Messy Marketplace

State voucher programs are making for an increasingly messy private school marketplace, especially in states that have placed few requirements on the private schools that accept them and on the families who receive them. In some states, private schools enrolling students with vouchers need not be accredited, could be for profit, or nonprofit with no checks and balances for conflicts of interest, and provide very little information to the state or public on ROI. Those scenarios will become even messier in states that embrace the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program, 29 to-date. The US Treasury has indicated that these voucher-like scholarships will be similarly regulation-lite.

For the past 60+ years, Americans have had two simple cognitive frameworks for private schools: fancy prep schools and neighborhood parochial schools, day schools and boarding schools. And even in private school saturated cities like St. Louis, where I live, most people are two or three degrees removed from private schooling, viewing it from the stands at a game, through a parenting conversation with a colleague, or in all its cartoonish forms in books and movies. Every independent school marketing or enrollment director has encountered these hazy perceptions of independent schools and tried to dispel them, no easy task. State and federal funding, and especially universal vouchers buffered by limited, soft regulations will make these perceptions exponentially messier because the money has already begun creating new schools, many of them on the other side of grifty.

Your independent school friends in Florida and Arizona can give you a sneak preview. As this ProPublica article relates, more than 100 new private schools open each year in those states. Arizona is so hands-off, it doesn't know how many private schools new or otherwise exist within its boundaries. Some of these new schools are penny-ante nonprofit frauds, operating solely with voucher dollars and a handful of garden-variety shell games, e.g. the Head is also an employee of her brother's accouting firm which keeps the school's books. There's enough money in the game that highly capitalized national concerns have also jumped into the market. AltSchool has reduced the school day to two hours of AI-guided screen time (for $45K) with "leadership projects" completing the day. The Gardner Schools has applied private equity principles to create a network of preschools in 9 cities. All told, these players are flooding into the market to vie for attention with an audience that only dimly understands private schools in the first place and, post-Varsity Blues, is inclined to think of them as bogus and insufferable.

Whether you're already living in this soup or hoping that your blue state's Blaine Amendment will preclude the adoption of the FSTC, the solutions for independent schools are straightforward: focus on our proven strengths--accreditation, legacy of excellence--and ward off our vulnerabilities through the tough, daily work of exceptional governance. This is a time for independent schools to get very clear about what has made our model for schooling excellent for many years. A year ago, I wrote about the need for independent schools to combat the Varsity Blues effect (independent schools as fluffing studios for the under-talented children of the rich) by showcasing visible, authentic excellece. That need is even greater now as is the need to highlight external verifiers. Your marketing people will tell you that accreditation is among the least sexy pitches, but I believe it's critical to weave it into your internal and external marketing content and to ask your accrediting association to step up their own campaign to highlight standards and the integrity of their process. For your internal and external marketing, it's time to push against the edges of your bragging comfort zone by mining your school's history of objective excellence, highlighting contemporary examples and upping the school's game to produce more of them. This is not a call to turn your school into a glimmer generator and students into performers, rather a call to shed your reflexive modesty and make your goal to separate your school from the competitors not on the margins but on a galactic scale.

Last, commit your board to exceptional governance best practice. This is "a custom more honored in the breach than in the observance." That is, good governance, even more unsexy than accreditation, will never be a marketing talking point, but failures of good governance will be, more than ever, headline news. Within a month of Texas's new voucher program, the nonprofit news source, Texas Tribune, published investigative pieces on cartoonish governance failures in private schools receiving voucher money. Nepotism, major donor overreach, inside track deals, all of the conflict of interest face plants that the outside world expects from private schools are failures of good governance and places ripe for equivocation about which you must be hyper-vigilant.