Public Schools Must Listen to Be Competitive

Iowa, Utah, Indiana, and my own state of Arkansas have passed legislation expanding state-funded school choice to include private schools. Every day, I hear from indignant defenders of traditional public schools predicting an educational apocalypse; school-choice supporters often counter by promising educational utopia. 

I have friends in each camp, so for me, school choice isn’t war. Instead, it’s more like dating – you have to do some listening as well as talking.

Back in college, years before meeting my wonderful wife, I was dating a pretty, brilliantly sarcastic young lady named Gina. She eventually dumped me and went back to her old boyfriend Tommy. 

When my friend Dana asked how I was doing, I assured her that I was doing great because “Gina is the one who made a mistake – I was a way better boyfriend than Tommy.”

“Sure you were,” Dana countered, “on everything you value in a boyfriend, but what about Gina?” Dana was right to deflate my ego; a better boyfriend would have listened to Gina to see what she wanted.  

Here’s how school choice resembles dating: in an education market, you have to find out what people want – that would be parents, in this case – and give them at least some of it.  

That’s harder than it sounds because those who choose to work in public schools or serve on school boards have deep emotional ties to the existing system. They love their public schools as they are, not as parents like me wish them to be. System insiders see teachers and school leaders working long hours helping kids, and managing the dances, concerts, and big games that hold school communities together.  

Public school insiders have trouble listening to parents who want something different. Often, insiders see critics (and our kids) as seriously flawed individuals, who, if they just straightened up, flew right, and joined the team – most male principals are former coaches – could learn to love public school. 

Weirdly, both insiders and reformers act as if public schools are so bad that once parents get more choices, they will all jump ship, killing public schools.

That happened in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, Democratic policymakers replaced the city’s traditional public schools with charter schools. Afterward, student attainment and achievement improved dramatically, as Doug Harris shows in Charter School City.

But New Orleans public schools had disorder, lousy academics, and so much corruption that 32 school officials faced indictments – including the administrator who paid a contractor to repair damage from a school fire a month before the fire occurred! Clearly, serving students was not the district’s core mission. 

Fortunately, in my state and most others, no public school district is anywhere near that bad. 

I spent years researching Arizona, where since 1995 it’s been relatively easy to start a charter school, and where private school parents now get state subsidies. Yet over 70% of Arizona students remain in traditional public schools. Most parents like their public schools, and school choice did not make them leave.  

Choice does offer havens for families who need something different, whether it’s small schools, schools with more (or less) discipline, or – what I needed from schools but rarely got –  more challenging academics.  

As my colleague Jonathan Wai and I detail in “Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice, and What Can Be Done About It,” traditional public schools often prioritize the social missions of schooling over academic learning, discouraging rigor on equity grounds. In Arizona and elsewhere, expanding choice to please parents has resulted in more phonics instruction and made rigorous academic options like classical education and advanced mathematics available to more families.

Yet academic rigor is not the whole story. When many parents exit a school district, it signals the system that it’s time to change leaders. The best predictors of charter school market share are surveys measuring whether public school teachers respect their leadership. Arrogant principals and superintendents frustrate both teachers and parents. Some teachers leave for other schools. Some even start new charter schools. 

In reaction to that competition, Arizona school boards fired ineffective leaders and adopted the challenging curricula that many parents wanted. Arizona now leads the nation in academic achievement growth, with all major demographic and income groups learning more in both charter and district schools. 

Competition did not destroy Arizona public schools – it improved them. The same can happen in your state if school leaders listen to parents and dare to compete.