High Pressure Reform: Examining Urban Schools’Response to Multiple School Choice Policies

Jennifer Jellison Holme • Rian Carkhum •

Virginia Snodgrass Rangel

Published online: 13 November 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Abstract Over the past several decades, policymakers have sought to address the

problem of school failure by exposing traditional public schools to competitive

market forces. In this analysis, we examine how two traditional public schools in a

‘‘high pressure/high choice’’ urban school cluster in Texas responded to a number of

overlapping choice policies that have caused them to lose significant numbers of

students. We explore how these two traditional public schools made sense of, and

formulated a response to, their multiple ‘‘competitors,’’ how they balanced market

pressures and the other external (accountability) pressures that they faced. In this

analysis, we illustrate how competition does not always lead to significant or pro-

ductive change in low performing schools.

Keywords School choice � Competition � Urban schools � Charter schools �Open enrollment

Introduction

Over the past several decades, policymakers have sought to address the problem of

school failure by exposing traditional public schools to competitive market forces.

As a result, a wide array of market-based reforms have been adopted by state

J. J. Holme (&) � R. Carkhum

Educational Policy and Planning Program, Department of Educational Administration, The College

of Education, The University of Texas at Austin, 1912 Speedway D5400, Austin, TX 78712-1604,

USA

e-mail: jholme@austin.utexas.edu

V. S. Rangel

Rice University, Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship, 6100 Main Street, MS 112, Houston,

TX 77005, USA

e-mail: vsr@rice.edu

123

Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196

DOI 10.1007/s11256-012-0216-3

legislatures, including charter school laws (in 40 states and the District of

Columbia), inter-district open enrollment laws (in 37 states), tuition tax credit laws

(in 6 states) and school voucher laws (4 in urban districts and the District of

Columbia, and 3 state-wide) (Center on Education Policy 2011; NCES 2011;

Welner 2008) The federal government also evidenced its faith in market models of

reform with the adoption of NCLB in 2001, which requires failing schools to offer

choice to students, and with Race to the Top, which requires states to lift the cap on

the number of charter schools.

Competition in education is intended to spur improvement in traditional public

schools by pressuring them to increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation

(Lubienski 2005). Yet to date, despite the significant expansion of choice policies,

relatively few researchers in the US have studied how traditional public schools

respond organizationally to the pressures of competition (Hess et al. 2001). This

limited body of work, furthermore, has primarily examined how schools or districts

have responded to a single type of choice policy, such as charter schools, vouchers,

or inter-district choice (for an exception, see Arsen et al. 1999).

In some contexts, however, schools are often subject to competition from a

number of different types of school choice policies at the same time. This is

particularly true in urban districts, where charter schools are disproportionately

likely to be located (Budin and Zimmer 2005; Hess 2002; Stoddard and Corcoran

2006) as are voucher programs (Hess 2002; Howell et al. 2006; Moe 2001). Urban

districts also have a disproportionate concentration of schools in ‘‘improvement

status,’’ which are required to offer choice under NCLB (Gill et al. 2008).

While ‘‘threat’’ of competition can be significantly higher for urban public

schools, few researchers have studied how schools in those contexts respond as

organizations to such multi-directional pressures. In this analysis, we examine how

two traditional public schools in a ‘‘high pressure/high choice’’ urban school cluster

in Texas responded to a number of overlapping choice policies that have caused

them to lose significant numbers of students. We explore how these two traditional

public schools made sense of, and formulated a response to, their multiple

‘‘competitors,’’ how they balanced market pressures and the other external

(accountability) pressures that they faced. In this analysis, we illustrate how

competition does not always lead to significant or productive change in low

performing schools.

Competition and Organizational Change: Theory and Research

School choice policies are designed to accomplish a number of closely inter-related

goals. By exposing schools to competition, choice is intended to encourage schools

to become more efficient (by increasing the work effort of teachers and improving

allocation of resources); more responsive (by improving internal lines of commu-

nication, and improving alignment between organizational goals and preferences of

parents) (Belfield and Levin 2002; Lauen 2008; Loeb and McEwan 2006); and more

innovative (by improving and offering new curricula and instructional strategies)

(Lubienski 2005; 2008).

168 Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196

123

Most of the existing research on school response to competition has sought to

evaluate the first of these goals by examining whether competition leads to

improvements in the efficiency of traditional public schools. In most of these

studies, the assessment of whether or not traditional public schools changed in

productive ways in response to the threat of competition has been often deduced or

inferred from test score outcomes. The results of this work, which has primarily

focused on the response of schools to one type of choice policy, have been mixed:

while some researchers that have examined how traditional public schools respond

to competition from charter schools have found test score gains (Hoxby 2003),

others have found no effects (Bettinger 2005; Budin and Zimmer 2005), while still

others have found negative effects (Ni 2009). The same is true of research on

vouchers: several studies have found gains in achievement in traditional public

schools exposed to competition from vouchers (Hoxby 2003; Chakrabarti 2008) and

others have found no effects (Brasington 2007). The research on the performance of

public schools exposed to competition from private schools has found similar

results: some evidence of improvements (Dee 1998) with others showing no effects

(Jespen 2002). Finally, some studies of open enrollment have found no gains

(Cullen et al. 2005) while others have found improvements (Bradley et al. 2001).

A relatively smaller number of studies have asked whether traditional public

schools become more responsive organizations when exposed to the threat of

competition (i.e. by improving external lines of communication, or increasing the

alignment of the organization with parental preferences.) The small body of work on

this issue, as with the productivity/efficiency research, has tended to focus on the

response of schools to a single type of school choice policy. The evidence from both

the US and other countries (primarily New Zealand and the United Kingdom) has

found little evidence of increased responsiveness (Budin and Zimmer 2005; Ladd

and Fiske 2003). Several studies in the UK and the US have found that, for example,

instead of engaging more effectively with parents, schools focus on superficial

responses such as marketing and public relations (Gewirtz et al. 1995; Lubienski

2005).

Even less empirical attention has been devoted to examining whether levels of

innovation in traditional schools (i.e. change in instructional practices, curriculum,

or schooling structures) increase in response to competitive pressures from choice.

While research has often compared levels of innovation between schools of choice,

such as charter schools or voucher schools, and traditional public schools (Lubienski

2005, 2008) few have examined whether traditional schools become more

innovative in response to (or as a result of) competition. The few studies that

have examined the issue of innovation have examined the effect of charter schools

on the behavior of traditional public schools (see Budin and Zimmer 2005; Wells

et al. 1998). These studies found no transfer of innovation between schools, and no

increase in innovation in traditional public schools in response to competition.

Taken together, then, the existing body of work on school choice has illustrated

that traditional public schools do not always respond in expected ways to the

pressure of competition. Yet few studies, to date, have examined how traditional

public schools respond when they are threatened with losing students to more than

one type of choice policy. This type of competition could be expected to

Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196 169

123

significantly increase the intensity of pressure on traditional public schools.

Understanding whether competitive pressure will prompt schools in such contexts—

the very schools most of concern to reformers—to improve requires understanding

how schools respond to their unique, and often intense, competitive dynamics.

Understanding Response to Competitive Pressures

In order to understand how a high degree of competitive pressure affects the

behavior of low performing urban public schools, we turned to literature in the field

of organizational behavior and management. This body of research has identified

three key drivers of competitive response, or ‘‘organizational antecedents of

competitive behavior’’ (Lamberg et al. 2009, p. 4): awareness, motivation, and

capability (or A-M-C) (see also Chen 1996; Chen et al. 2007; Lamberg et al. 2009;

Williams 2007). We discuss each below, in turn.

Awareness

In order to respond to competition, this literature has found that organizations must

be aware of its competitors or ‘‘rivals’’ (Chen et al. 2007) Awareness, which is the

‘‘precursor to any strategic action’’ (Williams 2007, p. 141), consists of is the degree

to which an organization is ‘‘cognizant’’ of the relationship between itself and the

firm(s) with which it is competing for clients (Chen et al. 2007, p. 104). Awareness

therefore entails an assessment of competitors’ market positions (Williams 2007);

such an assessment depends upon the ability of organizational leaders to gather and

interpret information about both competitors and the overall market within which

they are operating (Williams 2007).

