Using the tools of politics, marketing, and communications, education reformers can build the public support needed to sustain their efforts to improve public education. These tools include:

• Polls and focus groups to listen to the public, the customer.
• Brochures, newsletters, videos, radio and TV spots, web pages and other mechanisms to publicize messages.
• Community organizations for involving parents and other community members.
• Public relations and media relations (though districts often mistake these relatively limited tools as the whole tool kit).
• Strategic planning, to ensure all activities work well together and support priorities.
• Constant measurement and feedback to make sure your efforts are getting results.

 Building Public Confidence

In order to build public confidence, a school district decided to reach out to the surrounding community for help in planning the future directions of the district. The district wanted to do three things:

1. Connect with all community members.
2. Gather community perceptions about district issues.
3. Use collected data to reexamine their long-term goals and strategic plans.

The district accomplished its mission by working through the stages listed below:

Stage 1: Comprehensive Public Input Process

• Collect suggestions and ideas from a "community summit".
• Use input to help define district-wide goals and increase district accountability.
• Develop quality indicators for each goal.
• Use quality indicators to define specific performance outcomes with annual targets.

Stage 2: Create Performance Benchmark Question Pool

• Define performance outcomes.
• Help in collection of baseline performance data.
• Involve community in refining the final draft (focus group composed of administrators, parents, and community members).

Stage 3: Recruit Response Groups

• Invite randomly selected parents and community members (Key Communicator Response Group, Employee Response Group, Student Response Group).
• Extend an open invitation to any community members who wanted to provide feedback.

You can use technologies such as automatic phone questionnaires, phone-in questionnaires, web page questionnaires, and advanced technologies to further this process.

For example, you can conduct an OutCall ™ of 50-100 respondents, consisting, for example, of PTA presidents, some staff, service club presidents, church leaders, business leaders, etc. The purpose is to:

• Easily gather direct, unfiltered feedback from a diverse segment of the community about critical issues facing the district.
• Ascertain the impact of front-page ‘news’ stories about specific events.
• Provide information to a group of people of influence (key communicators).
• Acquire some hard perception data, prior to embarking on a specific course of action.

The benefits of doing this are that you can:

• Balance pressure from a single interest group with immediate feedback from several different perspectives.
• Find out what various stakeholder groups know and want to know about a school issue before election.
• Build confidence in your schools.
• Improve staff relations.
• Improve accountability (institutional and individual)
• Use the information to help prioritize budget expenses.
• Gauge your community against national surveys by asking the same questions as those included in Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup and Public Agenda polls.

Resources

In this Module:

In the Toolkit: