You are marketing director for the Everything Under 35 Cents discount chain and your underlings just delivered the 2011 marketing plan for your consideration.

You’re furious. The plan focuses on the lower end of the economic pecking order, with no attention at all paid to the millionaires and newspaper publishers and other rich people who live within driving distance of so many of the stores.

The staff attempts to calm you. Boss, they explain, some retail is intended to cater to and coddle the rich folks, but when you do that, the overhead jumps and soon you have nothing left that you can sell profitably for 35 cents. At our stores, we focus on what we do best, on what we know we can excel at – peddling 50-gallon drums of laundry detergent to folks who are counting every penny.

Much the same scenario develops when I go to the bank to deposit the small bag of pennies I get as compensation for writing my column. I grab a paper cup full of complimentary coffee and stand in line to hand over my money. When the publisher of the paper goes to his bank, he is carried off to an oak-paneled private banking suite, where he sips champagne and is offered great deals on high-yielding bond funds from Lichtenstein.

Niche marketing, target marketing, isn’t in itself good or bad, moral or evil, democratic or despotic. While Cohen the Columnist can often be All Things to All People, most mere mortals choose specific targets that fit their skills and comfort levels.

The new charter schools in Massachusetts that are uneasily located in “low-performing” school districts must, as a matter of new state law, make special efforts to drag students who aren’t fluent in English kicking and screaming into the charter schools, spiff up their educations in an English as a Second Language sort of way, and be so alluring about it that the kids don’t drop out.

A noble mission, but what if those with limited English-language skills don’t make your educational heart go pitter-pat? What if your charter school specializes in transforming blue-collar white kids into either air conditioning technicians or Shakespeare scholars? What if you simply don’t have the core competence or commitment to serve up a high-level English-language remediation program to kids who are enticed into attending your school?

A Different Approach

At least in theory, the charter schools were created to be different from the traditional, all-things-to-all-people, one-size-fits-all, public schools. The state mandate to some of these new charter schools, requiring them to serve up a comprehensive language mission, seems to dump on the very idea of flexible marketing and targeting consumers who can best be served by your organization.

The bureaucrats are already complaining that most of the new 23 charter school applications don’t appropriately gush over the opportunity to serve up sophisticated, language-sensitive remedial education. But, if the charter schools don’t see that as an essential part of their mission, the existing public schools could, and should, be ramped up to provide what the “competition” is not inclined to deliver.

At the heart of all this is the long-simmering squabble between traditional public-school advocates and the “choice” folks about a competition that seems to burden the traditional public schools with the good, the bad and the ugly, while allowing charters and other nontraditional alternatives the luxury to pick and choose their clients. Across the country, some charter programs are required to take on students through a lottery – again, diminishing the notion that niche marketing can attract the best kind of customer to the appropriate kind of educational store.

One of Gov. Patrick’s subtle campaign messages last year championed the notion of “flexibility” in education, not only for charters and the like, but even for traditional public schools that wanted an opportunity to tinker a bit. Part of the character of “flexibility,” of course, is the freedom to say “no” – to suggest that certain kinds of customers belong elsewhere.

That’s an uncomfortable idea for a nation that generally accepts the nobility of “public” education. But, if we want the benefits of the market system to help us educate, the players must have some freedom to pick and choose their clients.