Motivation

The organizational management literature has found that in order to respond to

competitive pressure, organizations must also have motivation to act and respond

(Lamberg et al. 2009). Motivation, like awareness, rests in large part on perceptions

of key actors within an organization (Chen et al. 2007). As Chen et al. (2007) note,

the ‘‘level of competitive apprehension or anticipation [organizational leaders] feel

as they observe, filter, and act on competitive ‘information’ inform[s] the way a firm

acts (strategically or competitively) on those perceptions’’ (pp. 103–104). Thus, the

way in which (and the extent to which) organizations are motivated to respond to

competitor(s) is dependent in large part upon their perception of competitive threat

or tension. This is particularly true in cases where organizations have experienced

significant decreases in ‘‘market share,’’ and have entered into a state of

organizational decline– defined by Mone et al. (1998) to be a ‘‘measurable threat

to an organization’s viability’’ (Mone et al. 1998, p. 117).

Mone et al. (1998) have differentiated between two key perceptual dimensions

that affect motivation to act in response to such a threat: the first is stability (leaders’

perceptions about the degree of permanence of the cause of the threat) and the

170 Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196

123

second is controllability (leaders’ perceptions about the degree to which organi-

zation has control over the threat) (Mone et al. 1998). When, for example, the threat

is attributed to permanent or controllable causes, leaders are more likely to believe

that action is more urgent and possible, leading to greater potential for action (Mone

et al. 1998). Research suggests that under such conditions organizations are likely to

engage in external behaviors, by changing ‘‘products, markets, and relations with

outsiders’’ and the way the organization ‘‘interacts with clients, customers, and

parent organizations’’ (Chattopadhyay et al. 2001). By contrast, if the threat is seen

as temporary or uncontrollable, action is less likely because ‘‘the necessity and even

the possibility of proactive response are unclear’’ (Mone et al. 1998, p. 120). In such

circumstances, what action is taken is more likely to be internally directed as leaders

may ‘‘retreat to the status quo or make only incremental changes’’ within the

organization (Chattopadhyay et al. 2001; Mone et al. 1998, p. 126). One possible

response to perceived lack of control by organizations is a retreat into ‘‘threat

rigidity’’ mode in which the organization leans towards a conservative response and

falls back on known routines (Chattopadhyay et al. 2001; Mone et al. 1998; Olsen

and Sexton 2009).

Capability and Organizational Social Capital

In addition to awareness and motivation, a third driver of organizational response is

the capability of the organization to respond to change (Chen et al. 2007; Lamberg

et al. 2009). Capability is defined as ‘‘the operational ability of a firm to challenge a

given rival in the marketplace’’ and consists of an organization’s ‘‘resource-

deployment ability.’’ (Chen et al. 2007, p. 105).

The capability for change, or ability to learn as an organization, is dependent

upon an organization’s social capital, which is according to Leana and Van Buren

(1999), a feature of organizations that ‘‘[reflects] the character of social relations’’

within organizations (p. 538). It is an organizational resource that facilitates

cooperation, increases efficiency, and fosters knowledge transfer among individuals

within an organization, thereby increasing the potential for organizational learning

and, ultimately, improved performance (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998; Smylie and

Evans 2006). It consists of four core dimensions: structural (ties between actors),

relational (affective relationships), cognitive (shared representations and meanings),

and intellectual (individual and collective capabilities of an organization). Each of

these dimensions of social capital affects organizational learning, and influences an

organization’s ability to respond to competitive pressures (Offstein and Gnyawali

2006).

Historical Feedback and Response

Organizational response to competitive market pressures is dependent not only on

awareness, motivation, and capability, but also the history of prior actions on the

part of the organization and rivals in the marketplace. Past competitive actions, as

Lamberg et al. (2009) note, create changes in the market that then influence current

(and future) competitive response:

Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196 171

123

Both awareness and capability to ‘do something’ can be seen as results of

historical interaction processes between the focal firm and the market (Nelson

and Winter 1982) this is the mechanism of market feedback. First, each action

increases dynamism in the market, potentially leading to changes in

competitive positions. Second, past competitive actions affect the future

repertoire of competitive actions and the related capabilities at the level of the

firm. These two processes intertwine in the managerial cognitions which

constitute the focus of awareness and motivation of top-manage-

ment….Accordingly, actions constantly change the firm: ‘‘its structure andstrategy, and its resources and capabilities’’ (pg. 51, emph. added.)

This perspective acknowledges that the history of competitive actions (or non-

competitive actions) on the part of both an organization and its rival will influence

the organization’s motivation and capability of responding.

Understanding Response to Multiple Choice Policies

In sum, the organizational behavior literature suggests that a number of factors

(awareness, motivation, capability, and prior history) can be expected to shape the

response of schools to the competitive pressures of multiple school choice policies.

Yet while the organizational behavior literature has yielded important insights into

competitive behavior by organizations, as a whole that body of literature has not

wrestled with the ways in which organizations respond to multiple ‘‘competitors,’’

instead focusing primarily on pair-wise analyses of firms and their rivals (Williams

2007). Yet it is reasonable to expect that—particularly in the case of school

choice—different types of competitors may put different types of pressures on an

organization, and may generate a different competitive responses. Charter schools,

for example, are schools that are often created around a particular theme and are

often freed from curricular, labor, and other administrative constraints (Lubienski

2008); as such, they are more likely to put relatively more pressure on the domains

of responsiveness and innovation (Lubienski 2008). NCLB choice, however, is

closely linked to standards and accountability: choice is offered to parents when

their local school fails to meet standards-based performance benchmarks. The

pressure on schools therefore becomes centered around efficiency and (to a lesser

extent) responsiveness (Lauen 2008). There is, however, little knowledge within

either the management or the educational literature regarding how organizations

(such as schools) wrestle with often multiple competitive pressures at the same time.

We seek to explore these dynamics through our case studies as detailed below.

Methods and Data Sources

The goal of this study was to understand how two urban public high schools

responded to the pressure of multiple, overlapping choice policies that caused

significant losses of students. We therefore examined how leaders and teachers

conceptualized the competitive threat(s) they were facing, formulated response

172 Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196

123

strategies, and engaged in response. We also examined how leaders and teachers

reconciled the pressure to respond to the pressure of choice against other pressures/

threats facing the organization (i.e. accountability pressures).

We employed qualitative case study methodology, an approach that facilitates an

examination of the relationship between a policy and the context in which it is

implemented. We selected two high schools within in one urban school district in

Texas for in-depth study. We focused on high schools because they tend to

experience a high level of school choice activity by students (NCES 2010). Our case

study schools were identified based upon our own analysis of school district

demographic and enrollment data, as well as early conversations with school district

administrators, who suggested we select these two schools for our study, as they

were the schools facing the most pressure of the high schools in the district.

Both schools experienced significant enrollment declines in a relatively short

period of time due in large part to the availability and ease of school choice

transfers. At the time we were collecting data (fall 2010 through spring 2011),

students were able to ‘‘choice out’’ of the two schools through multiple choice

policies: students were able to attend one of many charter schools in the area; or

enroll in the district’s ‘‘diversity choice’’ program (a majority to minority transfer

plan); enroll in magnet school choice; or elect to transfer through intra-district open

enrollment (in which students are able to transfer to any school with space). Because

the two schools were identified as ‘‘in need of improvement’’ under NCLB, students

in the schools were also entitled to transfer to a higher provided school within the

district with transportation provided.

In each of our two case study high schools, we conducted in-depth interviews with

campus leaders, as well as counselors and teachers. We conducted a total of eight

interviews at each school, as well as two interviews at the district level.1 During the

interviews, which were semi-structured, respondents reflected on the ways in which

school choice affected their particular school, and how they saw their school

responding to the pressures of choice. All interviews were digitally recorded and fully

transcribed, and then coded for within and then cross-case themes. Themes were

clustered in multiple ways: by topic area, and by role within the organization as

appropriate (i.e. administrator, counselor, teacher). Findings were checked and

rechecked for both confirming and disconfirming evidence (Bogdan and Biklen 2006;

Miles and Huberman 1994). In cases where apparent discrepancies arose within

analysis, interviews were re-read and checked against the coded data (often multiple

times) to ensure that interpretation was consistent with the preponderance of data, and

that conclusions were not over-reaching. Interview data were also supplemented by

document collection and demographic data from the state and from the US Census.

