James Richardson

When public school administrators and teachers in Washington, D.C., recently laced up their sensible shoes and launched an unprecedented canvassing campaign to goose slumped enrollment rates, the panicked affectation was unmistakable.

Short of horse-drawn carriage makers, few industries have suffered such a pronounced decline in market share than government-run schools in America’s urban centers. Consider the numbers: forty-four percent of the District’s public student population has abandoned conventional neighborhood schools for public charters.

But while the taxpayer-financed campaign was designed to signal fresh responsiveness to parents, the effort merely reinforced the perception that entrenched teachers and labor unions were braving the sweltering heat out of self-interest. No students means no jobs.

Here, where traditional public school enrollment has dipped by 30,000 students in just the last 18 years, administrators believe the key to stemming the exodus of public school refugees lies in diverting precious resources from improving instruction to marketing.

To augment the hard sell being made door-to-door by principals, the school system even retained the pricey data miners who twice won the White House for President Barack Obama.

The hiring of that degree of experience doesn’t come on the cheap — the system spent at least $44,000 for five two-hour huddles with the Obama campaign veterans and for a statistical model to pinpoint students most likely to leave the traditional public education system, according to a review of receipts by the Washington Post — and not without cause.

If enrollment trends remain constant, soon a majority of students in the nation’s capital city will be educated in charter schools. Said another way: roughly half of parents living in the seat of the federal government don’t trust government-run schools to properly educate their children.

But D.C.’s expanding educational marketplace isn’t especially unique. To the west, in California, and north, in New York, working poor communities are rejecting traditional schools whose intractable tenure regime has punished budgets, and in turn students, for decades.

Last month, a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles invalidated California’s tenure law, which shielded even grossly underperforming teachers from termination.

That verdict, which credit agency Moody’s rated a positive development for the state’s cash poor school system, prompted the filing of a parallel lawsuit this month by a group of 11 New York City students arguing the current system had denied them the right to a “sound education” promised them in the state constitution.

Spooked by the possibility that the court may finally eliminate protections for lousy teachers, one New York City public school educator, Franceso Portelos, preemptively retaliated by warning a fellow instructor on Twitter to “look away” if a “disservice” was done to two students who brought the suit.

The city had previously spent in excess of $600,000 in an unsuccessful, two-year attempt to terminate that same teacher’s employment for a host of grievances.

But in the same period that the city was fighting to exercise a measure of the same employment freedom that managers in the private sector wield as a matter of course, the number of students in New York City charter schools spiked by 24%, up to more than 48,000. Teachers like Portelo, girded by tenure safeguards, have fixed that basement, and it won’t be long before multiple stories are built atop it.

Now, the hemorrhaging enrollment rates in government-run schools isn’t the result of a profound pedagogical debate, at least not directly, among America’s parents that teachers in charter schools are necessarily better and more committed than their counterparts at traditional public schools, because they’re not.

Underperforming educators can be found in any institution, public or private, charter or traditional, but only the best among them treat education as a commodity and parents as consumers. The marketplace demands change, and traditional public schools instead remain fixed in decades past — hoping to dupe earnest-but-forgiving parents into believing that their self-interest is on par with concern for students, because it isn’t.