The Choice Challenge

About a month ago I ran across a podcast called Good on Paper, hosted by Jerusalem Demsas, a reporter for The Atlantic. This podcast episode was titled “A Remarkable School-Choice Experiment: Are Principals the Key to Improving Schools?” The introduction begins this way:

“In 2012, Los Angeles Unified School District set up an experiment. It offered parents in some parts of the city a new option: Instead of automatically sending their middle schoolers to their neighborhood high school, parents could instead pick between a few high schools in their area [Zones of Choice].”

“School choice is usually about providing parents an option outside the traditional public-school system. From 2010 to 2021, public charter-school enrollment in the U.S. more than doubled, even as states across the country have made it easier for parents to use public funding for homeschooling and private-school options.”

“But Los Angeles did something different. It recognized the growing appetite for choice and wondered whether the normal public-school system could help satisfy it. The experiment was the sort ripe for an economics paper and, thankfully, someone took notice. Economist Christopher Campos’s paper reveals than when public high schools were forced to compete for enrollment, achievement gaps narrowed, and college enrollment took off.”

“In today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Campos about why students improved in this new system, and we grapple with tough questions about school segregation, the no-excuses model, and the role of principals in student outcomes.”

Here’s an excerpt of Demsas’s interview with Campos:

JD: “…I could imagine a world in which these zones of choice pop up, but it’s not like Los Angeles city schools was saying, We’re going to take away your funding if you’re on the bottom end of people’s prioritization.  And I would imagine, even before Zones of Choice, there were a lot of people who were working in schools who cared a lot about making the kids better off.”

“So what was the push, incentive to actually make them change any processes inside the school? Why would zones of choice actually do that?”

CC: “Right. That’s a great question. And sometimes people ask the same question in a different way, and they ask me, Are principals or teachers lazy if you don’t have the school-choice programs? The answer to that is no. I’ve never talked to a principal whom I doubted cared about the welfare of their students. They’re all fantastic and deal with a host of different problems. And in many ways, they’re superheroes.”

“And so I can talk about a scenario where a well-meaning principal would naturally respond to this policy, and it wouldn’t really imply that they didn’t care before the policy, right? So in the status quo, with neighborhood-based assignment, principals have a somewhat fixed set of students they educate every year because neighborhoods determine enrollment flows.”

“In the Zones of Choice area, it’s not obvious what kids a principal is going to receive, because some kids may opt to go to a different school that is not their neighborhood school now that we’ve expanded the attendance-zone boundary. If we introduce the fact that, although LAUSD does not sue a student-centered funding formula – as you pointed out – school-funding levels are still positively associated with enrollment. Therefore, any loss of enrollment could lead to a loss of a teacher, a counselor, a nurse, etcetera. And in this scenario, any well-meaning principal is going to naturally care about the enrollment because it could potentially affect the number of teachers the school has, the counselors, nurses, and so they’re going to naturally care about having higher enrollment.”

…

JD: “To me, though, that incentive to prevent low enrollment is existing whether or not you have the system or not, right? Like, in a school system that doesn’t do zones of choice and just has neighborhood schools, people will move away from really, really bad schools.”

“Like, it’s obviously harder and it’s over longer timelines. People don’t just move every year. But you know you do see declining enrollment and declining funding and, you know, losing teachers and guidance counselors in schools that are doing very, very poorly. So, is it that they’re just worried about losing enrollment, or is it that now they’re actually kind of being ranked in a very obvious way?”

CC: “So career concerns are probably definitely a thing that principals are thinking of. I can hypothesize here most, but if you’ve just followed the trajectory of many school district administrators, you’ll see that many start off as teachers, they become assistant principals, and then at some point get promoted and end up in some administrative position in the school district.”

“And so if they do have career concerns, obviously being the highest-performing principal in the zone of choice is probably something you’re going to embellish on your resume or make sure it’s very salient on your resume. And so one you introduce these additional career concerns, it’s an additional incentive principals may have to really perform really well once you create these zones-of-choice markets – in comparison to the status quo, where it’s just neighborhood-based assignment.”

JD: “It’s funny, though, because there’s a pretty big effect size you’re finding, and obviously I know that you’re saying it’s hard to figure out exactly what the exact mechanisms are happening here are. But if it is that principals are not changing school policy as a result of this concern about declining enrollment, that means principals have impact – their individual person has, and I guess maybe it’s also other administrators. But a handful of people at a school can vastly change the outcomes without changing funding, without changing who the teachers are, without changing who the students are.”

…

But not really.

When I worked in a large urban Texas school district as a region superintendent, we tried our own version of Zones of Choice. Kids trapped in low-performing schools were allowed to choose another school that performed better when it came to safety and security, academic excellence, and achieving a positive school climate.

The problem was there weren’t enough seats in the higher performing schools for those kids coming from the sucky schools. And, unless the high-performing school had years of top achievement under their belts, the pressure of taking on young learners from low-performing schools usually caused the high-performing school to decline when it came to developing strong readers, writers, and problem-solvers.

Also, in the end, there just wasn’t enough talented principals to make our version of “zones of choice” successful over the long term. Those principals who took on young learners from other low-performing schools, either were promoted within the district or moved to other districts for better jobs. The lack of talented principals let to a lack of talented teachers, counselors, para-professionals – the list goes on and on.

So this idea that a charismatic principal can continue making a good school good, even though that school inherits a group of high-need learners, is suspect at best. Jerusalem Demsas’s quote – “But a handful of people at a school can vastly change the outcomes without changing funding, without changing who the teachers are, without changing who the students are” just isn’t right, based on my experience.

Til tomorrow. SVB