As school choice continues to grow, public schools vie for students with innovative marketing approaches.
A teenage girl in a green crop top and sweatpants stands in front of her iPhone camera. Pulsing music plays over time lapses of the student and her friends in class—filling out worksheets, doing TikTok dances, working on iPads. It may seem to be a typical day-in-the-life video posted by a would-be teenage influencer, but this video is different. This student isn’t posting on her own or chasing personal fame. Instead, she is promoting her school as part of public education’s newest recruitment strategy.
In late March, Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) unveiled an initiative to recruit and pay high school students to post positive accounts of their time at DPSCD institutions. To get this job, eligible teens had to create a 60-second reel explaining why they would be a great fit for the role. Then applicants attended social-media etiquette and content-creation classes. Those selected receive $250 a month to serve as student influencers. Some of the resulting videos are more polished, featuring interviews with teachers, while others are pure teenage energy, full of teenage slang and YouTube-like intros.
The videos are a response to the growing number of schooling options available to students and families. As national enrollment declines, charter schools and voucher programs are leeching students from traditional public schools. Unlike district schools, which serve students within designated areas, charter schools do not cater to any fixed geographic zones. When a student enrolls to a charter school, a public institution loses not only that student but also the state and federal funding linked to their enrollment. Districts like Detroit hope influencer campaigns can help reverse that trend and win students back.
Davon Johnson, a sophomore student influencer at Detroit’s Demby High, only has 52 followers on Instagram, but he is enthusiastic about his new job. In one video for Teacher Appreciation Week, he and his friends approach a favorite teacher with a gift bag and a poster, bringing her to (happy) tears.
“My generation in particular—we’re always on social media. It’s just become a daily part of our lives,” Johnson said. “So I do think if you want to get in contact with my generation, you need to meet us where we’re at.”
Public school marketing isn’t new, but this strategy is, marking a transition from the traditional mailed flyers and even Facebook ads, to an approach that district administrators hope reads as more authentic and student-centered. But the rise of public school marketing may also mark a departure from long-held values of public education, experts say. The sheer volume of information overwhelms parents, and the pressure of packaging an experience and branding schools could distract educators, administrators, and families alike from what truly matters: quality of education.
It is impossible to extricate public school marketing from the topic of school choice. For decades, most students attended their local public school, with a choice few attending mostly parochial private schools. Then, in 1991, Minnesota passed the country’s first charter-school law and forever changed the national school enrollment landscape. Charter schools are publicly funded but run by an outside group, meaning they have more autonomy than traditional public schools. Families are often drawn to charters for their specialized programs, which may center on language immersion, the arts, or a certain educational philosophy.
Because charter schools don’t have built-in enrollment like traditional schools, their survival depends on attracting enough students to sustain operations. Quickly, they turned to advertising and marketing to get their name out and boost enrollment. Throughout the ’90s and 2000s, states passed their own charter laws and today, there are charter schools in 45 states.
With students lured to charters by sleek websites and compelling curricula, traditional public schools realized they too needed to get in the marketing game. Between 2010 and 2021, 2 million students left traditional public schools and enrollment in charters more than doubled. Schools must “continuously explain why they’re worth public investment—that is no longer a given,” said Joel Cagne, CEO of K-12 schools marketing and communications consulting firm Allerton Hill. “Public schools, if they do survive and continue, have to really sing for their supper.”
Traditional public schools from coast to coast began advertising in competition with charter and private schools. There were giant ads on public transit, flyers in mailboxes, texts with reminders about application deadlines, and school tours.
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic only accelerated such marketing. “Covid has made school districts the political piñata for both the left and the right, so that has put even more of the onus on them to market themselves [and prove] that they are still a worthwhile investment to the community,” Cagne said.
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Universal voucher programs offer even greater competition and more options to families by helping enable enrollment in previously unaffordable private schools, though it is unclear how many students are actually taking advantage of the vouchers to transfer from public to private schools.
