The right model for a school

(c) Gary Hayes, via Flickr

If you’re a Twitter user and you’re looking for great, thought-provoking ideas on education then a good place to start is @spedteacher.  His blog, Education On The Plate is a must-read for anyone looking for stimulating input on the subject of education.  I saw through Twitter that he’d blogged on the subject of running schools like a business – something which I feel has great advantages.  One thing that Deven did was to identify that this is not only controversial, it is also not simple.  Teachers are almost naturally resistant to the factory model for a school, recognising that students are individuals in their formative years and have differing needs and skills.  I’ve even heard a teacher use Pink Floyd’s, The Wall as an example of how school can be too focused on creating drones.  Sadly when it comes to this piece of music, I can’t forgive the band for the first line – We don’t need no education.  Countless kids know this line without understanding or even having heard the rest of the piece.

Employers bemoan the fact that school-leavers are often (in their eyes) ill-equipped for the demands of the working world.  They regularly claim that standards are falling.  Indeed on the same day as Deven’s post, @rliberni tweeted a link to an article blaming Twitter and Facebook for falling standards of grammar.  The article is taking a cheap shot at social media.  It’s a populist approach, but it’s pretty hard to prove a correlation.  The most significant part of the post was a quotation from Ann Barrett from Waterloo University.  She poses the question:

“Are [schools] (really) preparing students for university studies?”

Many employers are asking the same thing and reconciling the views of the employers/further education on one side and the teachers on the other side will need a major change from one or both parties.

Deven wrote in his blog:

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: the folks talking about running schools believe their customers are their product.

The problem with making the student into the customer is that you then have a model with a customer who often doesn’t know what he wants and doesn’t always have the skills or knowledge to decide on what he wants. Given that education is a major “purchase” (to continue with the model) you are putting a lot of responsibility on the business to supply the right product. After all, the business offers no warranty on its product.  Just imagine offering a two-year warranty on your last foreign language lesson!

When I want to be brutally blunt, or I need to simplify something to get a reaction from an audience, I will often say that the children are the product, but the customers of a school are future employers and if the school isn’t providing what the customer wants then the customer is going to start complaining.  Believe me, the customers have been complaining loud and clear for decades.  The problem is that schools don’t have customer service departments, so no-one takes any notice of the complaints.

But even this is an over-simplification.  I use it as a tactic to generate discussion.  What we really need to do is differentiate between consumers and customers.  It would be nice and easy to view students as the product of a school, but schools actually produce education.  This is consumed by the students, but here I differ with Deven.  They are not the customers.  The customers are the parents, the employers and the further education establishments.  Think of baby food – babies consume baby food because it’s palatable, but the parents are the customers.  They buy it (usually) because it’s healthy.  A healthy baby food which is unpalatable is going to have problems, but an unhealthy baby food which is extremely palatable will face huge difficulties.

This is exactly the dilemma facing education.  In making it more palatable for the students (the consumers), schools run an enormous risk of alienating the customers even more than they have already.  The employment landscape in the industrialised world is changing, but that doesn’t mean that the demand for transferable skills of school-leavers will change out of all recognition.  Accuracy, quality control, punctuality and the ability to work to a system and the ability to learn is just as important in an office as it is on the shop floor.  Taylor and Gantt created systems that allowed the US to dominate industrial production.  The modern systems stemming from Japanese management practice have only one significant difference – Taylor put the stop watch in the hands of a manager, the Japanese put the stopwatch in the hands of the workers themselves.  Drones haven’t been necessary in industry for a long time, self-discipline and awareness are the modern requirements.

So what should schools do?  Jay Mathews summed it up very neatly writing in his blog for the Washington Post.  Fix Schools with ideas, not money.  Whether you agree with his suggestions isn’t really important – what’s important here is the way of thinking.  Money is a useful tool, but innovation is far more powerful.  Unless clear goals are set, the money is going to disappear down the drain – fast.  Schools need to identify the needs of their customers and start to serve them.  The difference between consumers and customers is vital here.  There is no point whatsoever in creating happy consumers unless the customers are happy too.  A happy school-leaver who hasn’t got the skills to get or keep a job and can’t get a place in higher education, but fully met the requirements of the school, is not someone that any school should be proud of.  And it’s a nailed-on cert that the customers’ complaints will continue until they reach a level where the consequences will be very unpleasant for education.  Working together with the customers is much easier than fighting them.  Telling the customers that they are wrong or don’t understand is not smart.  In any business.