Rather than pushing a program and/or school to students, it is simply moral to sit down and discuss the pros and cons of a program/school, like, Why do you think this program/school is appropriate for a particular student? Does its mission statement resonate with a student? Can a student afford this program/school?

As a parent, I will sit down with my child to explain that if the school does treat her as a customer, it does not necessarily meant it will do a good job educating my child, precisely because knowledge is WAY more than a product that one can sell.

So, the question like this should come in the context, and the contexts can be MANY…Which means I see how the quote above portrays students as customers. But there are also other subtle dimensions to consider.

Irrelevancy lies in the notion that the world is still a top-down regime.

Students desire to learn has nothing to do with it. Students are hungry for knowledge like no other, but fundamentally understand that knowledge is personally constructed not deposited.

In education there are other issues to consider – it is not a transaction.

However, for some people, treating someone like a customer simply means, treating them with respect, dignity and courtesy. From this perspective – then yes, every adult should treat a child like this – even when disciplining them and holding them accountable.

The growing tendency to refer to parents as customers in an educational marketplace makes me uneasy for similar reasons. Choice is very important, but we shouldn’t allow these choices to become mere transactions that weaken our belief in public responsibility for public education.

Finally, when a teacher worries that she might “lose control” of a room, she may well be thinking about the considerable challenges of preserving discipline and resisting the worst kind of disorder. She may believe that treating students as customers amounts to serving their every whim. Treating students as members of a community of learners may be more appropriate. Does her concern necessarily push her to the brink of irrelevancy?

jarvis’ take is like shirky’s – “publish then filter.” offer up a product, within your standards of course, and then provide a platform for them to tweak. the filtering or the tweaking is the process that not only gives the student (customer) ownership, but because of the absolute magnificence of the students abilities/creativities that are too often blocked in school, the end product is far better than anyone could have imagined.

today’s customer is listened to by hits on google. in the classroom, those hits represent challenges, curiosities, misunderstandings, anything that kids find remarkable (worth talking about – good or bad) with any given topic or skill.

one small example: within a class site you have a list of interactive sites that kids can go to for extra practice or extended research. rather than teacher loading up those sites, students submit sites they find that have helped them most. offer points for every hit they get from students who also use the sites they submitted (most district platforms will count hits for you – ie: moodle.) then watch kids take ownership and start using it. watch it start growing into a better resource center or study guide than any one teacher could ever have created.

pay to the teacher (and student) – kids get the math. class is fun. time is spent discussing rich ideas, doing rich experiments and research.
product for the student (and teacher) – a finely tweaked platform of minutely differentiated methods/etc for learning math – made by them – so user-friendly.

students most definitely should be treated with respect – but that’s not the big issue here. the big issue is – how can i offer the best product (education/desire to learn more) for my students. the best product will happen when many creative minds continually adjust, tweak, filter….through methods that make sense to them.

nice post scott. i’m a new subscriber. there hasn’t been a day yet that hasn’t blown me away. early this week – episode 4 of the radio post. wow – learned so much about implementation and pd in our day.
huge huge grazie for the work you are doing. we need to make you a staple on district platforms everywhere.
keep us cranking.

In some ways, students are like customers:
- both have an expectation that they are treated with respect
- both should have the ability to make some meaningful choices about what they “buy” (learn)
- there is an aspect of sales in both education and business… in business, you try to promote your product… in education, we try to make learning meaningful and relevant, which is similar.
- businesses want repeat customers… educators want life-long learners… same basic idea, though in the case of educators we would think it great if students were able to learn without our services, while businesses would probably prefer that their customers are reliant on them

However there are some important differences…
- teachers assess students’ learning… whereas most businesses do not assess customers’ responses to their products in the same way or for the same purposes
- in business, what matters most is the current sale and the future sales… in education, I’d hope what matters most is not the sale (lesson / learning) but the person. A business probably doesn’t care what else is going on in your life when you leave the store… I think educators do and should.
- business is often focused on return on investment measured in a relatively short period of time… in education, the return on investment is often long term.
- teachers are responsible (moral, legal) for students… businesses really don’t have the same type of responsibility to their customers… if a customer is problematic, the business can give them a refund and that’s that… businesses are responsible to shareholders and regulators more than customers I think.

So… in some ways students are like customers, in quite a few other ways they’re not. On balance, I’d probably answer “Um, no” to the question too… but not because I don’t believe in respect, choice, and relevance.

I’ve milled over this relationship a lot, against the traditional “customer is always right” thinking of business, and arrived at the conclusion that, YES, teachers should approach children and their parents as customer. However, I’m a parent and taxpayer too. I am an equal stakeholder in this relationship, so is the childless retiree or single-income taxpayer who never steps foot in my school. All of us, no matter who provides which service, reap the consequences (be they positive or negative) of public schools.

My ultimate communication to students and parents is that we all have the responsibility to approach public educations as the client-centered service provider AND the customer. If we approached ANY relationships with the mindset of a selfless, but mutual benefit and greater good for the whole, wouldn’t our world (and public ed) be a better place?

That’s similar to the argument that excellent education can be bought simply by paying teachers (or students) a lot of money. It’s a ferocious reduction of human minds to mechanisms or other purely logical-rational-utilitarian models that can be manipulated through Newtonian means. That ship sailed a century ago