superintendent's responses to public school choice : an inductive multicase study of school choice policies in Massachusetts

This qualitative case study interviewed four public school superintendents to explore their experiences and decision-making in the face of competition from charter schools and interdistrict school choice. Legislation in Massachusetts in the early 1990’s provided parents the option to send their children to a charter school or another public school district outside of the family’s hometown. The study focused upon the leaders of four of the ten public school districts on Cape Cod between the years of 2005 and 2010. During this time, Cape school districts were losing students to charter schools and to neighboring districts through inter-district school choice. These enrollment losses were further magnified by a demographic decline in the school-aged population. All of the districts in this study tried to retain their resident students while actively recruiting choice students from other districts; some districts were more successful at maintaining and even augmenting enrollment than others. There were clear winners and losers in this melee of school choice competition. The district experiencing the least competitive pressure did not appear to innovate in the face of competition, whereas, the other three districts appeared to respond to the market dynamics and improved their program in hopes of retaining and recruiting more students. Each of the superintendents reported some benefits from school choice competition, but there was a darker side to this competition, including a diminished sense of community and disproportional loss of involved parents in some districts and a lack of collaboration amongst the region’s school districts.