Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 29, 2002
This is what we have come to in Pinellas County public schools: We are turning our school administrators into sales and marketing specialists.
Even our education vocabulary now is littered with terms typically reserved for private commerce: "marketing strategy," "advertising slogans," "PowerPoint presentation," "business partners," "direct mail."
Is learning in the forefront anymore?
A new era has begun in Pinellas County as the school district ends 30 years of pupil assignment based on a court-supervised desegregation plan and opens the doors to parents to choose, within certain limits, where their children will go to school.
Under school choice, parents must learn about the schools within a wide attendance area and fill out paperwork to declare their preferred schools. The school district will assign children to one of the schools on the preferred list. Parents who don't do their homework and miss the deadlines will lose the opportunity to choose -- the school district will assign those children wherever space is left.
School choice also burdens school principals and faculties, because if they want to attract the "good" students and if they don't want to be one of the schools that no one chooses they must figure out a way to attract customers.
This fall, as Pinellas parents have begun declaring their school choices for next year, school administrators have scrambled to pump up their product (their school) and advertise it in the educational marketplace. The end result could be read in a recent mailing to parents in which schools touted their attractors to shoppers (parents). To cite a few:
-- "Boca Ciega is proud to offer the following attractor programs: Army Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, aviation and aerospace, computer graphics, popular music, show business, student athletic trainer, technology and robotics."
-- "John F. Kennedy Middle School Journey For Knowledge, Maturity and Success . . . is a full-service school with an emphasis on community partnerships and family involvement."
-- "Riviera Middle School offers your child a comprehensive educational opportunity to include a fundamental-type strand, advanced academic classes at all levels and an acclaimed band program."
-- "Largo High School is "High School the Way It Should Be . . .' "
-- "Parents say, "Osceola High School is the best kept secret in Pinellas County.' "
-- "By focusing on technology and mathematics, Pinellas Park Elementary is able to meet the needs of all its students, because this is a school where "Every Student Counts.' "
-- "Orange Grove Elementary is a small neighborhood school tucked away from the noise of traffic and city life."
Schools that didn't have an EXCITING NEW PROGRAM or a FABULOUS OPPORTUNITY to advertise did the best they could with phrases like, "We value a safe school atmosphere," and "Our school has many fine attributes," and "We care. We all care! You'll like it here!"
But these "attractor statements" are not the only advertising schools are doing. They are creating brochures to hand out to parents. They are appealing to passing motorists with marquee messages, designing PowerPoint presentations to take to community groups and considering radio spots. They are opening their doors at night for "discovery tours" for parents who are shopping for schools.
The school district now has a choice marketing coordinator, Andrea Zahn. And it recently brought in Ken Banks, who has done marketing for Circuit City and the Eckerd Corp., to share his ideas on marketing schools with more than 100 school principals. He told them to define their school's identity, streamline their message and aggressively peddle their attributes -- the same sort of advice that would be given to private businesses. He suggested schools consider advertising on buses, in newspapers and on the radio.
How they are supposed to do that is anybody's guess, since schools have not been given any money for advertising.
Some people who are watching the transformation of our county schools into marketing machines will cheer the development, believing that the schools will be improved by being forced to compete in an open marketplace. Indeed, in one school district in North Carolina that is a year ahead of Pinellas in its transition from court-ordered busing to choice, officials say that forcing schools to think about their strengths and advertise them has led to new pride and enthusiasm among faculties.
But marketing and advertising won't provide Pinellas schools with more textbooks and computers, put fewer students in each classroom, fund a needed additional class period each day, support cash-starved music and art programs, reinstate summer school, raise test scores or improve the quality of teaching. Those are the things that our schools need most.
Does it even make sense for schools so strapped for cash that they must ration copier paper to be dreaming about adding engineering programs, sending foreign language students to Europe or outfitting a student television studio?
Parents might be surprised to learn that this talk about special "attractors" is, in some schools, just that -- talk. The exciting new programs being advertised at some schools don't yet exist because there is no money for them. Teachers are writing grant requests and principals are desperately seeking business "partners" to donate money to cover the costs of the attractors. These schools are like the shopper who goes to the supermarket with a long grocery list, but can't put anything in the cart because he has no money to pay the bill. It remains to be seen whether some of these schools will ever be able to scrape together enough cash to activate the attractors they have advertised.
In other schools, the advertised attractors just put a new face on programs the school has had for years, or they tout educational components that every school has or should have, such as field trips, an "emphasis on reading and writing," or a hands-on science lesson every week.
Without more money for implementation, these attractors and slogans and tours and ads are just so much window dressing. And the time spent trying to work up marketing plans and solicit donations is a distraction from what ought to be the primary mission in our schools: teaching students the basics they need to go to college or enter the job market.
On the other hand, perhaps Pinellas schools will succeed at developing and implementing useful, inspiring attractors -- attractors so exciting that parents will put their children on buses and send them half way across the county for the experience. Then will the successful attractor programs, which -- let's face it -- are marketing tools, be allowed to supplant or weaken traditional, and very important, study of less glamorous basics like history, grammar and literature?
Choice is indeed a revolution. It not only transforms the method of student assignment, but has the potential to change the mission of schools and their administrators. Is that the choice we wanted?