One of the great horrors — and yet, one of the great joys — of the travel, tourism and hospitality industry these days is the Internet chatter posted by passengers, customers and other hangers-on who have stayed at your honeymoon suite (the champagne was flat) or feasted at the all-you-can-eat buffet at your poolside café (be sure to try the chicken wings).
The potent mix of advertising and marketing and branding now runs up against analysis from real customers, in the flesh, or, at least, on the keyboard.
There are still niches of everyday life, of course, that rely on rumor and reputation and guesswork to attract the curious — or drive them away.
One of the most significant business enterprises that, for the most part, avoids traditional advertising, and yet receives little in the way of Internet chatter analysis, is public education. Which brand of local public school is perceived to be naughty or nice, special or mundane, appealing or appalling, is a curious, often squeamish mix of data and perceptions and unsophisticated guesswork.
And the public may or may not be up to the task. A new public opinion poll in Massachusetts found that parents in “Gateway Cities” (which in Massachusetts-speak, normally means factory towns that don’t have any factories) gave their public schools high marks — even though, by normal standards, the schools were teetering on the edge of awful. No, the upper-middle-class to snobby rich don’t come streaming into Massachusetts, begging the real estate agents to sell them homes in Springfield or New Bedford, so their kids can feast on high-quality public education.
While much of this is based on the sturdy foundation of test scores and percentage of graduates who go to college and other such data, the embarrassing truth is that much of the shorthand for what determines a school’s image is the percentage of minority students, or, in the alternative, the percentage of blue-collar kids of any color whose parents drive them to school in a pickup truck. This is no secret, of course, but it is rarely talked about out loud, because we prefer the gentle prodding of “No Child Left Behind.”
It is the school systems on the edge — many of them “ring suburbs” within spitting distance of central cities — that have the most challenging chore in polishing up school system images. In the Hartford area, the increasingly minority Bloomfield schools know that, in addition to succeeding at reading, writing and arithmetic, they must also work to convince middle-class white folks — and black as well — to stay in the system.
For a real factory town, such as East Hartford, snob appeal is not really an issue. The middle class of every race, religion and creed must be coddled and reassured that Junior won’t be ill-educated or physically abused in the school parking lot.
All this explains in part the angst suffered by the Manchester public schools, after the recent, embarrassing student brawl at Manchester High School. Put aside how the chaos was handled, or whether secrecy is the best policy in coping with kids run amok. The blow to Manchester is that this is another town on the edge, coping with an integrated student population and an increasingly wary middle class, wondering whether it’s time to move to Glastonbury.
Were the brawlers in Manchester gang members? Were they black or white? Are they, in the aggregate, guilty as charged? The problem, to those attempting to spiff up tenuous public school systems, is that the answers hardly matter. This isn’t social science research. It’s perception. It’s marketing. It’s very difficult, and often, unfair.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
