(Digitally) Connecting Students, Schools, and Districts: Measuring the Size and Popularity of K-12 Public and Charter School District Websites

Abstract

As open enrollment charter districts have continued to grow in Texas, researchers and policymakers have continued to investigate how charter districts market themselves to the public in an effort to recruit students, teachers, and finances. Although a wealth of research has examined how charter districts recruit students, teachers, and finances through traditional methods, recent developments in computer science now allows researchers to measure the size and visibility of district websites on the Internet. As a result, this study uses the Texas Education Agency and SEMrush data from the 2018–2019 school year to compare the website size and popularity of charter school district and traditional public school district websites to understand how these districts invest in their robustness of their web presence. Results suggest that when compared to traditional public school districts in Texas, charter school districts publish smaller websites ( p < 0.001) and are less popular on the Internet ( p < 0.001) than traditional public peers. Implications for research, policy, and competition between open enrollment charter districts and traditional public school districts are addressed.

The Internet and K-12 Education: Capturing Digital Metrics During the COVID-19 Era

“…Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet had forever changed K-12 school districts (Childs & Taylor, 2022;Jones & Figueiredo-Brown, 2018). Yet, the research into the measurement of K-12 school districts has largely remained unchanged.…”

“…Traditional scholarship regarding measurement of K-12 school districts has primarily focused on physical metrics (students, teachers, classrooms, and schools) or fiscal metrics (per-pupil spending, salaries) (Jabbar, 2015). However, over the past twenty years, school districts have increased their marketing, informational, and advertising presence online, given the way that the Internet has rendered the K-12 landscape a more competitive one (Taylor & Childs, 2020;Childs & Taylor, 2022;Jabbar, 2015). Amplifying the importance of the Internet, COVID-19 has forced many K-12 school districts to shift operations and instruction onto online platforms and environments, rendering it necessary for teachers and students to rely heavily on the Internet to teach and learn (Borup et al, 2020; Childs & Taylor, 2021, 2022.…”

“…The transformation of online education, both in practice and organizationally, presents opportunities for educational researchers to collect and analyze digital data that could be useful for understanding policy and practice decisions in school districts, especially as it relates to the access to and quality of online or hybrid teaching and learning (Childs & Taylor, 2021, 2022. Although reliant on physical wires and conductors, digital technology has advanced to the point where now, the world wide web can be measured through digital means, allowing researchers to explore new digital web metrics that could not be measured decades prior.…”

“…These digital web metrics can provide insight into how many people visit a website, how much an organization spends on hosting website traffic and web advertisements, and how visible a website is within search results, to name a few. As a result, researchers and policymakers can better understand how a K-12 school or school district invests in their website, thus influencing the accessibility and quality of the website itself (Taylor & Childs, 2020, Childs & Taylor, 2022.…”

“…Understanding how K-12 school districts leverage their websites is critical to conceptualize how school districts spend on web technologies and whether certain schools or school districts are better positioned to educate students and maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive online marketplace (Childs & Taylor, 2021, 2022Jabbar, 2015). Prior research in higher education revealed that an institution's digital web metrics can help to explain their influence, popularity, and overall web presence, which in turn influences student enrollment and tuition revenue dollars (Alsmadi & Taylor, 2019;Jones & Figueiredo-Brown, 2018;Taylor & Bicak, 2020).…”