As Yin (1993) points out, the goal of qualitative case study research is not about

statistical generalization (i.e. making assertions about the average effect of a policy)

but about theoretical generalization: that is, to ‘‘expand our understanding of

theoretical propositions and hypotheses’’ (p. 39). The goal of this particular study,

therefore, is not to draw generalizations about how the average low performing

school responds to competitive pressure, but to examine whether and under what

1 The interview with the superintendent was conducted via email.

Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196 173

123

conditions the theory of action underlying school choice policy plays out in

expected (or unexpected) ways.

School Context: Enrollment Losses and School Choice

Chavez High School and Jordan High School,2 both located within Urban

Independent School District, are situated in predominately non-white communities.

The schools, which are just six miles from one another, are both located in

neighborhoods became segregated in the earlier part of the 20th century as a result

of local and federal housing policies. Beginning in the 1980s, as the area’s suburbs

expanded with increasingly affordable housing options, middle class families began

to leave the neighborhoods surrounding both Chavez and Jordan, sparking

enrollment decline at both schools. These enrollment losses accelerated significantly

in the past 10 years, however, as the school choice options available to students in

the neighborhoods increased (Table 1).

Since 2000, Chavez has lost more than half (56 %) of its student population (see

Table 2). Most of the students that were lost over this time period were relatively

more advantaged compared with those who remained at the school: between 2000

and 2010, the proportion of students identified as economically disadvantaged

doubled (from 46 % in 2000 to 90 % in 2010), as did the proportion of students

designated as Limited English Proficient (from 9 % in 2000 to 21 % in 2010) (see

Table 3). Chavez’ decline worsened significantly in 2008/09, when, because of

Chavez’ persistent low performance, the district required that students in the

neighborhood be given a choice of any campus in the district with space. All

neighborhood students coming to Chavez that year had to ‘‘choose’’ to come there,

which caused a brief but significant dip in enrollment that year.

Since 2000, Jordan has lost well over one-third (42 %) of its student enrollment.

Like Chavez, the losses have been primarily among the relatively more advantaged

students: since 2000, the proportion of Economically Disadvantaged students has

risen from 62 to 91 %, and the proportion of students designated as Limited English

proficient has increased from 17 % in 2000, to 33 % in 2010. Both schools are now

overwhelmingly African American and Latino, and high poverty, with few white or

Asian students.

The significant enrollment losses in a relatively short period of time have left

Chavez and Jordan facing significant challenges to their organizational survival. As

our discussion in the following section will demonstrate, each school struggled to stem

the loss of current students while attracting more students back to their campuses.

Understanding School Response to Competition

In order to understand the ways in which schools responded to the threat of multiple

competitors, we returned to theory on organizational response to competitive

2 All names of schools and districts are pseudonyms.

174 Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196

123

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(81.7

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(1999–2000)

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Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196 175

123

pressure. We therefore organized our finding around the key antecedents and

predictors of organizational response to pressure: awareness, motivation, and

capability. Within our findings we pay attention to and differentiate between the

multiple types of competitive pressure; we also look at the role of historic feedback

in shaping school response.

Awareness

The first antecedent of competitive response to pressure, as stated previously, is

awareness. Awareness entails an ability to ‘‘…perceive and process information

regarding competitors’’ (Williams 2007, p. 142). It is influenced both ‘‘…by the top

management team’s information processing and the visibility of competitors’

actions’’ (Williams 2007, p. 145).

Keen Awareness of Loss

In our interviews, we did indeed find that educators at both schools were very aware

that they had been experiencing significant enrollment losses to choice for many

years. Educators we interviewed at both schools told us that they suffered losses of

students through variety of official school choice policies (charters, NCLB choice,

etc.), and that they lost students to a number of schools throughout the district.

Table 2 Percent change in

enrollment race, poverty, LEP

and mobility of between 2000

and 2010

* Total number of these students

in 2000 were at or below 11

School 1 (%) School 2 (%)

Enrollment -55.5 -41.9

African American -59.2 -63.6

Hispanic -44.2 -14.9

White -96 -76.1

Native American* ?200 ?50

Asian/Pac. Islander* -81.8 -100

Econ. disadvantaged -11.6 -14.3

LEP ?7.57 ?10.5

Mobility -51.5 -37.5

Table 3 Change in percent

distribution of race, poverty,

LEP and mobility status between

2000 and 2010

* Enrollment is presented in

actual difference

School 1 School 2

Enrollment* 831 (joint) 577

African American -1.7 -18.4 %

Hispanic 16 % 22.9 %

White -15.2 % -2.8 %

Native American* .3 % .3 %

Asian/Pac. Islander* -.4 % -.4 %

Econ. disadvantaged 44.8 % 29 %

LEP 12.5 % 15.4 %

Mobility 14.6 % 3.1 %

176 Urban Rev (2013) 45:167–196

123

According to educators we interviewed, the most significant losses to choice at

each school began decades ago with an informal choice policy: residential choice.

Educators at both schools told us that the first enrollment declines experienced at

each school were a result of the significant expansion of suburban housing in the

1990s and 2000s, which lured many middle-class families out of the neighborhoods

surrounding both Chavez and Jordan. In recent years, according to the educators we

interviewed, the losses to suburbs accelerated as builders expanded the supply of

affordable (Section 8) housing in outlying suburbs, which enabled even moderate-

income families near Chavez and Jordan move into those neighborhoods. A teacher

at Jordan, when asked about the loss of students at the school, described this

phenomenon:

A lot of them are actually moving to [a low income suburb]. I know there’s

Section 8 housing in [the low income suburb] now, and they’ve opened up

Section 8 housing all over, even in nicer areas, and so people who understand

that they have a choice in Section 8 housing, they don’t have to live [in this

part of town], a lot of times will move also because they want what they think

are better schools.

The assistant principal of Chavez High School, who had been an educator in the

district for many years, recalled of the dramatic drop in enrollment at the school due

to residential shifts:

I’ve seen this campus when it was a 5-A high school,3 won the district in

football, all that stuff like that …[The decline in enrollment] has a lot to do

with [the suburban districts] growing, …a lot of families when they were able

to buy better housing, buy more for their kids, they chose to go to those places.

Many of the families that left the local neighborhood, according to administrators

at both schools, tended to be African-American. The principal of Chavez High

School noted: ‘‘[The neighborhood]…it’s no longer majority African American,

we’ve lost that community, there’s a been a huge exodus into [the suburbs].’’

Our analysis of Census data revealed that, consistent with the perceptions of

educators, the neighborhoods of both schools lost significant numbers of high school

aged children between 2000 and 2010 (see Table 4). We examined census data for

the current attendance zones of both Chavez and Jordan, and found that between

Table 4 Number of 15–17 year olds in census tracts within 2010 attendance zones

2000 Census 2010 Census Difference

Chavez HS* (10 census tracts) 1,918 1,069 -849

Jordan HS (7 census tracts) 1,372 1,045 -327

Source: www.census.gov

* For Chavez, three census tracts changed between 2000 and 2010. Only those that remained the same

were compared

3 5-A is the designation by the University Interscholastic League for the state’s largest enrollment high

schools. See http://www.uiltexas.org/about.

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2000 and 2010, the number of 15–17 year olds in the Chavez zone (a total of 10

census tracts) declined by 849, while the number of 15–17 year olds the Jordan zone

(a total of 7 census tracts) declined by 327. (Comparable data on income and race

were not available as of yet in the release of the 2010 census.)

When enrollment first began to decline at both schools (and in other

neighborhoods in the district) in the 1980s, the district constructed several magnet

schools within the district as a way to stem the flight of middle class families to the

suburbs. The Magnet High School (MHS) program was originally housed in Chavez

High School, which according to the Chavez principal helped the school’s overall

achievement scores. Yet, after about a decade, the district pulled the program out of

Chavez High School and placed it inside another campus in the area that had been

losing student population. A teacher at Chavez noted that the loss of MHS, and the

resultant shift in demographic at Chavez, began a cycle of decline at the school:

‘‘Whey moved the MHS off this campus, that was almost like pushing the school off

the edge, because they were attracting some very high caliber… students, and that

did kind of reverberate through the rest of the school pop, and when they were gone,

it was…I think that was a big hit that they never recovered from.’’

