Students: Product or Customers?

Every year, as the school year starts, all the teachers in my district are brought together to be addressed by various members of the central office.  Our accomplishments are celebrated.  The areas on which we need to work are defined. The challenges of the near future and our ability to meet those challenges are explicated.  This year as I sat in the darkened auditorium, I heard a person for whom I have much respect refer to the students as “our product.” My immediate, instinctual response to that was inappropriate/unprintable (albeit silent).  It was followed by the thought that students are the customers, not the product.  The product is their education.  

I cannot really blame the speaker for making this reference to student-as-product.  This has been the dominant cultural metaphor regarding education for some time.  With it has come the ascendancy of multiple-choice, standardized, norm-referenced testing.  After all, if the students are the product, we need a way to measure the value of that product.  This mindset has come more and more to dominate the way educators and the populace think about education.  

But there is a major problem with this dominant cultural metaphor.  

In an article in The Atlantic OnlineNicholas Carr (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google) introduced me to Frederick Winslow Taylor.  Taylor made his name by breaking down tasks in industrial production into small discrete steps.  Then he experimented to find the most efficient way to do each step.  In The Principals of Scientific Management(which was published in 1911), his goal was to figure out the “one best method” to do every job.  Then the work of standardization should begin.  Each worker should be forced to work in the most efficient way possible.  He explicitly placed the system above the people who performed it.

As an educator, I am already familiar with the concept.  I have seen it at work in schools for years.  Thinking of students as a product makes the teachers little more than workers in an “education factory.”  The teachers are not respected as professionals.  New “teacher proof” methods of “educating” are touted. Scripted courses, where teachers are not allowed to deviate from the script even if it would benefit the students, have been adopted throughout the country.   Even something that was originally used as a guide has become more of a straightjacket.

I am reminded of a round-and-round discussion I had with a math teacher several years ago. We both taught seventh grade.  He taught math.  One day he was complaining—again—that his students were, for the most part, failing his class.  He was upset about this.  He wanted them to do better.  I, having practically no talent for math, asked him if he wanted to talk about it. I thought that maybe as a math-struggler I could see something that he, as a subject matter expert (no sarcasm—he was really an expert in his subject), might be missing.  Sometimes a person is just too close to the problem to see it.

“The main problem,” he said, “ is that they are missing some fourth grade skills.  They never mastered them.  Without those skills, they have no real hope of doing the work in seventh grade.”

“Are these skills tough?” I asked.

“No, not really. “

“How long would it take you to teach them those skills?”

“A week, maybe two.”

“Would having this background knowledge help them to be more successful?”

“I think it would, yes.”

I thought I saw a solution.  “Then why don’t you take a week or two and review those fourth grade skills?  Then you will be able to teach the seventh grade skills and they would be better able to catch on and pass the class.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” I was curious.  It seemed so simple.

“Those skills aren’t in the Course of Study for seventh grade.” 

I asked if the students, having mastered the fourth grade skills, would work faster.  Probably.  I asked if he could make up the time it took to teach them those skills.  He again agreed he probably could.  So I asked again--why not do it?   Again he told me that it wasn’t in the Course of Study for his grade level.  We kept going around and around, always to end in the same place.

I want to emphasize here that this man was far from incompetent or uncaring.  It was tearing him up that his students were not succeeding. But the Course of Study, as issued by the State Department of Education, was a document he followed religiously. He could not and would not deviate from it.  This way of thinking is all too familiar to many educators.

I see this as a consequence of treating students as the product and not as the customers.  He had the instructions issued for his product (a laTaylor’s paradigm) and he was going to follow them.  In fact, there could be serious consequences (especially as he was not tenured) for not following them.  He could receive low evaluations.  If his students did not perform well on the standardized tests, he would be called on the carpet for deviating from the approved course.  By following the Course of Study, he was trying to cover his own behind.  Hey, he did what he was told, when he was told, the way he was told to.  It couldn’t be his fault, could it?

Seeing students as product, not customers, leads to the problem of standardization.  I believe in educating people.  I want all my students to achieve to the best of their abilities, but all of my students have different abilities.  Students come into all classes with differing abilities. If they are product, the problem is to force them into a conformity with a norm that they may or may not fit. Then the students and their differing abilities are the problem.  If they are customers, the problem is to figure out a way to get each of them from where they are at the beginning of my course—to help them each make as much progress as they can.  Am I always successful?  Nope.  But I try my hardest and I do feel it is worth the effort. 

Until we can shift the metaphor to students being the customers of our educational system, many of the current problems are apt to remain, even worsen.  We will continue to focus on test scores, not the students behind them.  We will continue to blame teachers for not producing a viable product.  We will continue to blame students for not meeting arbitrary standards.  We will continue to treat all children as cookie-cutter copies of each other rather than as individuals to be nurtured.

 More important than my role as a professional educator is my role as a parent; I do not want my beautiful, quirky, intelligent daughter to be treated as raw material for the educational factory.  She is an individual.  The only way to help her achieve her potential is to treat her as an individual.  If you are a parent, don’t you want your child (or children) to be treated as a customer instead of a product?  Whether you have a child or not, don’t you want to be thought of as an individual? I think this is only natural.  And I believe that if we, as a society, can make the shift to a different way of thinking about the students in our schools, it will do our society an incalculable amount of good.