Seattle’s School Program Sets Off Marketing Frenzy

Elsa Holm is a shopper, but navigating the mall is nothing compared to sorting through the intimidating array of education choices laid out before her, the schools vying for her attention. With her son Julian entering high school next year, Holm feels a little like a Christmas shopper in the middle of a Tickle Me Elmo frenzy. Will Julian win a place in one of the city’s best schools? What if he has to settle for one closer to home, where the curriculum is scarcely more advanced than what he already has studied?

A landmark financing structure in which money follows individual students to the campuses they attend has touched off a marketing frenzy as Seattle public schools compete for enrollment.

“It’s been totally anxiety producing,” said Holm, who won’t be able to close a deal on a school until May. “I like having a choice. But we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. We’re kind of sticking our necks out in making a request, without knowing what the odds are.”

Few other places in the country have gone as far as Seattle in transforming its schools into independent economic enterprises, succeeding or failing in part on the number of parents who elect to enroll their children.

The city’s most desirable schools are turning applicants away. Some of the rest are struggling to attract enough students to keep the doors open. All of them are seeking to carve themselves a market niche, a way of standing out in a competition that could see less successful schools forced to close.

“We’ve created a free market. We’ve put total choice into the system: A parent in this city can send their child to any school in this city,” school board member Don Nielsen said. “So now, the onus is on the principal and the staff to create an educational environment that’s attractive to parents in their neighborhood, or risk going out of business.”

With its 20-year-old desegregation program ending this year, Seattle has thrown open the doors to schools all over the city. Students living in the neighborhood have first choice on open spots, followed by students who have a sibling at the school, those who live in the general area and students whose race would promote desegregation goals at the school.

Schools Launch Marketing Drives

Although many school districts have moved toward more open enrollment plans, Seattle is the first major urban district to adopt a formula that links each school’s budget directly to how many, and what kind, of students it attracts.

Over the last three months, as parents made their annual selections, schools mounted active marketing campaigns--touting their programs and pulling the community in for a look.

Most schools scheduled parent tours and enrollment fairs; Coho Elementary took out recruiting ads in a monthly tabloid on parenting. Chief Sealth High, which is boosting its performance art programs as a way of attracting enrollment, scheduled its choir for performances at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel.

A recruitment committee at John Hay Elementary, a school in Seattle’s tony Queen Anne neighborhood, put together a brochure. “Why choose John Hay for kindergarten?” it asks, before boasting about low class sizes, a $250,000 technology grant and fourth-grade test scores 19% above the district average.

Rainier View Elementary, whose slipping enrollment threatens it with closure if it can’t attract more students, decided to offer two full-day kindergartens this year, a powerful lure for working parents.

In a brochure, the school emphasizes its enhanced reading and math programs for young pupils, its hands-on science program and technology lab.

Others promote special programs for bilingual students, low-test-scoring students and the developmentally disabled: all considered more costly to educate, thus earning the schools that enroll them a financial premium.

Many campuses nationwide have moved away from the old model of the neighborhood school by offering students a broader array of options. Eighteen states even allow students to choose schools outside their own districts.

But Seattle is among the first to follow that up with a budget formula that ties money directly to the students, favors those with the greatest needs and leaves principals free to decide how to spend it.

Los Angeles has moved increasingly toward decentralized schools. But funding still is based largely on standard staffing formulas. David Koch, business manager for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said a move toward competitive enrollment “is a very interesting idea” but might be difficult to implement in Los Angeles because of overcrowding.

“You can’t just opt to go to a school that you might select, because it’s already on a year-round calendar,” he said.

What is happening in Seattle is a confluence of issues ranging from the end of its racial busing program to a move toward greater decentralization and accountability. When John Stanford, a former Army general, took over as superintendent in 1995, he declared that his administrators would not be principals but CEOs, accountable for spending their own budgets and extracting acceptable performance levels out of their students.

Expanding Magnet School Approach

Seattle parents long had a degree of choice through magnet schools designed to help draw high-achievement students to inner-city campuses by offering them programs they couldn’t get closer to home.

The open-choice model seeks to expand on the same idea, pairing it with an innovative formula that pays schools not simply for how many students they have under their roofs but also for what kind of students they are educating.

Special education and bilingual students, children from poor families and students with a history of low test scores all bring more money with them when they enroll in a school, under the “weighted student formula.”

The formula provides each school with a foundation grant for a basic core administrative staff, but then leaves each principal free to decide how to spend the majority of the budget: a full-time librarian or a music teacher? Smaller classes or more computers?

“I used to control a budget of $25,000. Now our site controls a budget of $1.6 million. That’s quite an increase,” said Hay Elementary Principal Joanne Testa-Cross.

Franklin High, which last year had a discretionary budget of $17,000, this year has $10 million.

