THE WORK AHEAD

Computer, and Michael Armstrong, CEO of AT&T, operated in a market where revenues depended hardly at all on attracting or losing customers? What if competition exerted minimal pressure and if market threats could often be trumped by successful efforts to glean government subsidies? What if they had only sparse information on the performance of personnel and could not fire or demote most employees? What if they could count on potential competitors’ being deterred or eliminated by political and legal forces? This should all sound familiar to education reformers because these are the market conditions faced by the administrators running urban schools today. For instance, since vouchers were introduced in Milwaukee in 1990, the school district’s enrollment, total funding, and per-pupil funding have all grown steadily. From 1990 to 2001, enrollment climbed from slightly under 93,000 students to more than 98,000 (see Figure 1). Total spending by the district grew from just over $580 million in 1990–91 to more than $990 million during the 2000–01 school year. In other words, since vouchers and charter schools came to Milwaukee, the district’s budget has risen by some 70 percent while its enrollment has grown by only 5 percent. Per-pupil spending has grown from about $6,200 to $9,700. A similar pattern prevailed in Cleveland, where vouchers were introduced during the 1995–96 school year. Enrollment in the Cleveland school district grew from about 73,000 in 1994–95 to slightly more than 78,000 in 2000–01. Per-pupil spending grew from slightly more than $6,000 to more than $8,000. These conditions make competition more of a relief than a threat. Some educators in Milwaukee and Cleveland have even come to describe their cities’ voucher programs as a “safety valve” that helped to ease the pressure of overcrowding. This puts the lie to the oft-repeated claim of critics like National Education Association president Bob Chase that school choice is “siphoning money from the communities and public schools that need it the most.” Competition in most urban districts is like a gnat to a bull, there but barely noticed. Nevertheless, in states like Arizona or Michigan, where charter schools are multiplying quickly, real changes in policy and behavior have emerged. And advocates of competition and school choice have been eager to parse every change for evidence that public school districts are responding to competitive threats and that markets are “working.”Certainly some districts have adopted potentially valuable policies, such as providing all-day kindergarten, adding an extra year of preschool, or opening themed schools that meet the demands of particular groups and families. However, observers rarely bother to note that such efforts tend to be superimposed on the existing dysfunctionalities. There is little evidence that districts are restructuring or are being pushed by market pressures to revisit their “business model.” Moreover, in most cases, districts’ responses have primarily taken the form of changes in marketing and outreach. In Arizona, Mesa Unified has tried advertising in local movie theaters and has conducted customer-service training for employees. The Flagstaff district now distributes leaflets comparing its expenditures and outcomes with those of neighboring districts. Milwaukee launched a campaign called “High Standards Start Here,”replete with banners for each school, and worked hard to promote former superintendent Alan Brown’s 1999 guarantee that all Milwaukee students would be able to read by the end of 2nd grade. While much of this is welcome—anything that prompts a public school district to increase its attention to customer service clearly has value—these changes may in fact make the schools less productive. After all, they take money from the schools and put it into ad campaigns that do nothing to change the schools themselves.Advocates of choice have been too quick to characterize the add-ons, rhetoric, and ad campaigns as the leading edge of a business-like, performanceThe Work Ahead