You can’t work in education very long without hearing The Blueberry Story. In it, an executive of an award-winning ice cream company gives a speech to a group of teachers – teachers who grow angrier by the minute as the executive tells them how business principles could save education.
As the executive finishes his speech, a teacher begins asking questions about the executive’s company, which recently had its blueberry ice cream named as best in the country. She catches him flatfooted as she points out the difference between businesses and schools: if a business sees inferior products arriving on the receiving docks, they can send them back; schools, on other hand, take every student, no matter what challenges those students face.
It’s a compelling story, and it’s been used for years to explain why schools struggle so mightily to produce results: without eager, capable, and committed kids, the argument goes, there’s no way we can produce strong and capable graduates.
There’s only one problem: the analogy is fundamentally wrong.
It’s wrong to consider kids just one more ingredient in the mix. There are a lot of ingredients that go into the education system – from textbooks to teachers, from buses to blackboards – but kids aren’t on that list.
If we looked at the analogy correctly, we would see that children, along with their families, are education’s customers. Just as an ice cream company needs customers to buy its premium ice cream, schools need children and their families to essentially buy their services. Every child going to school essentially walks in and hands over thousands of dollars to that school and, in doing so, expects in return to receive a relevant education so that they may successfully function in the world around them.
But are we providing these consumers with a product they want? We cannot look to market behavior for the answer – after all, the vast majority of kids cannot take their business elsewhere. But we can look at what students do, and ask them what they think, to tell us whether they are satisfied customers. And their actions and reported attitudes show us, by and large, that they are not satisfied at all.
Approximately 30% drop out of school before graduation, and it’s not because they can’t pass their classes: 90% have passing grades at the time they drop out. And in a 2000 survey, only 28% of 12th graders said that school work is often/always meaningful; 21% said that courses are quite/very interesting; and 39% said that school learning will be quite/very important in later life. And these numbers are actually higher than one would find in the total population, considering that most students who drop out – the ones who completely reject schooling – do so before 12th grade, when this survey was administered.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between what schools provide and what consumers want to receive. If we are to create a product our customers need and want – one they see as relevant and valuable – our education system must understand and respond to its market environment, just as businesses across the country do in order to tailor their services to customers’ needs.
The education system was initially designed with a keen understanding of its market. When Horace Mann created the first public school system, he took a simple approach: he looked at the world around him and created a system that reflected what he saw, responding to the developing industrialized age by creating a system that not only prepared students for factory work, but imitated many of the processes of those factories.
Things have changed dramatically since the creation of the school system, but our schools have unfortunately not kept up. We can no longer allow the dichotomy between an interconnected, all-at-once world and schools that parcel out knowledge in discrete and sequential chunks that lack context. We can no longer place a choke hold on technology in the classroom when it is ubiquitous outside the school walls. We can no longer artificially restrict learning to limited blocks of time in a single location in an anytime, anyplace world. And we can no longer try to prepare kids for today’s jobs in a system designed to reflect life 150 years ago.
If the education system wants to adapt to the current market and corresponding customer needs, it can learn from the business community. Time and again, businesses have proven their ability to adapt to changing market conditions. Competition forces companies to pay close attention to changes in their markets and respond accordingly – or face the consequences of losing their customers to businesses who were better able to serve them.
It’s time we take the critical first step of viewing families and children as our customers. Once we do that, we can respond to the questions that inevitably follow – what those customers need, and how best to serve them – and begin to revolutionize American education.
Brett Pawlowski is president of DeHavilland Associates, a consulting and communications firm that helps businesses help education. He is also the founder of the Business/Education Partnership Forum, an online clearinghouse featuring news, information, and resources for anyone interested in building effective business/education partnerships.