“Traditionally, funding of schools has been based on the number of adults in the school. It’s called a staffing standard, and it’s done all over the country,” Nielsen said. “We have for decades worried more about the employment of adults than we have the education of children. Now we’re changing that.”

Joseph Olchefske, Stanford’s chief of staff, believes schools should be given the latitude to have big classes or small ones, depending on their own population base and achievement plan. How much money they have depends on how many students they attract.

“I describe it as a free market in kids: Kids are free agents, and they can choose any school they want,” Olchefske said. “In general, I believe that a customer is defined as whoever has the money in their pocket. In the old world, I as an administrator had the money in my pocket, so the principals spent a lot of time with me. Now, the kid is the customer. And the principals don’t call me anymore.”

Bob Carlson, a financial officer for the Council of Great City Schools, based in Washington, D.C., said the weighted student formula, first introduced in Edmonton, Canada, has not been attempted in any other major U.S. school system.

“I think what they’re trying to do is get to the issue of equity. So that the poorer schools in the district are equally served in terms of what’s being provided,” he said.

While south Seattle schools--with large populations of poor and non-English-speaking students--suddenly have the wherewithal to pay for benefits like small classes and beefed-up curriculum, schools in higher-income neighborhoods in the north suddenly find themselves shorted.

Hay Elementary, surrounded by middle-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods, draws students with the lowest earning rate, and for the first time this year stands near the bottom of Seattle schools in per-pupil district funding, at an average of $3,400 a year.

Enrollment Called Key Money-Maker

What to do? Recruit more students, Testa-Cross and a committee of parents and teachers decided. “It forces us to really look at enrollment as our key dollar-generating factor,” Testa-Cross said. “We’ll see what happens next year, whether all our recruitment has paid off.”

The school also began charging tuition for two full-day kindergarten programs, an option that not only boosts enrollment by expanding the kindergarten but also allows each class to be as small as 22 students, a draw for parents.

Parents at schools like Hay, seeing the money that used to go to their kids being siphoned off to follow higher-need students elsewhere, have taken a wait-and-see approach.

Also feeling the squeeze are small specialty schools that may not be able to meet Stanford’s minimum enrollment goals.

At American Indian Heritage School, a small remedial program focused on Native Americans who might otherwise not be in school at all, principal Andy Lawson wonders how he’s supposed to achieve a minimum enrollment of 250 students when most of the higher-achieving Indian students in the district are bound to opt for a school with a college-preparatory curriculum.

“You got kids here on parole, kids from dysfunctional families. Nobody from this school can go to a degree-granting institution. We have no chemistry or physics, no math above geometry,” Lawson said.

The school has always attracted about 120 students. Now, it faces closure if it can’t reach 250.

“I’m running twice the cost per pupil. . . . The superintendent said: ‘I will not allow schools to function that are so expensive.’ So, he’s challenging me to double the enrollment.”

How, Lawson asked Stanford, is he supposed to lure more Native American students when he doesn’t have the curriculum to offer them?

“He said I’m the CEO. I have to go out and raise the $260,000 to provide the five [new teaching] positions I think it’ll take to enhance the curriculum. Well, I think that’s a bit unfair,” he said.

Lawson sent out grant proposals to companies like Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp., but corporations told him they are reluctant to fund what are regarded as the basics in the schools. He went back to Stanford.

“The superintendent said there are up to 450 Indian kids in the streets, and if they were in school, they would get state aid.” Lawson shrugged. “Obviously, those 450 students aren’t knocking down the door here. I’m going to have to be able to go out on the street and tell an Indian kid, come to Indian Heritage School, and we’ll provide for your needs.”

“If I can’t do it,” he sighed, “I guess they could replace me with somebody who can.”

Parents generally celebrate the open-choice option. But some, like Holm, worry that competition for the best schools can leave many having to settle for less. Holm is particularly frustrated with district standards that give priority for enrollment to those students living nearby.

“It would be more fair if we had an equal potential to get into the schools,” she said.

Olchefske takes the criticisms in stride. His version of educational Darwinism still gives parents the deciding vote. “The ultimate proof is, are they giving a party, and are people coming? Are they making an attractive educational program that parents want?”

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The Value of an Education

Under Seattle’s weighted formula, school funding is tied directly to the students, favors those with the greatest needs and leaves principals free to decide how to spend the money. Here is a look at the amount given to schools for each individual student. In the current school year, a funding factor of 1 translates to $2,441.25:

STUDENT FUNDING WEIGHTS

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ELEMENTARY MIDDLE HIGH SCHOOL Basic 1.0 0.87 0.88 Mildly disabled 1.57 1.57 1.57 Severely disabled 8.76 7.70 7.70 Limited English proficiency 1.26 1.41 1.42 Low test scores 1.05 1.05 1.12 Poverty 1.087 1.18 1.109

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Source: Seattle School District