Enhancing the Value of Public Education: Lessons from the Private Sector

Abstract

MUCH OF my career in education has been spent working on behalf of independent schools and nonprofit organizations both in the U.S. and abroad. I have planned, developed, and administered a number of these schools and organizations. Over the years I have raised funds, designed buildings, recruited students and teachers, written curriculum, organized alumni, written promotional materials, established tuition levels, created scholarships, written policy, developed boarding programs, designed student uniforms, and completed dozens of other tasks. I believe that my work in the world of tuition-driven institutions has given me some insights into the care and feeding of successful schools. I further believe that many of the things I have learned from the highly competitive world of private schools can be applied to the world of publicly supported education, and I would like to share some of these insights with Kappan readers. First, let me create the context for this discussion. Over the years, I have discovered one recurring theme among those who work in the development or administration of private schools--how their schools might gain the comparative advantage over the competition. When the competition is defined as other private schools, the strategies devised in pursuit of comparative advantage often lead to an escalating game of one-upsmanship. At Ivy Collegiate Academy in Taiwan, we scoured the promotional materials of the American School of Taichung, calculating how we could top them with a slicker recruitment brochure or how an exotic AP course in environmental science would outclass that school's AP biology course. The anticipated rewards in this competition between private schools are, of course, more students and more tuition dollars. On the other hand, when private schools consider the public schools as competition, the discussion often turns to distancing. In other words, how much distance can we put between our independent school and their public school, considering such items as curriculum, academic excellence, athletics, college placement, faculty, prestige, and the like? It is common practice for private schools to extol their virtues using the public schools as the lowest common denominator. I recall a brainstorming session several years ago in Munich at which those of us building Schloss Wedendorf discussed our many conceptions (and misconceptions) about German public education--poor teaching, deteriorating facilities, irrelevant curriculum, violence in the halls, breeding grounds for ultra-nationalists, and so on. For every negative view of the German public schools aired, we planned ways for Schloss Wedendorf to exemplify the opposite. This distancing strategy employed by the private schools is just one reason why public education is often identified with many of society's ills. Whether or not a public school is providing a superior education to its students, it is still vulnerable to slings and arrows launched by almost anyone with a bone to pick about almost anything. The idea of scapegoating public education is not new, but it does demand that savvy public school officials respond and educate the general public about the strengths and virtues of their institutions. For issues of public image and also for purely economic reasons--a more market-driven economy, a decline in state and federal funding for public education, a push toward privatization, the charter school movement--believe it is time for public school officials to begin studying the private schools in order to learn some proven strategies for image enhancement and institutional advancement. And to assist in this effort, I would now like to share my insights with Kappanreaders about what many independent schools are doing right and what public schools can learn from them. 1. Move beyond event fund-raising into institutional advancement. Public school officials can learn much about development and institutional advancement from their private school counterparts. …