School Marketing as a Sorting Mechanism: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Charter School Websites

Abstract

An emerging body of research has explored “supply side” questions of school choice, or how schools and systems shape enrollment through locational decisions, recruitment, and marketing. This study focuses on how school websites market and communicate the distinct missions of charter schools to prospective families. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 55 elementary charter school websites in one demographically diverse metropolitan area, we explore how school websites operate as discursive texts that signal the potential “fit” between particular schools and particular families. Guided by a critical discourse analysis framework, we emphasize how websites (a) employ implicit discourses of race, culture, and diversity; (b) draw on different meanings of academic achievement, and (c) emphasize different ideologies of individualized learning. We argue that websites act as one mechanism that contributes to the segmentation and differentiation of an emerging local marketplace of school options.

Notes

We employ the term “market segmentation” to describe how schools in a given marketplace may not compete against all other schools in that market. In contrast, schools may have incentives to target particular subsets of students and families. This term has long been employed in economic literature on marketing (see Smith, 1956; Wedel, 2000), but less often in the literature on education marketing (exceptions include Batie, 2009; Scott & Wells 2013). In their review of the research on marketing, Oplatka and Hemsley-Brown (2012) note a few examples of marketing segmentation strategies (e.g., Bagley et al., 1996; Maguire, Ball, & Macrae, 2001), but conclude that schools are unlikely to employ systematic approaches to marketing research, positioning, and segmentation (2012, pp. 15–16).