Public Relations
Schools Don’t Need Advertising
By Daniel Muniz

In my hometown, the San Antonio Independent School District mandated their new superintendent, Robert Duron, with a lofty but daunting task of improving the image of the their district. The school district intends to launch a public relations blitz with a two-fold purpose.

The first objective is to cast away the dingy reputation it has had for the past couple of decades as being an inner city, crime ridden, gang infested, and low performance district. The purpose of this “make-over” is to replace it with an image that resembles the more pristine reputation of its equally large suburban and exurban counterparts.
 

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The second objective is that a better image will help increase enrollment because more families are now opting to relocate to the suburbs. The district once had a peak of 76,000 students enrolled in 1969 (when it was in the suburbs) but today it has plummeted to an all time low of 55,000 even though the city of San Antonio has exploded in growth. And even if the district could just stabilize that low number and prevent it from plummeting any further with an influx of new families, it would still represent a tremendous victory.

But as with many governmental bureaucratic monopolies this organization has its priorities in the wrong place.

Although district officials lament that urban flight created huge suburban school districts with booming enrollments, they are so out of touch with reality because they completely misunderstand what the purpose of an education system is supposed to be. Yes, suburbanites like having newer bigger houses but they also want their kids to go to better schools especially when they are deciding where to live at.

A solid quality education in a safe learning environment will do more to improve a school district’s reputation than what all the m dollars and marketing campaigns could ever possibly accomplish.

Yes, spending a lot of money on public relations will help definitely accentuate the positives but it won’t do anything to help eliminate the negatives. The fatal flaw with this approach, which has already been implemented by so many other school districts around the country, is that pretending that the negatives do not exist does not mean that they go away even if you do hire a snazzy advertising agency.

If a young family has a choice of where to live, they are not exactly thrilled about sending their children to an environment infested with hoodlums, drugs, violence, gangs, and other undesirable elements. And if they want good schools, then they definitely don’t want to send their children to where standards are diluted and where a watered down curriculum that graduates barely illiterate students is the norm.

The educational leadership of inner city schools often feels that they are between a rock and hard place.

They do want to instill better standards and enforce more discipline, especially when it comes violent gang bangers, yet they will often be penalized by the public for punishing poor kids and minorities even though a tougher curriculum is what is really needed. By choosing the path of least resistance, they end up weakening their academic standards and loosening up on discipline which makes more people happy, especially the indifferent parents.

This perverse incentive just encourages the people who won’t tolerate that mush for education to flee to the suburbs.

The bottom line is that these school districts have to get serious with academics.

They have to develop the courage to say no to excuses and say no to the whining from inner city community leaders. Yes, these community leaders want to have it both ways. They get upset with rigorous curriculums that fail kids but then they also get mad when students can hardly read and write. There is no way to make them happy so school districts ought to choose the path that represents a quality education even if it means flunking students and bringing lousy parents to task for their lack of parental guidance.

In the business world, if you offer a good product, people want it and some are even willing to pay through the nose for it.

It is no different in education.

If these inner city school districts want to attract more families to invest in their attendance boundaries, then they are going to have to provide something of substance and value that people want. Nobody wants junk and urban flight is perhaps the embodiment of that.

A catchy slogan, a slick poster, and maybe a few sharp television commercials will give an impression that a district has an excellent education, but it won’t take long for parents to realize that they have been duped when nothing else has been done to transform failing schools into high performing ones.

It is time for school districts all over the country to eliminate their public relations departments and to remove anything in their budgets that has to do with advertising. Actions speak louder than words and they definitely speak louder than any clever but deceptive marketing schemes.

Let the results of a good education and academic performance speak for itself.

And if a school district cannot produce a quality education, then all the advertising in the world is not going to help.

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