| WHO
IS THE "CUSTOMER" FOR K-12 PUBLIC EDUCATION?
Article by Herb
Rubenstein
CEO, Growth Strategies Inc
Introduction
As the Development
Chair (fundraising) for the Montgomery Blair High School, I attended
PTSA meetings with great regularity. I once asked the question,
“Who is the customer for K-12 Public Education? As an Adjunct
Professor of Entrepreneurism at George Mason University I am aware
that the term “customer” means “one who pays for
a service, a patron or buyer.” However, today when you go
to the doctor you do not pay, your insurance company pays most often,
yet you would argue strongly that you are the customer, not your
insurance company.
So the first
question is: Does K-12 Public Education have a customer? If the
answer is “No,” then there is a huge problem. Without
a customer, a supplier (in this case the public education system
including teachers, administrators and funding sources) has no idea
how to properly measure the quality of the service provided, has
no idea of what services to increase, decrease or stop delivering
in their entirety. Without a “customer” a supplier does
not know if it is performing well, if an innovation is successful,
if an innovation or change is needed and can not learn from the
essential feedback from the customer as to how to improve its services.
It is more than a logical fallacy to say that K-12 public education
does not have a customer. My definition of a “customer”
is “the one whose interests are most served by the supplier
and without whom the supplier would go out of business.” There
are only three possible candidates as to who is the “customer”
of K-12 public education.
The
Customer
Having determined
that K-12 public education must have a customer, who is that customer?
One could argue it is a) the parents, b) the teachers and administrators,
c) the employers of students or d) the students themselves.
Unless K-12
is only day care or a means to get the children out of the hair
of the parents, then the parents are clearly not the customer. There
could be no parents (due to a war or some catastrophe) and if there
are children, then we would need to supply them with education.
The parents are not the ones whose test scores we use to determine
if the school is doing well. It is the students. Surely, the teachers
and administrators are not the customers. They do not pay for school.
Schools are not designed for their benefit and teachers and administrators
are the suppliers of education, not the customer.
An interesting
argument could be made that employers are the customer for public
schools because they need people with math, English and other skills,
plus discipline, and the purpose of the schools is to teach these
skills to students for the purpose of meeting the employer’s
needs. The grading of students is the way that schools communicate
to employers how “worthy” the students are as future
employees. This writer has
been informed that in Connecticut the DuPont Company built schools
in the 1920’s for African Americans and paid for the teachers
since neither the state nor US government would do so. A dissertation
is being written on this topic and may cogently argue that this
is conclusive proof that employers are the customers of K-12 public
schools. The argument of “employers” as the customers
of k-12 public education, while interesting and supported by some
evidence going back for nearly 100 years, is misguided. Employers
today do not pay for schools and they are not the prime beneficiaries
of the public education system. If schools fail to teach students,
or, to put it another way, if students fail to learn anything useful
in school, and the student wants to work and an employer wants to
hire the student, employers will train the student as necessary
to fill the job. While employers benefit greatly from the K-12 public
education system, they are not the customer; they are not the reason
why schools exist.
The only logical
answer for “who is the customer of the K-12 public education
system” is the student. It is the student who we seek to train,
teach and improve. It is the student whose test scores we use to
determine success of the system. Without students, the very idea
or existence of a school is absurd.
What
Does It Mean That The Student Is The Customer
In this Age
of Accountability new efforts to focus on test scores appear to
make the K-12 public education system accountable for student performance.
However, students have some choice in the matter. They can choose
to work hard and earn higher grades or choose to work less hard
and earn lower grades and have lower test scores. The teacher may
or may not be directly responsible for how hard the student works.
Clearly, the student, him or herself, is responsible for how hard
they work.
Recently my
daughter who is 17 went to the doctor and took some medical tests.
As she was checking out, she noticed on the bill (which the insurance
company was going to pay for) there was a $20.00 charge for a test
that she was not given. She insisted that the doctor’s office
take the charge off of the bill and they did. Even though she was
not paying for the bill, she wanted the doctor’s office to
know who was the customer. She was the customer.
If it is the job of the schools to insure that the customer, the
student, does well, then the supplier better figure out what the
customer wants and figure out how to supply what the customer wants.
My daughter wanted a bill that was accurate. The Age of Accountability
has hit 17 year olds who will not stand for their doctors’
offices cheating insurance companies, even out of a mere $20.00.
The supplier
in any situation is and must be accountable to the customer. The
customer can leave, and many students have left the public school
system via home schools, charter schools, private schools, and many
have just dropped out. My family left the District of Columbia to
move to Maryland because our children, then in the second and 5th
grades demanded better schools. We moved to Maryland and got better
schools.
Knowing that
the student is the customer will totally change the way education
is delivered in the K-12 public education system. Today companies
are spending billions on “Customer Relationship Management”
and those that understand what their customer wants and needs will
be the winners. K-12 public education schools have never had a history
of listening to students to find out how they want to learn, to
find out what they want to learn and for that reason students in
the K-12 public education setting have so little choice in what
and how they learn that it is not surprising that there is not a
good fit between the supplier and the customer in this industry.
The
Customer
There is an
old saying, “The customer is always right.” Clearly
five and six year old children just starting school can not be expected
to be right all of the time. And neither can 18 year old seniors.
But, five and six year old children and 18 year old young adults
are often right and the K-12 public school system needs to listen
to them and needs to figure out new ways to supply educations the
way the customer wants to get it.
If the K-12
public education system continues to ignore the fact the student
is the customer, the customers will continue to flea via vouchers,
via home schooling, via dropping out. Without a customer a supplier
can not exist. Without a growing customer base, a supplier can not
flourish. The timing is critical for the K-12 public education system
to begin to understand that a new partnership between the supplier
(teachers, administrators and public funding sources) and the customer
must be formed. New forms of real feedback must be established with
formal student evaluations of teachers, formal systems where students
have real input into how they are treated, how they are educated
and how they are viewed.
Conclusion
In this Age
of Accountability, suppliers are now accountable to their customers
and the public at large. The K-12 public education system is not
immune from this new era. Teachers and administrators will find
that they will become accountable to students and treat them as
customers or they will see vouchers empty their classrooms. This
author does not want to see the day where the only payment a teacher
receives is early retirement because the public education system
was closed down due to the lack of customers.
If teachers
and administrators continue to argue that “there is no “customer”
for K-12 public education, they may find that what they say becomes
a self-fulfilling prophesy and one day there will be no students
in their classrooms. On that day, and not a day before, will it
be true that “there is no customer” for K-12 public
education. Let us hope that day never arrives, but we are heading
in that direction through no fault of the parents, through no fault
of the students and through no fault of the employers who want to
hire well trained students. We are heading in that direction because
the K-12 public education system refuses to recognize who
their customer is and refuses to treat their customers the way suppliers
need to treat their customers if they want to keep them as customers.
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