Social media, too, increases the pressure on school districts. A disgruntled parent can now have a wide reach and public relations crises have a longer life. Declining national fertility rates also simply mean fewer children of school age.
Public school districts, Cagne said, “have come to realize that they can no longer operate in a vacuum, that if they’re not telling their story, somebody else is and it might not be with the best intention.” Consequently, marketing consulting companies like Allerton Hill and district-run initiatives like Detroit’s student influencers have become lifelines.
Detroit plans to spend $42,000 on student influencers and a community ambassador program in the first year. The full marketing plan will cost around $1.4 million. The district is not alone.
In 2025, the Newark Public Schools school board approved a contract of over $275,000 with Caissa Public Strategy, a Memphis-based communications firm, to recruit over 300 students through “secret shoppers, door knocking, and market and trend analysis.” Indianapolis Public Schools used Covid relief money to hire the same company to contact the families of students who had previously been enrolled in district schools; at the worst point, students were leaving the district at a rate of one in 10. And during Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, New York City Public Schools, the largest school district in the country, spent at least $21 million on an ad campaign that appeared on public transit and businesses throughout the city.
It’s unclear if all this spending is actually doing much; New York City public schools still lost 88,000 students in the past five years to charters, privates, and families moving out of New York City. And even if marketing campaigns do successfully increase enrollment, thus increasing the amount of state and federal money flowing to public schools, some experts worry that all this fuss over marketing is misplaced.
Ideally, schools would meet competition by focusing on upgrading their curriculum, searching for meaningful new extracurricular activities, and improving teacher quality, said Douglas Harris, a professor of economics at Tulane University and a researcher of education policy. But this isn’t where schools look first when confronted with greater competition. “The things that will be persuasive are not necessarily the things that make schools better,” he said.
Harris lives and works in New Orleans, a city whose schools are almost entirely charters. In his research, he found that one of the first things schools did in response to the environment of extreme competition was improve the customer service in the front office. “Is that doing anything to the quality of education? No, it’s not,” he said.
Harris is less concerned about the money spent, which he says is a relatively small portion of total district costs, than the way the focus on marketing and choice might reflect a change in the ethos of public education.
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Public schools are supposed to educate all kids, preparing them to be members of a healthy democracy. But choice and the ubiquity of marketing create winners and losers, said Catherine DiMartino, author of Selling School: The Marketing of Public Education. Rather than a suite of strong options, there are good and bad schools. Only those whose parents have the time and resources to sort through the avalanche of information about these options will enroll in the best schools, she said.
Marketing is in some ways very helpful to parents. Text reminders! A beautifully designed website! But it’s not so simple, DiMartino said. Even engaged, knowledgeable parents can find themselves lost and confused. When it came time for her three children to attend public schools, DiMartino was quickly overwhelmed by the options in her charter-saturated Brooklyn neighborhood. “I ended up moving to the suburbs, because the idea for me of doing my homework for all three kids, visiting the schools, looking at the test scores, looking at the after-school activities, going to the open houses, seemed really overwhelming,” she said.
DiMartino is an expert in public school marketing. If she can’t navigate the deluge of information surrounding choosing a school for your child, then who can? She worries that the multitude of marketing surrounding charters and public schools is harming parents’ ability to select the best school for their child.
“If choice is supposed to be about individual free will to choose what’s best for your kids, how do you do that in a highly marketized or highly advertised environment?” DiMartino said. “Because advertising is all about image-shaping and influencing a consumer. Are people really making an objective choice or is it a choice where the image has been massaged in some way?”
It seems that public school marketing isn’t going away any time soon. But, experts questioned if it was having the intended effect: better schools and a better education for the nation’s children.
Samantha CamireSamantha Camire is a 2026 Puffin writing fellow for The Nation. She studies journalism at Indiana University, where she serves as the General Assignment Editor for The Indiana Daily Student. Her work has also appeared in Chalkbeat and The Indiana Citizen.