The movement of Magnet High School also had an effect on Jordan High School:

because the program was moved to a school that was geographically closer to

Jordan High School, it started to draw the high achieving students away from that

campus as well according to people we interviewed. A teacher who has been

teaching at Jordan High School for more than 30 years recalled that the opening of

MHS sparked enrollment losses at Jordan: ‘‘I think the biggest effect I’ve ever seen

was when they opened the Magnet High School, that’s been awhile now, but that’s

when we really lost a good portion of our population, and I think that they still pull

kids from this area.’’

More recently, schools have been facing competition from local charter schools,

which have sprung up around Chavez and Jordan in recent years. Educators told us

the charter schools often begin their recruitment in elementary and middle school,

and tend to lure away the higher achieving students within the neighborhood.

According to a counselor at Jordan: ‘‘we lose a lot of our students beginning in their

choice between fifth grade and sixth grade is when they get pulled to go to charter

schools, so…And we’re losing a lot of our students that would be academically

successful to charter schools at an early age, so that is a big factor.’’

Our analysis of charter data confirmed the intense competition faced by these

schools from charters. We identified all charters within a 5-mile radius of each

school in 2010/11 (see Tables 5, 6), and we found 11 charters operating within a

5-mile radius of Chavez High School, four of which served high school aged

students. We found 12 charters within a 5-mile radius of Jordan (seven of which

were also within the 5 mile radius of Chavez), five of which served high school

students. While were not able to get enrollment data on all of the schools, the total

high school enrollment in these charters stood at least at 536 in 2010/11.

According to respondents, Jordan was also affected by NCLB choice policy,

which allows students who are in schools that are in ‘‘improvement status’’ to select

another non-failing school within the same district. This choice policy only affected

Jordan High School, because at the time of data collection, the Chavez High School

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had been restructured, and designated by the district as a ‘‘choice in’’ school only.

This means that students attending the campus had to choose the school; no

neighborhood students would be assigned to the school a chemistry teacher at

Jordan High School told us that, from her perception, NCLB choice tends to be

utilized by the relatively more advantaged students:

I think that as soon as [our school] became academically unacceptable, I think

five years ago, people started, yeah, using the No Child Left Behind policy in

being able to choose to go to other schools, which actually, since I lived in the

neighborhood, I could tell that there were a lot of kids in our area that were

going to [another higher performing high school], and so that was just kind of

obvious that it was affecting our student population.

Table 5 Charter schools within

5 mile radius of Chavez HS

* Denotes a school that is also

within the 5 mile radius of

Jordan

School Level Enrollment

Charter 1 High school 357

Charter 2 High school NA

Charter 3 Elementary NA

Charter 4 K-6 317

Charter 5 PreK-8 NA

Charter 6* Middle school (5–8) 361

Charter 7* High school 179

Charter 8* K-4 NA

Charter 9* Middle (5–8) NA

Charter 10* K-4 NA

Charter 11* Middle/High school 88

Total high school enrollment (avail data) 536

Table 6 Charter schools within

5 mile radius of Jordan HS

* Denotes a school that is also

within the 5 mile radius of

Chavez

School Level Enrollment

Charter 1 PreK-8 NA

Charter 2 K-8 526

Charter 3 K-12 907

Charter 4 Middle & High school 310

Charter 5* Middle school (5–8) 361

Charter 6* High school 179

Charter 7* Middle school (5–8) 97

Charter 8* K-4 NA

Charter 9* K-4 NA

Charter 10* High school 357

Charter 11* K-6 317

Charter 12 K-12 NA

Total high school (avail data) 536

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One unexpected source of enrollment losses for Jordan High School was a policy

that was not designed as a school choice policy: the McKinney-Vento Homeless

Act. This Act prohibits schools from asking students who declare homeless status

about their residency. According to the principal of Jordan High School, some

African American students who have been unable to move out of the neighborhood

and who have become uncomfortable with the rising proportion of Latino students

at the school have used the Act to move to suburban schools, where suburban

administrators are prohibited from asking about where students really live:

So some students have, you know, and it’s prime example at this school, it was

an African American population, for whatever reason the culture starts to get

uncomfortable and they flee even out of the district to the closest schools. So if

I were to go to [suburban] High School, which is the closest [suburban] school

to us, I’m gonna find that a lot of Jordan High School students have claimed

homelessness, and are there under that pretense that they’re homeless, and

when, in fact, they’re not.

Jordan High School has also experienced losses as a result of the district’s

‘‘open choice’’ policy, which allows students to choose freely between schools in

the district as long as there is capacity. Such transfers can include a ‘‘sibling

transfer,’’ in which a sibling gets a transfer if their older sibling is already at a

particular school. Another transfer is a ‘‘diversity choice’’ transfer in which a

student is able to transfer from a school in which they are a majority to one in

which they are a majority. This policy has allowed many students to transfer to

schools on the wealthier side of town. According to Jordan’s school report card, in

2009/10, the school lost 327 students to these choice policies, or a total of 23 % of

Jordan’s student population that year. Yet what was interesting is that we heard

educators speak relatively less about these type of choice policies compared with

the others.

Lack of Information about Competitors or Market

While educators were generally aware that students were leaving, and vaguely

aware of the various ways in which they were leaving, we found that administrators

and teachers had little concrete information about how many students were leaving,

through which policy, to which competitor schools, or why. Although administra-

tors at both schools did have access to some concrete data from the district, this data

only provided information on just two of the choice policies available to parents:

NCLB and open enrollment (which consolidated information about diversity, open

enrollment, and sibling transfers). As an administrator at Jordan told us, the

statistics from the district gave him little knowledge about where these students

were going or why they were leaving. When we asked where students go who opt

out of Jordan, he replied:

It’s hard to say…it’s hard to say because we don’t necessarily track where

they go…We have sort of a number of how many ninth graders should show

up, and so right now the number is 438 of ninth graders who should come to

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Jordan. We typically get in the 300 range, and so…we lose, on an average,

about 100 students to school choice.

At Chavez high school teachers expressed the same lack of familiarity about

where students were going who opted out of the school. As one teacher noted ‘‘I’m

not sure… I know that we do have a lot of kids out that I’d love to get them back

here. ‘‘One Chavez teacher told us that he only knew about the depth of enrollment

losses by watching the bus come pick up the students in the neighborhood: ‘‘I see

that each morning when we come to school, I see a group of kids standing on the

corner, each of the corners, waiting for buses to carry them to other campuses, you

know, and they tend to be the…I mean, it’s not surprising, the more highly

motivated students, and probably…with all kinds of exceptions, but some of the

more active, the parents that are probably a little more involved.’’

The difficulty of discerning where students were transferring to was made more

difficult by the fact that many of the types of choice losses the schools were

experiencing were not necessarily ‘‘on the books.’’ Students leaving the school, for

example, using the McKinney Vento Homeless Act were not reported to their

district, nor were students who moved out of the area into the suburbs.

An equally significant problem for principals was that many students left the

‘‘vertical pattern’’ (or feeder schools) well before high school. Some students left for

charters, according to principals, as early as elementary school, as the principal of

Jordan noted: ‘‘…charters are an issue that are coming in and sweeping the kids out

at the elementary level even, and not letting them go through into middle

school.‘‘Similarly, another Jordan teacher noted that she only realized how many

students they were losing when she met with her school’s vertical team:

I didn’t really think about [how many students we lose] until we had this

vertical team meeting in the fall, and our…in my group was the [Feeder]

Elementary principal, and he just talked about how many students Jordan loses

due to charter schools that are like their top students in elementary, and like

that’s when it first hit me where I was just like wow, ‘cause we never really get

a chance to meet as a vertical team like that, and so when we do talk…when I

had a chance to talk to the elementary principal, and he’s telling me, like

giving me names and telling me numbers of all these kids we’re losing, it’s

just like, oh wow, like we had no clue…

Because the students disappeared from the pipeline before middle school, the

principals felt that they did not have an accurate sense about exactly how many

students ‘‘should’’ be coming to their campus. A teacher at Jordan noted: ‘‘it’s hard

for me to know exactly how that affects it because I don’t see like which kids live

near and which kids aren’t actually going to Jordan.’’

