Increased Competition For Students is the New Normal

I had the honor of addressing about 100 public school superintendents last week, just as we were unpacking copies of Thrive for all of them!  (If you have not seen it yet, I have updated the home page of my website, where you can click a link for a free download of the Introduction).  They represented large and small districts; urban and rural, wealthy and poor.  I led off my talk with the theses that underlies Thrive; that we are experiencing a period of rapid evolution driven in part by new levels of customer choice  in education, and that most, if not all, schools will have to learn to compete for families and students who have been passive consumers in the past.

Most of the heads in the room were nodding in agreement. Private school leaders are used to competing for students, but now public superintendents and principals see the impacts of district-wide choice, cross-district enrollment options, rural school and district consolidation, and increased access to high-quality on-line learning.

Just today I read an article out of MIT about new AI-based learning platforms that have millions of users in China, and are headed our way.  Most educators I respect are horrified at the prospect of students learning exclusively from a computer screen, but most agree that AI will and should have a role to play in some elements of learning.  Schools that find this balance will have an attractive story to tell their prospective families; they will enhance their differentiated value proposition in the competition for students.

“Winning” is not a bad term in education; it is just a word that denotes success where competition is involved.  Competition is an increasing part of the K-12 landscape, and success is never a bad thing!