Last year, Westside Academy boasted some of the highest standardized test scores in the Milwaukee Public Schools, despite being located in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. You’d think parents would be drooling to get their children into the school, but they aren’t. Enrollment has declined from 860 students five years ago to a projected 660 this year, according to school principal Jim Sonnenberg.
The whole theory behind school choice was that bad schools would go out of business as parents chose the best academics for their children. But the experience at Westside and other schools shows that parents make choices that are much more complicated than this.
Household per-capita income in the neighborhood surrounding Westside is less than $15,000 annually, and nearly all of its pupils qualify for free-lunch programs. So it’s a remarkable accomplishment that its fourth-grade test scores are close to the district average and eighth-grade scores are on par with the state average. Yet parents seem unimpressed.
The situation is similar at Kluge Elementary, Dover Elementary and 37th Street School. Milwaukee Public Schools data show that all three schools saw significant drops in enrollment over the past five years despite exceeding district averages in reading, math and language on the fourth-grade Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination.
Meanwhile, several schools that are subpar on standardized testing have seen their enrollments swell. Browning Elementary, Thurston Woods, Mitchell School and Urban Waldorf all scored below the district average on fourth-grade reading, math and language assessments for the 2003-’04 school year and yet have seen significant boosts in warm bodies over the last five years.
“Clearly, the data doesn’t support what people think is common knowledge,” says former MPS Superintendent Howard Fuller. “All sorts of things go into parents choosing a school.”
Current Superintendent William Andrekopoulos notes that in his 14-year tenure as principal at Fritsche Middle School, parents inquired more about after-school piano lessons than anything else. “Many parents pick schools for reasons aside from academics,” he says. “In many cases, they don’t pick what’s necessarily best for their kids but what meets their needs.”
In a city where many parents are single mothers with -limited means, finding a school that provides better services may be a lot more im-portant than finding a school that does better with No. 2 pencils. Dan McKinley, executive director of Partners Advancing -Values in Education, which works with many private school choice schools, uses Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to explain the discrepancy. “A parent could care less about whether a school has the best science program,” he says, “if it’s not perceived to be safe, if it’s not meeting their time needs or doesn’t have a breakfast program.”
MPS research, says Andrekopoulos, has found that parents care less about test scores than three other factors: (1) word of mouth – what other parents say about the school; (2) a convenient schedule, allowing parents to use the lag time of school busing to bridge the gap be-tween the end of the school day and when they get home from work; (3) removing their child from the neighborhood environment. “They want their kids to attend a school where there aren’t other kids from their neighborhood,” says Andrekopoulos.
The irony is that opponents and supporters of school choice have been arguing for years over the question of where achievement is better, in public or voucher schools. It may turn out that parents actually making the choice don’t care much about this issue and that schools will have to pay more attention to other perks that attract enrollment.
“What we have to be prepared for,” says Fuller, “is that once we give parents the option to choose, they might not choose a school for the same reasons that those of us who think we know what we’re talking about would.”