In sum, then, educators knew that students were leaving their schools, but they

had only a vague sense of the market in which they were operating. Educators

reported having little sense about how many students were leaving, which students

they were losing, which kind of choice policy was affecting them the most, who

their main ‘‘competitors’’ were, or why students were leaving. As one educator at

Jordan noted, when asked if they were competing with any particular school: ‘‘…

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there are so many competitors it’s hard to single out one.’’ Thus, while each of the

schools was suffering significant enrollment losses, the nature of those losses, and

the reason for those losses were, from the perspective of educators we interviewed,

highly uncertain.

Motivation

The second precondition to competitive response is motivation. Motivation is based

on two key perceptual dimensions on the part of organizational actors: first is the

awareness (as described above) of the competitive threat or tensions4 an

organization is facing. As Lamberg et al. (2009) note: ‘‘Logically, the more aware

the firms are, the better they should be prepared and motivated for changes in the

competitive landscape and act accordingly’’ (p. 9). Thus the awareness challenges

described above–in terms of a lack of understanding of the market–can be expected

to hinder motivation.

Second, motivation is based on the attributions that organizational leaders make

about the reasons for the competitive threat or tension. When the threat is perceived

by organizational actors to stem from a controllable or a permanent cause, the

organizational behavior literature predicts that school leaders and educators are

more likely to respond; if the cause is viewed as uncontrollable or temporary, action

is viewed as unnecessary and therefore becomes less likely (Mone et al. 1998; Staw

et al. 1981).

Choice Losses and Motivation

When we asked educators about the losses their school incurred as a result of

choice, we found that most educators believed such losses were largely out of their

control. Furthermore, we found that most educators interviewed did not attribute the

cause of choice losses to their own failures as an organization, but rather to the

‘‘unfair competition’’ and ‘‘skimming’’ of higher achieving students away from their

schools—drawing away students whose parents were more informed and involved

in the system.

This skimming, they believed, resulted in an uneven playing field: indeed, many

educators at both schools believed strongly that the reputation of schools was

intimately tied to the relative advantage—or disadvantage—of the students served.

Thus, we heard many educators tell us that when their school lost higher achieving

students, their school’s reputation suffered.

The relationship between student composition and school reputation, educators

believed, put Jordan and Chavez at a significant competitive disadvantage. A

number of educators said that the positive changes they had made in recent years

would not be ‘‘rewarded’’ in the market because of this (outdated and undeserved)

reputation. An educator at Jordan noted that: ‘‘You know, people who have never

been to Jordan, I think that reputation precedes what is happening now, but once

4 Competitive tension is defined by Chen et al. (2007) as the ‘‘aggregate threats and pressures (both

objective and perceived) that a firm experiences’’ (p. 103).

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people come to Jordan…I know the perception is out there, right, that Jordan is a

bad school.’’ Similarly a teacher at Chavez noted of the role of reputation that is

hard to overcome: ‘‘Parents are constantly being told, that’s a bad school, don’t send

your kid to that school, send your kid to this school, or send them to anywhere else

but that place because of the reputation it’s had in the past.’’

These negative perceptions, according to administrators, were also held by the

middle school counselors, who were instrumental in choice because they helped

parents fill out their choice sheets. As the principal of Jordan told us:

The parents are not educated enough when they’re making the choices, they

are left to the mercy of whoever is telling them, especially when they’re not

English speaking parents, so if one counselor translates to 50 parents, can you

imagine the power of that, saying…and not anything about choice, but saying,

your student is going to over here, here’s the paper to fill out, sign it, that

assures you a transfer to that school, sign it, with no other option. So, can you

imagine the bad impact on a system with just that.

Educators therefore believed that the loss of higher performing students to other

campuses was both a cause and an effect of their own school’s bad reputation—an

iterative cycle that left their own schools with the neediest students, and with the

poorest reputations, in the district. The principal of Chavez noted, for example, that:

‘‘The problem with choice is that I have that default homogeneous population of

ESL and special ed, over 50 percent of my population is at a disadvantage already,

98 percent of my students read below grade level, and I want to say it’s like 40 of

them are at 5–6 years [below grade level], if not more.’’ The principal of Jordan

similarly observed that as a result of choice ‘‘… you are building a really rich

concentration of high performing kids in some areas, but you’re depleting the

balance. It’s just like any ecosystem, and so you deplete the system of a system of a

well-balanced… organization, and you start pulling the kids into these elite

positions where all of the high performing kids are together.’’

Educators at Chavez High School and Jordan High School, therefore, had a very

low sense of efficacy about their ability to respond to the choice losses: educators at

both schools felt that the reasons for losses were largely out of their control, not

attributable to internal organizational failures of their own schools, but rather to

unfair competition and ‘‘skimming’’ of higher performing students by charters or

other public schools with relatively more advantaged demographics. This lack of

efficacy around the ability to respond, as we found, translated into a relatively low

motivation to respond. As one educator at Jordan High School told us, when asked

where choice fell as a priority in the school on a scale from 1 to 10: ‘‘It’s not even

anything that we worry about, we can’t worry about it, like it’s not even on the scale

because we can’t do anything about it.’’

Accountability and Motivation

While the losses to choice were perceived by educators at Jordan and Chavez to be

highly threatening to the organization, the schools were also facing another

significant threat to organizational survival: the sanctions of both the federal and

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state accountability systems. Both schools received low rankings on both systems

(both were in stage 5 of Program Improvement under NCLB at the time of our data

collection), and as a result, were subject to increasing sanctions by the district and

the state. Principals at both schools, in fact, expressed concerns that their schools

might be closed if they did not improve performance on the state assessment, the

Texas assessment of knowledge and skills (TAKS).

Thus when faced with a vague and uncontrollable threat (choice) compared with

an immediate and more certain threat (accountability), we found that schools chose

to focus on the latter. When asked how school choice ranked as an organizational

priority in their school, nearly all of our respondents told us that although they felt

the loss of students was an important issue to address, their primary concern was

improving test scores enough to get off the ‘‘failing’’ list. Thus, although each

school was losing significant numbers of students to choice, it was the account-

ability system—even more than choice—that generated the most anxiety, and

sparked the greatest motivation, on the part of the schools.

Chavez High School was arguably under the most pressure from the state and

federal accountability systems: the school had already undergone ‘‘restructuring’’ as

a result of its repeated failure to meet state and federal accountability targets. This

restructuring, however, did not relieve educators of the pressure to meet the ever-

increasing thresholds set by the state, and many were concerned that the school

would be shuttered. One teacher, for example, when asked about whether Chavez

tried to increase their enrollment by recruiting or marketing at the feeder middle

school, responded:

We’re under so much pressure for TAKS that [choice is] just not a priority really,

I don’t think it is for us. We’re trying to do what we can with the kids we have and,

you know, doing TAKS pull outs, math pull outs and pulling kids from their

electives to get special tutoring, but…yeah, so that’s mostly…that’s our priority

right now, and it has been for the last few years since we’ve been [trying to meet]

AYP.

Chavez High School’s principal echoed his teachers’ sentiments, explaining that

the school was in crisis mode and that meeting accountability goals and getting out

of ‘in need of improvement’ (INI) status was the first priority. When asked about

where school choice fell within the school’s priorities on a scale of 1–10, this

principal told us that, ‘‘Of course, right now, 10 is keeping the doors of the school

open, so choice takes a back seat to that.’’ A fine arts teacher at Chavez High School

did hope that the school would be able to move beyond a focus on the TAKS to start

recruiting students back to the school:

[The administration is] so bent on the TAKS scores, and rightfully so, I mean,

…that pretty much is what determines the future of the campus. But, you

know, at some point we’ve got to take a step back and start putting our nose to

the grindstone and finding ways to make the kids that aren’t here, come back.

This same teacher also noted: ‘‘Nobody’s in a feeling of…that they’re safe or that

they can relax, everybody’s still on high alert.’’

