Do you have customers, or students in your classroom and school?
Someone on #edchat on twitter posted a quip that was hard to figure out about auto repair shops and how we didn’t get to know our “customers” in education. Twitter is like a cocktail party, and I definitely walked into that conversation mid-way, so he might have been making an excellent point, but I really do not like using the word “customer” to describe the families that we serve as public school educators. I don’t like it because it makes a number of assumptions about customers, and the service they receive in private businesses.
Public schools take all comers. The number off students going to “alternative” placements is pretty darn small, and even then, their education is still the financial and legal responsibility of the school district where they live.
