Is Treating the Public Like Customers Hurting You?

08/01/2001

By Susan Rountree Salter

It’s lunchtime, and you’re headed to your favorite deli for a quick bite between appointments. You love the place – you eat there almost every day. You know most of the staff personally, and they take good care of you.
When you get to the door this day, however, the place is a shambles. There’s a long line of people waiting to be seated and more waiting on carryout orders. The kitchen’s a wreck, tables need to be bused and there aren’t enough waiters. Do you:

A. Go elsewhere.

B. Wait around in hopes they’ll get to you before your lunch hour ends.

C. Hop over the counter and start making sandwiches and ringing up orders.

For most, the answer, of course, is A. And therein lies the problem behind what public engagement expert Richard Harwood sees as a fundamental mistake public schools make these days: treating the public like customers.

It may be heresy in this consumer-focused, what’s-in-it-for-me age, but Harwood is calling on school leaders to all but abandon the customer mentality.

“ People are saying our schools don’t work and that we need to follow the business community’s example because they know how to get things done. That sounds good because it sounds like common sense. The problem is, public schools aren’t supermarkets, and kids aren’t products,” said Harwood, president of the Harwood Institute, a Maryland-based organization that helps communities learn to work and live together more effectively.

“‘ Customer’ is a word that sends signals to us about where we fit. If I’m your customer, why should I jump over the counter and help you in a pinch?”

In short, approaching the design of and vision for public schools as if serving consumers lets the public avoid its responsibility to those schools as citizens, Harwood argues.

“ When you ask, ‘How are we doing?’ you’ve turned me into a customer. I’ll lay my demands at your feet, and if they’re not met, I’ll walk,” Harwood told the Council of School Board Association Communicators at a July training meeting. “When it comes to public schools, we think if we pay our tax bill, we should get good service, and we have no obligation beyond that. A consumer mentality takes us all off the hook,” he said in a subsequent interview.

That’s not to say schools should abandon all forms of customer service. They should, for example, continue to emphasize that parents are welcome at school, make certain the front office staff is courteous and helpful and ensure teachers and administrators treat parents and students with respect. Those types of customer service are a must today.

But Harwood advises school leaders to spend significant time rebuilding the relationships between their schools and their communities, recasting the public as citizens to help recapture that sense of collective responsibility.

“ As a citizen, you see yourself as connected to other people and having a common enterprise in which we’re engaged. You tend to consider other points of view. You realize there are tradeoffs to be made, and you may not always get what you want. You realize there are some issues that can only be resolved by people taking action together, whether it’s passing a bond issue or mentoring children.”

To reclaim that sense of citizenship and rebuild the school-community relationship, school leaders must change fundamentally the way they interact with the public, forgoing the gathering of public input in favor of engaging the public in meaningful discussions about the future of the schools and the community, he said.

“ Input means you don’t take responsibility for anything. You get to show up, stand in front of a microphone, shout out what you want somebody else to do and go home and turn on the TV,” said Harwood, who views traditional input-gathering mechanisms like public hearings as cattle calls that dehumanize parents and minimize their concern for their children.

Worse, public hearings, surveys and traditional input-gathering methods lead many leaders to believe they can divine the public will if they just get feedback from enough people. Wrong, says Harwood.

“ If you tally up everyone’s individual preferences, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what the community wants. It means that’s what those people want for their individual kids,” he said.

But when a school board engages parents and non-parents in on-going, in-depth discussions about what they collectively want for the community, its children and its schools, a different picture emerges, he said. As people begin to talk with each other, they often realize the scope of the problem is different or more complex than they thought originally, or they realize some solutions will create other problems, he said. Frequently, their opinions will shift as they weigh their options against their values and the values of others, he said. Instead of focusing on their own children, they are forced to grapple with the broader issues school leaders struggle with – things like how to provide the best education to every student with the limited resources available.

To shift from input to engagement, Harwood recommends a four-step process built around the question: What are we responsible for?

Step 1: Reframe the debate. Bring people together for an in-depth discussion over a period of months to talk about what they want for the community and where education fits in. Start by asking what participants’ hopes and dreams for the community are and what they hope people will be saying about it in five years. Such discussions inevitably focus on their aspirations. “Shortly, they say the schools can’t get us there by themselves. We have to get together,” Harwood said. “How am I going to blame people or bemoan how bad things are when you want to engage me on how we continue to make progress?”