Jordan High School faced similar pressure from accountability: the school was

also in Stage 5 of program improvement under NCLB, and had failed to meet state

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accountability targets for many years. These accountability pressures created a

similar sense of uncertainty for Jordan’s educators, who were also concerned about

the possibility of school closure, even though they had met state accountability

expectations the prior year, earning an ‘‘acceptable’’ rating for the first time in years.

A teacher at Jordan noted that, from her perception, administrators were not very

strongly focused on stemming enrollment losses from choice. When asked why, she

responded:

We’re in survival mode. Instead of even thinking so much about how we can

grow things, we’re more like, let’s get the kids to pass so that we can become

‘‘acceptable’’ another year. And then perhaps after that would happen, then

maybe the discussion would happen, since it’ll be a two-year long thing, but I

do think it’s because we’re in survival mode, it’s kind of like, put out the fire.

School choice, according to educators, made it more difficult to meet state and

federal targets, because choice drained the school of their higher achieving students.

As a result, educators noted, the task of meeting accountability benchmarks was all

the more difficult. A teacher at Chavez High School told us, ‘‘it’s almost like we

keep digging our hole deeper, deeper and deeper by allowing the better students to

transfer to the other schools, and raise the bar and say, ok, now you guys score better

than you did last time, with less resources. So, it makes it hard, to say the least.’’

Similarly, the principal of Jordan High School told us that choice often left their

campuses with high concentrations of disadvantaged students, making it more

challenging to meet state and federal testing benchmarks. She reflected that as a

result of choice they tend to lose their higher performers, and as a result:

…you no longer have the same population of kids, and so if you had a fighting

chance to rebuild the kids that can perform well, you knock it out by pulling

them away, and so… you’re left with the lowest performing students, so your

job becomes a much more difficult. And in some cases I’m sure it could be an

impossible task.

Educators, therefore, felt that choice put the schools into a downward spiral: as

the higher achieving students fled the campuses as a result of choice, the

concentration of disadvantage at the school made it harder for them to improve,

reducing possibility of meeting the accountability thresholds (which were increasing

every year), which in turn prompted even more students to flee. Many believed that

the possibility of exiting this Catch-22 was slim.

These data suggest that, when understanding an organization’s motivation to

respond to a competitive threat, it is important to identify the different threats that

an organization faces, and the relative importance actors in the organization place

upon each. We found that the threat posed by choice was vague and uncertain; by

contrast the threat posed by accountability was more imminent and the type of

response that was required was also more clearly defined. Our data therefore raise

some questions about the introduction of choice along with accountability policies:

our results suggest that any competitive pressure to respond from choice is

overshadowed by accountability pressures—especially in the lowest performing

urban schools.

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Capability

The final dimension of response to competition is capability of an organization to

respond, or internal organizational capacity. Organizational capacity to respond is,

as discussed previously, dependent on an organization’s social capital (structural,

relational, cognitive, and intellectual). We found, however, that both organizations

had fairly low levels of organizational social capital, and educators we interviewed

blamed choice, to some degree, for these organizational difficulties.

Capability, Organizational Social Capital, and Choice

By all accounts, after years of enrollment losses and low performance, the

organizational social capital at both Jordan and Chavez was extremely low. The

biggest challenge with respect to social capital was high levels of turnover among

both leadership and staff (see Holme and Rangel 2012). At Chavez, the school had

experienced a high degree of turnover of top administrators: as one educator noted

‘‘the school’s been in academic trouble for 10 years, they’ve had 13 different

administrations, all that fun stuff.’’ Teacher turnover has also been very high: as one

teacher noted, ‘‘[The principal] can provide you with the numbers, but we had a high

turnover of faculty even during the year, and…and in critical areas, math, for

example, ok, and we had a lot of turnover in the math. And the kids were caught, ok,

this teacher’s gone the first 6 weeks, and I’ve got a sub now for 2 or 3 weeks before

we get another teacher hired, and so we’ll get another teacher hired, that teacher

stays for awhile, they’re gone.’’

Recruiting staff to fill openings at Chavez also been difficult and as a result, the

school has been forced to hire inexperienced teachers. One teacher noted that ‘‘I

would say somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 percent of the staff members last

year were first year teachers.’’ As one teacher admitted: ‘‘This year, in the first eight

weeks of school we lost four teachers who just said, ‘I can’t deal with this.’ And,

you know, I’ll be honest to say that I spent almost every day for the first two

marking periods looking for another job.’’ The principal also noted of difficulties

recruiting in core content areas: ‘‘My math department, the average experience

is…not even…it’s like 1.3….If it’s that, it’s probably less…..Because I have one

teacher that has two years experience, my new geometry teacher has been teaching

now two weeks, my algebra teacher has been teaching three months.’’ The principal

told us that he doesn’t get many experienced teachers to apply for vacancies: ‘‘For

every position I get about 30 applications; however, none of them are certified, I

mean, I’d say ten percent of them are certified. I get everybody that’s wanting to use

me as a springboard to get into a good school.’’

The high levels of turnover at Chavez resulted in a very low level of trust

between teachers and students. Several educators reported that students were

surprised when teachers stayed at the school. As one teacher noted:

…there was such a large turnover in the faculty anyway, that [students] just

weren’t…you know, it was just like, ‘‘yeah, you’re not gonna be here later

anyway,’’ you know, ‘‘you’ll do like everybody else and gonna leave.’’ And I

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was reminiscing with [a teacher] the other day and I said, you know, you

realize that these kids that we’ve got, they’re about to be seniors, we’ve been

with them now three years, they will have had an entirely different faculty for

the fourth time when we come up.

The principal of Chavez also noted of the adverse effects of teacher turnover on

relationships with the students–eroding the relational capital within the building:

….There’s already been a lot of turnover even during the year, which makes it

even harder because these kids, one of the big things with them is, you know,

developing relationships and building that sense of trust, and when a teacher

leaves, you know, a week…a semester in or, you know, a month in, and then

they have a new teacher, it’s like starting all over again, and it’s very hard.

To focus on organizational survival, Chavez leaders focused intensely on

meeting accountability targets. In a context of scarce and declining resources, due in

part to enrollment losses, the administration made a decision to allocate costly

tutoring or ‘‘remediation’’ only to those students who ‘‘counted’’ for school

accountability, or who were present at the snapshot date in October. As an

administrator noted of this decision: ‘‘we just have to be cognizant of the students

that leave before the snapshot, and actually, it’s the other way around because they

day they leave, well, they’re not on our rosters, it’s the students that come in after

the snapshot that I’m not going to put through all the extra remediation, it’s constant

cleaning of the rosters] because I don’t want to burn my teachers out on students

that aren’t gonna count.’’ This kind of gaming behavior has been found in other

studies of schools’ response to accountability, when high stakes pressure meets low

internal capacity (Holme and Rangel 2012; O’Day 2002).

Jordan similarly suffered from low levels of organizational social capital. The

school had suffered from very high turnover levels with both administrators and

teachers. When the current principal was hired in 2008, she was the sixth principal

to lead the school in 3 years. As an ELA teacher noted of the turnover in the past

eight years: ‘‘It’s changed faculty back from like 2000–2003, there’s very few, like a

handful probably of, you know, administrators and teachers. In my department,

from ‘02, I think there’s three of us out of the 13 or 14.’’

Yet the current principal at Jordan has, by most accounts, brought an element of

stability to the campus in the brief time (3 years) she has been at the helm. While

the principal has had to hire many new teachers due to the small pool of teachers

who have applied for jobs at Jordan, she has been able to retain many of the ones she

has hired. She noted that ‘‘After the second year [I was here] we had very few

teachers leave, and so we have the same teachers, so the program is starting to build

itself, teachers are more familiar with each other, they…we’ve put them in the

places where we feel they’re the strongest, and we’ve shifted them to where we are

getting our biggest bang for our buck, I guess you could say. So, the fact that

we…even though they were new teachers, they’re starting to get the experience here

and they’re staying here, they’re not leaving anymore.’’

