Consumer-Driven Education

I had a wide-​​ranging con­ver­sa­tion over cof­fee the other day with David Tim­ony (@drtimony on Twit­ter). One of the things that came up was the idea of stu­dents as con­sumers. David is doing research about what con­sti­tutes an expert teacher, focus­ing on teacher behav­iors that influ­ence stu­dent per­cep­tions of exper­tise. It got me think­ing about how we treat teach­ers and stu­dents in the big pic­ture and the busi­ness of edu­ca­tion today.

For a long time, edu­ca­tors have been told we need to run schools more like busi­nesses, that the stu­dents are the con­sumers, and we need to let the mar­ket drive our meth­ods. We should mea­sure stu­dent per­for­mance and stu­dent reac­tion like cor­po­ra­tions mea­sure con­sumer pref­er­ence and adjust our meth­ods to pro­duce the out­comes (increased sales) that we are look­ing for.

I have a prob­lem with this approach, though. It pre­sumes that the stu­dents are pas­sive recip­i­ents of the edu­ca­tion we are pro­duc­ing. It also leads to a mar­ket where many of the pro­duc­ers (schools) resort to manip­u­la­tive and decep­tive tac­tics to increase the num­bers. We only need to look at recent news on Wall Street to see that reliance on one met­ric to judge per­for­mance can not only cause prob­lems but it can affect the entire econ­omy. Is this really what we want for education?

What if we turn the model upside down? What if we think of the stu­dents not as con­sumers but as the producers?

In the mar­ket­place, cor­po­ra­tions have a lot of con­trol over their prod­uct, their meth­ods, their adver­tis­ing, but they are ulti­mately depen­dent on the con­sumer to judge their prod­ucts and make them suc­cess­ful. The con­sumers also pro­vide a great deal of feed­back to the com­pa­nies about what works, what doesn’t, and how they can improve their prod­ucts to make them more suc­cess­ful. In addi­tion, cor­po­ra­tions have to work within an exist­ing envi­ron­ment that dic­tates much of what they must do to suc­ceed: laws, tax struc­tures, sup­pli­ers, com­pe­ti­tion, investors, and so on.

If stu­dents become the pro­duc­ers, they will have to work in the envi­ron­ment cre­ated by the schools and teach­ers, includ­ing cur­ricu­lum, stan­dards, and so on. The teach­ers become the con­sumers, pro­vid­ing feed­back and guid­ing the learn­ing process (roughly par­al­lel to R&D in the cor­po­rate world).

This model is far from per­fect, of course. There is a great deal about learn­ing and about school that doesn’t fit into the busi­ness approach. But if we’re going to be asked, or even required, to do busi­ness like a busi­ness, then let’s really exam­ine that model and think hard about what it means for kids.