San Antonio and the Limits of School District Innovation Zones
Innovation Zones are a positive step for school districts, but they cannot replace an actual educational marketplace.
Following our review of district-sponsored charter schools, we now analyze Innovation Zones, another policy response to the free-market challenge that charter schools pose to the education establishment. Innovation Zones attempt to simulate the kind of flexibility and creativity found in a charter school marketplace within a subsection of the public school district, but without the district relinquishing any power. With Innovation Zones, charter school opponents argue, districts can provide all the model diversity parents want. There’s no need for charter schools or other choice innovations to provide alternative publicly funded options to families.
An imitation charter market within the district
Also called Autonomous Improvement Zones, Innovation Zones are permitted by legislation in 25 states and have popped up in dozens of major cities including Chicago, Memphis, and Los Angeles. Although their details vary, the basic concept imbues a subset of the district’s schools with the qualities of a decentralized charter market such as managerial autonomy, small-scale experimentation, and so on.
In practice, this often means relaunching low-performing schools with new principals who have increased control over staffing, curriculum, and budgeting. Desperate to prove that public schools can self-reform without external competition, districts often direct additional funding or philanthropy to their Innovation Zone schools.
In granting principals the freedom to try new “turnaround models,” district tacitly admit that their top-down approach might not always be best for all kids. At the same time, districts (like most organizations) loathe ceding control to anyone except those who put their board in power. Principals are allowed to “innovate,” but only within permitted bounds, meaning in ways that don’t seriously challenge special interests like the teachers’ union or pension system.
A district’s relationship to its Innovation Zone is like Ford’s relationship to Lincoln, its luxury vehicle division. Ford gives Lincoln license to follow different design rules and operate separately from its main brand but, ultimately, every Lincoln is still a Ford. Lincoln isn’t allowed to create cars or advertise in ways that undermine the Ford brand.
Free-market school competition improves performance
Texas formalized Innovation Zones in 2017 through Senate Bill 1882. The legislation allowed districts to exempt a subset of their schools from the district’s approved regulations and collective bargaining agreements. San Antonio launched its Innovation Zone the following year.
A new study of San Antonio educational outcomes, released on July 28 by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), compares the academic performance of standard district schools, district Innovation Schools, and charter schools in the 2018–2019 school year. The results suggest that the more free-market qualities a school or school sector has, the better its academic outcomes.
Innovation Schools, which some policymakers tout as “charter school lite,” outperformed standard district schools in reading across all subgroups but were statistically similar for math performance. Something about shedding the district’s monopoly — perhaps a perceived sense of accountability or the strategic plan they needed to compete — led Innovation Schools to teach literacy 24 percent better than their standard district counterparts. Put another way, the students enrolled at Innovation Schools got the benefit of an extra two months of reading instruction (+43/180 days).
That is meaningful improvement, but students at charter schools performed even better. Charter school students received the benefit of an additional 100 days of reading and 50 days of math instruction. To be clear, that doesn’t mean charter school students actually attended more days of school than their district counterparts. Rather, charter schools were so much more effective at teaching literacy and numeracy — 56 percent and 28 percent, respectively — that district students would need an extra 100 days of reading and 50 math days of instruction to keep pace with charter school students.
That means a typical charter school student who dropped out after spring break would still read better than if they had attended a district school for the full year. And that holds true for all at-risk student subgroups. By winter break, charter school special education students had learned almost as much as their district counterparts would learn in the whole year.
Innovation Zones offer ersatz choice and innovation
Innovation Zones try to capture the benefits of market competition without actually introducing the threat of real competition. In and of themselves, that’s not a bad development. Most American children still attend district schools, and we should applaud any steps districts take to empower imaginative educators and loosen self-imposed bureaucracy.
The problem is that Innovation Zones are often presented as a way to preempt more charter schools and, sometimes, as a holistic alternative to them. Instead, we should see an Innovation Zone for what it is: not an educational marketplace itself, but as a mechanism to improve one provider within the marketplace.
Innovation Zones imitate school choice by masquerading a single education provider, the district, as a marketplace of putatively distinct Innovation Schools.
District-controlled Innovation Schools are bound by the same assumptions, skills, and leadership as every other district school, which results in more uniformity than is optimal. In particular, the one-size-fits-all approach of a monopoly is the worst for students whose particular learning needs fall furthest from the mean. The district underperformed most for students with special needs (SPED) and those learning English as a second language (ESL). San Antonio’s charter school marketplace, by contrast, let those families self-select from a truly diverse set of schools to find the model that best served their children. Charter schools performed 47 percent better on average with SPED and ESL students than their district counterparts; Innovation Schools, partially shielded from the district’s monolithic administration, performed 14 percent better.
Innovation Zones imitate school choice by masquerading a single education provider as a marketplace of putatively distinct Innovation Schools. The data suggest these schools help districts improve, but regions should not forsake truly competitive educational marketplaces where any provider — even the district — can lose students and go out of business. That pressure of competition has eliminated the worst charter schools in San Antonio and is the reason the successful charter schools consistently outperform the district.
When charter schools survive, it is because they outperform competitors and gain market share. The real winners are parents and kids, who enjoy better and better school options. In the four years since the CREDO study, San Antonio charter school enrollment has grown by 30 percent and two-thirds of city charter schools have waitlists.
District Innovation Schools are an improvement, but policymakers should not prioritize them at the expense of other school options. The bottom line and the San Antonio waitlists show that Innovation Schools are a next-best option to high performing charter schools that have proven their value in a true education market.