The brief increase in stability in staff at Jordan, and the attendant increase in

organizational social capital, has brought the school some success: in the past year,

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the school met its AYP targets, which has given educators hope that the school may

have a chance of getting off of ‘‘INI’’ status (it was, at the time, in stage 5). These

improvements have also helped to stem the loss of students, according to a science

teacher:

[In the past] I would hear a lot of kids saying their parents were gonna pull

them out. This was probably like three years ago, but because the systems

were really broken in the front office, and they couldn’t get their schedules

changed, and scheduling was a really big issue, and so there was a lot of talk

about that about three or four years ago. But recently I haven’t really heard

that much about kids changing, especially ‘cause now I…the fact that we

made the [accountability] cut this year, I think helped a lot also.

Administrators hoped that meeting NCLB targets would not only relieve the school

from the threat of closure, but would also end the losses of students via NCLB

choice, as students would no longer have the right to transfer out if the school made

AYP For the second year in a row. As an administrator noted: ‘‘We’re not low

performing anymore, and that we’re gonna make it again this year, we’ll keep them

from being able to switch since we’re an academically acceptable school.’’

We found that—partly as a result of this brief success—Jordan educators did

begin to engage with the market and make initial efforts to recruit back students. Yet

we also found that the key driver of this market engagement was the political

support and resources conferred on the school by the district, as we describe next.

Capability, District Support and Market Engagement

For decades, neither school had made significant efforts to respond to enrollment

losses to choice, perceiving response as a lower priority than responding to the

demands of accountability system. Further, responding to choice was perceived to

be relatively futile because of an external environment (specifically the skimming of

higher achieving students) that was perceived to be largely inalterable, while the

effects responding seemed highly uncertain. We found that the sense of control over

the external environment was, we found, moderated by the support of the central

district (Urban ISD), which was quite different at both the schools. As we shall

illustrate below, the district helped reduce the level of uncertainty at Jordan by

offering support and resources to the school to enable it to recruit students; at the

same time, the district put what were perceived to be roadblocks for Chavez in its

attempts to respond to choice.

District Support and Market Response at Chavez According to our respondents,

Chavez High School has had a rocky relationship with the district for several years.

It is the only school in the district to be restructured, and the community’s feeling

was that the district had not done enough to support the school in the years leading

up to the restructuring, and that the situation would have been different at a school

with different demographics in a different part of the city. As discussed above,

Chavez High School had, in the past, been a high performing school when the

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magnet program was housed there, because the program attracted high achieving

students into the school from other parts of the city. After the district moved that

program to another school, however, Chavez High School began to lose its teachers,

AP courses, and higher achieving students.

More recently, the district has played an important role in exacerbating the sense

of uncertainty for the school. After the restructuring, the district decided that

Chavez High School would be a choice only school, and as a result any student who

attended the school (even those in the immediate neighborhood) would be required

to officially ‘choice in’. The result has been that Chavez High School has started

each year under-enrolled and has had less resources (due to the drop in enrollment)

allocated to it to pay for materials and teachers. Chavez High School’s principal

expressed a great deal of frustration at what he perceived to be the barriers that the

district was putting up in the school’s path to improvement. For example, he

described a run-in he had with the district during his first year as principal, when he

realized that if the school was going to have any students, he would have to go and

recruit them from the middle school. He recounted how he left a principal training to

go to the middle school and help students fill out their choice slips in time to meet

the district choice deadline. After he successfully got a number of students to

commit to Chavez for the next year, he recalled:

I got called in that evening to the Office of the Associate Superintendent. They

said, ‘what were you doing all day?’ I was like, I was at [the] Middle School

getting my choice slips. ‘Well, that’s not your role, this person in my office

recruits students.’ I said, ‘I get it, but look at all the kids that we got, look at…I

mean, I got 70 signed slips, we only need 100, I’ve got them.’ And I was told,

‘this is not an official form of the district.’ I said, ‘what are you talking about?

I got it, and I made copies.’ [They told me]: ‘They’re copies, they have to be

provided by the Office of…[the Associate Superintendent], the letter has to be

generated in that office in order to be valid, so all these are not good.’

The teachers at Chavez High School were aware of the uneasy relationship

between Chavez and the district. One teacher recounted to us his confusion at the

district’s unwillingness to support a specialized curriculum chosen by the teachers:

‘‘‘…’ Cause this [curriculum] was, the restructuring plan was, to do this

[curriculum] with the school, and then to not support it was a big shock last year,

not support it and not understand it and not be a part of it was a huge shock to us, so

that was kind of rough.’’

Indeed, a number of teachers attributed losses at the school to the sense of

uncertainty that parents had about what program would be offered at the school.

This teacher noted that at the end of the prior year many students left because they

and their parents wondered:

‘‘Well, what’s this school going to be next year?’’ [So] anybody who could get

out [left]…because I have a fear of…you know, I don’t know where I’m

sending my child to school next year, I want to get a place in a different school

as soon as possible, who’s left are maybe people who weren’t educated on

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what was going on in the district or were coming from out of district or…you

know, just who perceivably didn’t have any options.

The constant changes at the school, therefore, resulting in part from the district’s

shifting support for the school, were perceived to be a detriment in the

‘‘competition.’’

District Support and Market Response at Jordan Jordan High School has a very

different relationship with the district, though it is not entirely apparent why that is

the case. Just a decade or two ago, it might not have been clear that the relationship

would be as good as it currently is given that the district opened another high school

very close to Jordan High School that drew away some of Jordan’s enrollment. As

stated previously, the newer high school received the magnet program that Chavez

High School lost, so many of the students that left Jordan High School were higher

performing students. In fact, it was around that time that Jordan High School’s

academic performance began to decline precipitously, to the point where the state

and the district began to discuss possible closure or restructuring.

A new principal was brought on board in fall of 2008, and brought with her a new

administrative team. As the math department chair noted, when he was debating

whether to accept an offer to join the new principal’s administrative team: ‘‘it was a

little scary… [the district was] saying they were gonna close it down because

[Jordan] hadn’t been performing in so many areas.’’

This principal, by many accounts, was able in the course of several years to

create a sense of stability at the campus, establishing more consistent systems and

structures. She also established on a strong system of interventions for the lowest

performing students to raise their scores on state tests, in hopes of raising the

school’s accountability rankings and getting out of ‘‘improvement’’ status.

The second year of the principal’s tenure, the school made AYP. While being

relieved from the ‘‘in need of improvement’’ label requires that low performing

schools make AYP for two consecutive years, the single year of improvement—

after many years of failure—was enough to give educators hope that they would

soon get out of sanctioned status. As the principal told us, an important outcome of

making AYP for two consecutive years would end the choice option for many

students out of the school. When we interviewed her in the winter of 2011, she felt

confident that the school would make AYP for the second year in a row: ‘‘we’re

gonna make it again this year, we’ll keep [students] from being able to switch since

we’re an academically acceptable school.’’5

That same year—perhaps in response to the uptick in the school’s performance—

the district decided to house a new advanced studies program at Jordan High

School. This program emerged from a new federal grant for low performing schools

(the School Improvement Grant) which was funded by stimulus dollars. The

decision by the district to invest the funding for the program in Jordan High School

had two important consequences for the school. First, it demonstrated that the

district was invested in the school’s success and that it would support the school

5 When the results came out over the summer of 2011, we learned that the school did in fact make AYP

that year after an appeal to the state.

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with increased funding. Second, the advanced studies program allowed Jordan High

School to offer a variety of advanced placement and elective courses to its students.

The advanced studies program allowed Jordan to address two primary causes of

enrollment losses, from the perspective of Jordan’s educators: a lack of higher

performing students on the campus, and its (unfairly earned) reputation. The

advanced studies program also, as some educators acknowledged, would allow the

school to move beyond what has been largely a ‘‘remediation’’ focused curriculum,

a focus which stemmed from both the lack of higher performing students as well as

the pressure of the accountability system. As an administrator notes:

For awhile all we talked about ‘‘passing TAKS, passing TAKS, passing

TAKS,’’ right, so for a kid who is gonna choose another school, right, passing

TAKS isn’t a monumental thing for that kid, right, they’re gonna pass TAKS.

So for us to say, you know, your kid will pass TAKS if they come to Jordan,

that’s not really a selling point, right, they’re gonna pass TAKS anyway.

