Parents as Consumers

I just finished reading the executive summary of an education report called Tough Choices or Tough Times. The report was written by a blue ribbon panel of education, business, and civic leaders, and it recommends some pretty drastic reforms to public education. While some of the recommended reforms are, like the PLC movement, intra-systemic reforms—that is, reforms that come from within K-12 schools—many of the recommended reforms are extra-systemic, coming primarily from local and state governments.

The report got me thinking about the kinds of extra-systemic reforms that could likely have a significant, positive impact on public schools. Several recent extra-systemic reforms have played a large role in the education landscape, including the standards movement and the accountability/testing movement. Another attempted extra-systemic reform, one with a controversial pedigree, is the charter school and voucher movement. It is this movement in particular that I have been thinking about recently.

The premise underlying the charter school and voucher movement is that of choice and competition. By treating parents as consumers and providing them with multiple school choices, the thinking goes, the pressure on local schools to improve will increase as those local schools compete to attract students.

The same premise holds true for consumer products. Say, for example, that you go to the grocery store and want to buy a can of spaghetti sauce. Because there are multiple companies that make spaghetti sauce, and those companies are all competing with one another to convince you to choose their product, there is an incentive for those companies to offer the best spaghetti sauce available at the best price. As the consumer, you win.

In my opinion, however, there is an important flaw in this line of logic: picking a school is dramatically different from buying spaghetti sauce. When you buy a jar of spaghetti sauce, you have a lot of information to aid you in your decision. You can quickly compare the prices of different jars of sauce. You can also compare the variety of spaghetti sauces—one brand may have chunky tomato with garlic, whereas another has mushrooms and parmesan cheese. You can pick up the jars and check out the ingredients. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, you can buy a singe jar, take it home, try it out, and then make future purchasing decisions based on that sample.

When choosing schools, however, parents are particularly ill-informed consumers. Whereas there are multiple, immediately accessible metrics available for comparing spaghetti sauces—price, brand name, ingredients, taste—there are very few metrics available for comparing schools: the only two that come to mind are test scores and word-of-mouth reputation. And, realistically, those metrics don’t provide much information about your child’s individual educational experience (which is what you are really interested in), but rather an aggregate of experiences.

Additionally, once a child is enrolled in a school, parents receive relatively limited information about the quality of education the child is receiving. While parents may see good grades on a report card every nine weeks, do those grades necessarily reflect the quality of education? How many parents with students in K-12 public schools have a clear understanding of what their children should be learning, how their children are progressing relative to those learning goals, and how their children’s rate of progress compares to that of children in other classrooms or nearby schools?

Here is my point: competition can be a positive thing—competition is the reason we have so many good choices of low-cost spaghetti sauce available—but competition only works as a means for improvement if consumers have good information about the products they purchase. I believe that some level of consumer pressure from parents could serve as a positive extra-systemic force for school improvement. Before this could happen, however, parents would need to become better informed consumers.

How would this work? Parents would first need a clear, concise understanding of what their children should be learning at each grade level in each subject. State standards are a good place to start, but they are typically broad and difficult for non-educators to interpret. A simple list—maybe one or two bullets per quarter per subject—written in simple language is all that would be necessary. NCTM’s new Curricular Focal Points are a step in this direction.

Next, parents would need frequent, easily accessible feedback on how their children were progressing relative to those standards. This would need to go well beyond quarterly report cards; you don’t want to have to wait nine weeks to find out that your spaghetti sauce doesn’t taste right, and you shouldn’t have to wait nine weeks to find out whether or not your child is effectively mastering specific learning objectives. This type of information should be available online and should be easy to understand and interpret.

Finally, parents would need comparative data. Has your child mastered a skill that only 25% of the other students in the class have mastered? Are the majority of students in your child’s class still struggling to master skills that students in other classes at the same grade level have already mastered? By providing comparative data, parents can become well-informed consumers and applaud a teacher’s and school’s successful performance or question below-standard performance. Additionally, parents who are dissatisfied with the quality of education in one school can look at the data from nearby schools when weighing the decision to transfer a child from one school to another.

By providing parents with more specific information about the quality of education that their children are receiving, we would give them tools to help us improve the quality of education that we provide. External, consumer-driven pressure is a powerful force for improvement in any industry, but consumers can only make good choices if they have good information. As we continue to identify ways to improve the quality of K-12 schools, expanding the role that parents play as consumers of public education, and providing better consumer-type information to parents, is clearly one option.