Step 2: Establish a covenant among people in the room. The covenant isn’t a strategic plan or a list of tasks to be accomplished. Rather, it’s the common ground the participants identify, their common values and common beliefs about where education fits in the larger picture.

“ How are we going to set priorities for our schools if we don’t truly understand what tradeoffs people are willing to make? (Public engagement) means there has to enough of a relationship between the school district and the community so that the community has some understanding of what it values and the school district has some understanding of what those values are,” Harwood said.

Step 3: Elicit actions to achieve the covenant. Though Harwood believes public engagement is more about how citizens are going to live than about taking on projects, he encourages communities that are ready to use the values they’ve agreed upon as a basis for future actions.

That doesn’t mean that, once public engagement begins, every problem will be solved with this search for common ground. Communities must determine which issues belong in the public domain and which should be handled by professionals. For example, only a professional engineer can design a bridge, but the public issues include where to build it and how to pay for it, Harwood said. In education, the community should determine the skills students should have when they graduate, while the professional educators and school board determine how to teach them.

Step 4: Sustain the public capital of the community. Once engagement has begun, participants must work to make it part of everyday public life through future discussions or maintenance of newly formed friendships and relationships, Harwood said.

Despite public engagement’s potential to help school boards and communities reconnect, Harwood cautions leaders not to begin such an effort without a strong commitment to stick with it. That means committing the time that such efforts involve, being willing to change your way of operating based on the community covenant and making public engagement a way of life.

“ If you’re going to talk a game of public engagement, you need to earnestly do it. We’re all conditioned in our society to believe everybody is selling us a bill of goods. The minute people sniff out the selling of goods, that’s the minute they turn their back on you. The more people retreat away from public life, the harder it is to get them back,” he said.

Harwood also cautions that public engagement efforts won’t look the same in every community. In areas where there is distrust among different groups within the community or hostility towards the schools, the primary outcome of public engagement may be merely opening dialogue among different groups. In others, the discussion may lead to a concrete plan for attacking a problem within the community, such as truancy or low parent involvement in schools.

“ Public engagement on its face cuts to the core of many people’s questions about leadership, control and responsibility. But, if done correctly, it actually enhances leaders’ role; it enhances their ability to make sound decisions, to create the kind of political will necessary to create change,” Harwood said.

What does the conversation in your community sound like?

A school board can learn a lot about how the community relates to the school system by listening to the public conversation. Ask yourself:
To what extent and in what ways do people talk about the schools now?
How acrimonious is it?
Are there places in the community where people get together and talk (clubs, diners, Sunday school, etc.) and what do they talk about there?
When people talk about the schools, what do they end up talking about?

What does the media tend to cover about the schools?

Input vs. Engagement

Input means you:

Ask each person to give his individual view quickly (“Please line up at the microphone. You have three minutes.”).
Believe that when you add up everyone’s responses, you know what people believe.
Set a goal of getting as many people as possible to speak – credibility is gained through numbers.
Focus on what people “think.”

Engagement:

Requires more give and take between and among people. It requires time.
Takes people considering different perspectives and points of view and weighing the choices and tradeoffs.
Produces public knowledge about what people hold valuable, their aspirations, common purpose, directions for action.
Works from the assumption that we each hold self-interests but have the capacity (and desire) to act as citizens.

Source: The Harwood Institute.

Seeking Common Ground, Not Consensus

Public engagement consultant Richard Harwood argues that building consensus and seeking common ground have two very different connotations.

When building consensus:

People believe they must come to agree on nearly everything they are discussing.
People water down issues, avoid real tensions, seek compromise, go to the lowest common demominator.
People believe if they don’t agree with everything, they can’t be part of what’s happening.

When seeking common ground:

The test is: “Can I live with this?” People may not agree with everything, but overall they can stay at the table.
The underlying assumption is that people share common aspirations, and on most issues there is more agreement than disagreement. The goal is to uncover that.
Common ground is about seeking possibilities and asking “what if.”

Source: The Harwood Institute