When educators learned that the advanced program studies would be housed at

Jordan, they began to focus on marketing the new programs and dispelling the

negative perceptions of the Jordan. A Jordan teacher told us that the school was

trying to get information to both parents and educators in the feeder pattern: ‘‘you

know, so it’s more of like the communication between the schools and just trying to

get kids and parents on our campus. ‘Cause like I said, if…a lot of times, you know,

they have opinions, but they haven’t ever met anyone from here, or haven’t come to

our campus, so it’s just based solely on media.’’ The principal also told us that she

has begun to work on changing elementary and middle school educators’

perceptions about Jordan: ‘‘I have just started a campaign, every month I send

post cards home, we’ve had meetings with the middle schools and the elementary

schools to try…’cause, really, it’s their internally their own people who are doing it,

you know, like the elementary teachers are advising the kids they don’t ever want to

go to.’’

The district has actively supported such marketing efforts, providing resources to

bring students to the campus. As an English-Language Arts teacher told us: ‘‘A

couple weeks ago, they bused in elementary and middle school kids to do a college

and career fair here ‘cause at the vertical team meeting we just talked about, well, if

we can just get parents and kids on our campus, they will see it’s not such a scary

place.’’

In sum, while educators at both schools felt that school choice policies and the

accountability system left them facing uncertain futures, each school’s relationship

with the district moderated the level of uncertainty. Chavez High School, which

faced a great deal of uncertainty from choice as well as the accountability system,

found its efforts to improve unsupported by the central office, which exacerbated the

sense of uncertainty at the school. As a result, the school became intensely focused

on the nearest ‘‘threat,’’ which was improving state test scores, rather than choice.

While Jordan High School also felt the pressure of accountability and a threat of

closure, it was able to face that pressure and the challenge of enrollment losses due

to school choice with more confidence because the district has provided the school

more support. The implication of this balance is Jordan High School was able to

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respond to school choice more proactively—as choice theorists may expect—

because the risks of doing so were reduced.

It should be noted however that the outcomes of Jordan’s efforts, however, are far

from certain. There are few examples in the research literature of schools with high

concentrations of disadvantaged students recovering from significant decline and

enrollment losses. The degree to which the school can overcome its turbulent

history and negative reputation, and lure back a substantial amount of students,

remains to be seen.

Discussion and Implications

Market models of reform presume that external pressure from enrollment losses will

cause schools to take steps to compete, improving both internal organizational

structures and responsiveness to parents. The experiences of both Chavez and

Jordan, however, cast doubt on the potential of market models of reform to lead to

substantial organizational change in schools facing significant enrollment losses to

choice.

As stated previously, the organizational management literature has found that an

organization’s response to competitive pressure is dependent upon three organiza-

tional factors: awareness, motivation, and capability. With respect to awareness, our

study found that while the schools were aware that they lost many students to choice

(both official and unofficial), they had only a vague understanding about which

students they lost to choice, why they left, or which schools they were losing

students to. This was particularly problematic in a market in which there were

multiple ‘‘official’’ competitors (charters, NCLB choice, and open enrollment) and

‘‘unofficial’’ competitors as well (housing choice, and the McKinney–Vento Act).

This limited knowledge about the highly complex markets in which they were

embedded dampened educators’ motivation to respond to choice losses. Indeed, our

data illustrated that educators’ believed the losses to choice to be largely

‘‘uncontrollable’’—the losses were attributable not to their own failures as an

organization but rather to the unfair competition and skimming of higher achieving

students. This skimming, they believed, set off a cycle of decline that was

impossible to climb out of: an increasing concentration of disadvantaged students,

leading to a declining reputation and also to poor accountability rankings, leading to

more losses of students to choice. This ‘‘Catch-22’’ was perceived by many to be a

relatively hopeless situation.

Another key finding was related to the dual threats of accountability overlaid on

choice: when faced with an uncontrollable somewhat vague threat (choice) versus

an imminent and somewhat more controllable threat (accountability), the schools

chose the latter. This finding does have implications for the current choice policy

landscape, where choice policies are operating in parallel to accountability policies

(i.e. charter schools or open enrollment) or when they are directly connected to

accountability performance (i.e. NCLB choice.) The findings of this case study

suggest that when the most troubled urban schools are faced with both types of

threats, they are likely to put one (accountability) at a far higher priority than the

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other (responding to choice losses.) This suggests that there is little marginal gain

from choice above and beyond accountability in the context of both systems.

The somewhat ironic outcome of this accountability-focused response is that, to

cope with accountability pressures, the schools both focused intensely on

remediation of its students most at risk of failing the state’s high stakes tests.

While this curricular focus did address the most immediate threat facing each

school, it proved unhelpful in luring back the higher achieving students that each

school believed would be required to turn around their school, and their reputations.

This finding helps to explain the findings from other research that indicate that when

schools compete they often will target and recruit of higher performing students—a

response that is logical when schools attribute failure in the market to the ‘‘wrong’’

demographics. (see, e.g., Gewirtz et al. 1995; Lubienski 2005).

A related, and important finding of this study is that schools in this case study did

not differentiate between the types of choice policies that were affecting it in terms

of market response: thus educators in our case study schools did not attempt to craft

different responses to lure back students they lost to charters; and other policies to

lose back students they lost to open enrollment or NCLB. Educators’ understanding

of the market was too vague, and too uninformed, to make much distinction between

these market players. Instead, educators tended to lump all choice policies into one

group of ‘‘skimmers’’—schools that were luring away higher achieving students.

The only clear strategy to lure some of these students back was by meeting AYP and

closing the NCLB choice option. This route to re-gaining student enrollment,

however, only made them redouble their efforts to meet accountability targets (see

also Lauen 2008).

The third dimension of organizations that determines successful response to

competition is capability, and our data also illustrated that these organizations—due

to decades of loss of higher achieving students—were generally struggling in terms

of overall levels of organizational social capital. Both schools had years of high

turnover in administration and teachers, which had taken its toll on the organizations

and reduced trust among staff and students. Both formal and informal choice

policies were (and could legitimately be) blamed for the decline in capital in each

organization, as the increased concentration of disadvantage in each school was

linked to recruiting and hiring challenges as well as problems with meeting

accountability targets. This organizational turbulence, coupled with low motivation,

made response very difficult for both of these schools. These processes illustrate

what the organizational behavior literature has pointed to as the importance of

understanding the prior history of competition to understand current dynamics.

One unexpected finding related to capability—and one that is specific to

understanding how competition works in public education—is the role that district

support (or lack of support) played in response. Educators at both schools described

a general sense of environmental uncertainty, which the literature predicts would

inhibit efforts at market engagement (Chattopadhyay et al. 2001.) However, our

data found that the school district played a role in moderating such uncertainty.

Chavez suffered from a lack of district support, which exacerbated the school’s

sense of environmental uncertainty and led the leadership to engage in extreme self-

protective behavior. The school’s minimal efforts at recruiting students were also

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undermined by district officials. Jordan, by contrast, was able to gain district support

after it had made some key accountability targets. This, in turn, led the district to

direct a one-time federal allotment of funds to the school which allowed educators

to begin to institute new programs and market the school to a different audience

(higher achieving students.) What is interesting is that the organizational

management literature predicts that resources would hinder external marketing—

in this case the opposite was true (Chattopadhyay et al. 2001.) The potential for

success of Jordan’s efforts measures, however, is still unclear: the school is facing a

significant number of competitors, and has had a negative reputation in the

community for some time.

In sum, the findings of this study cast some doubt on the application of the market

model of reform in the US, which is distinct both in terms of the number of different

choice policies that have been developed, and in terms of the disproportionate

impact that such policies have on urban schools. This study has illustrated that

traditional public schools in such contexts do not necessarily interpret enrollment

losses, nor respond to such losses, in ways that reformers would predict. As the data

in this study illustrated, schools like Chavez, facing the simultaneous pressures of

multiple choice policies and high-stakes accountability systems, are likely to sink

further into decline as a result of such pressures. Pulling troubled schools out of such

a downward spiral requires, as the case of Jordan illustrated, at the minimum that

schools gain a greater sense of certainty about their external environment (i.e. relief

from threat of closure, and/or increased district supports.) Whether that greater

certainty will bear fruit for Jordan, and enable the school to gain back the students it

has lost in the past decade, remains a question.

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