, “Every kid is money.”
In the survey of 30 (anonymous) school leaders, others put it more delicately, but it is precisely how the funding structure works: more students equals more dollars.
The study, authored by Huriya Jabbar, is titled “How Do School Leaders Respond to Competition? Market-Based Competition and School Leader Strategy.” The surveys were conducted during the 2012-2013 school year and includes Recovery School District (RSD) schools and Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) schools, with eight direct-run schools and 22 charter schools.
With 84 percent of public school students in New Orleans attending a privatized public charter school, the survey points to the city as an ideal environment for a case study on the influence of market pressures on what was a public resource.
Jabbar outlines the argument for the benefit of introducing market pressures into public education: “A basic assumption underlying these policies is that more choice and competition will break up state monopolies to improve the quality and lower the costs of essential government services . . . School choice is thus intended not only to serve families who actively choose; it also introduces market pressures into unresponsive districts and thereby improves education for all students, ‘a tide that lifts all boats.’”
But the study’s findings show that the tide may be higher in some places, with one third of the school leaders surveyed openly admitting to “creaming” and cropping students—taking only the ones they want, and purposefully excluding those they don’t.
It also revealed that in their response to competition, only 10 out of the 30 school leaders surveyed “reported efforts to improve academic performance in order to increase student enrollment, attract parents, or compete with other schools. Many more schools employed marketing strategies.”
The study examines the different types of academic and operational improvements schools employ such as developing “niches” (language immersion, specific neighborhoods, special needs, gifted, extracurricular and career and technical programs, etc.) and financial efficiency.
It also details the varying marketing strategies used by the 30 schools — from fairs and flyers to billboards and bus stop signs.
Jabbar describes the early backdrop for the unprecedented sweeping reform that created New Orleans as the country’s grand experiment in privatization: “The state-run RSD had been established in 2003 to take over failing schools, improve them, and return the[m] to the traditional school board.”
However, while this was the plan sold to the public when, after Hurricane Katrina the majority of schools in the devastated city were handed over to the RSD, it is not what happened in New Orleans.
According to a report by the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives: “Intended as a mechanism for restructuring and reform, the RSD was never meant to be a permanent part of the public school governance landscape in New Orleans. Instead, the RSD was meant to take control of and turn around chronically failing schools for an initial period of five years. After that time, and assuming adequate school improvement, schools would be released from the jurisdiction of the RSD and returned to their local school board.”
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, it has become apparent to critics that for the state, “turn around” also meant “privatize.” Every school in their jurisdiction has either been closed or turned over to a charter operator. Only one charter school has elected to return to the OPSB (though others have tried, only to be vetoed by their unelected boards). And the OPSB has sued the state for the legal authority to force the schools to return.
With the privatization experiment far from over, Jabbar’s study provides insight into how, in the new market-driven landscape, school leaders are approaching the job of being both educators and businessmen/women.
While there are certain rules for charter operators set by the state, and now a centralized enrollment process (excluding many of the highest performing schools), the report revealed that a number of leaders voluntarily admitted that they are not following the rules.
The ERA report found that of the 30, eight schools who called themselves “open enrollment” engaged in some sort of selection processes, even though they are not permitted to do so.
The study found that some schools avoided recruiting students as a form of selection. One principal surveyed described the “double-edged sword” of wanting more money, but not wanting certain students:
“And now for us that battle is unique because we know the more we advertise and push the fact that we have opening, the more less-capable students we get. So yeah, I’m about 100 kids below what we were targeting, but it’s a double-edged sword. Do I want a hundred kids in the building who aren’t in school?”
Jabbar describes a similar pattern found in Detroit, where some schools “preferred to remain empty or recruit students from the suburbs rather than open seats to local families.”
Other forms of selection included the “It’s who you know” law of the land. According to the study: “Schools also had informal contact with affluent parents seeking placement. In some cases, prominent leaders in the city facilitated such relationships.”
The study then quotes a school board member, who described checking with other school leaders to find out about available seats for an acquaintance: “It’s impractical and as crazy as it sounds, there is no list. Part of it is that nobody wants to give up that information in a real-time format and part of it is that everybody thinks that they’re going to get screwed somehow.”
Jabbar writes: “The informal assignment of students, in which schools kept information on empty seats to themselves, gave schools much more control over which students to accept and served as a form of selection.”
The study examines whether the schools perceive themselves as experiencing low, moderate, or high competition, and how schools view each other. The most popular schools were considered “high status.”
The study found that “high-status schools were more likely to engage in students selection. Schools that selectively enroll students, by design or illicitly, may be viewed as competitors more often because other principals believe that selective schools recruit away strong students from other schools and send back lower-performing students. For example, one principal at a low-status school believed that the reason she received students mid-year, just before testing, when she ‘had no opportunity to even touch the child,’ was because other schools were ‘kicking out children who have been problems all year long.’”
Other methods of selection included “invite-only open houses,” interviews with families, and not providing transportation. A principal at an open enrollment school said that their school was “not for everyone.”
Jabbar writes: “ . . . some schools in New Orleans preferred to remain under-enrolled than to attract students who might hurt their test scores. The fact that school leaders shared these practices with me suggests that they did not see them as problematic. Rather, they viewed these practices as just a part of their effort to create a coherent school culture or as a necessity for survival in a market-based environment.”
The study found that the larger charter networks were perceived to have a competitive advantage over the smaller networks or stand alone schools, and typically had larger budgets for “professional marketing and branding campaigns.” One principal lamented about the equability of facility assignments (dictated by the RSD) — saying that is was difficult to be as competitive without a nicer, newer building.
While the ERA report is revealing, there is much research to do and questions to be answered regarding the unintended consequences of bringing the profit-driven forces of the marketplace into the education of children.
There’s the question of “How many kids is this system not serving — thus — on any given day, how many kids are simply not in school?”
While the pre-Katrina school board was thought to be notoriously corrupt, the state-run agency of today has been reported to be rife with secrecy, nepotism and dictator-like power and decision-making — traits well documented in the blogosphere.
The ERA reports confirms that at least in some cases, social and political connections are beneficial in school assignments.
In his study, Jabbar wrote that “informal assignments of students occurred via school leaders’ social networks.”
The study also concludes that practices such as “preventing students who might be struggling from enrolling,” illegally enrolling students outside of the OneApp system, and not reporting available seats “actually limit parents’ choices.” Jabbar continues: “Even if schools in New Orleans on average are improving, there are concerns that not all students have equal access to better schools.”
In the free market, Jabbar suggests, “a more significant role for a central authority may be warranted.”
He warns: “Without some process to manage the current responses to competition like student selection and exclusion, New Orleans could end up with a less equitable school system.”
This article originally published in the April 13, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
