Houston Expert: How Adopting Business Strategies in Education Can Improve Outcomes

It’s no secret that K-12 public schools in the United States are facing major challenges. Resources are dwindling. Costs are rising. Teachers struggle with burnout. Student results are declining.

There are many areas of concern.

Some challenges are intangible, unavoidable and made worse by crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Some can be corrected or mitigated by allocating resources wisely. And others, like lack of strategic focus, can be completely avoided.

It’s this latter area, strategic direction, that researchers Vikas Mittal (Rice Business) and Jihye Jung (UT-San Antonio) address in a groundbreaking study. According to Mittal and Jung, superintendents and principals spend inadequate time and resources trying to appease their many stakeholders – students, parents, teachers, administrators, community leaders, state assessors, college recruiters, potential employers , etc.

Instead, Mittal and Jung show, administrators must focus entirely on a single key stakeholder: the “customer,” that is, students and families.

It may seem strange to refer to students and their families as “clients” in the context of public education. After all, 5th period Spanish isn’t like buying an iPhone or fast food. Class is not transactional. Students and caregivers are part of a larger relational context that most directly involves teachers and peers. And students are expected to contribute to this context.

But state K-12 funds are tied to enrollment and attendance numbers. This means that the success or failure of a school or school district ultimately comes down to the satisfaction of the “customer.”

Beware the trap of stakeholder appeasement

Here’s what happens when students and families become dissatisfied with their school:

As conditions deteriorate, families (who can afford it) may choose to homeschool or transfer their children to higher-performing private or public schools. As a result, registration revenue declines, forcing administrators to cut costs. Reducing costs leads to worse performance and lower student and family satisfaction. Less satisfaction leads to further loss of registrations, which leads to more cost reductions. And so on. (Schools need about 500 to 600 students to break even.)

This is a vicious downward spiral, in which it is not uncommon for schools to find themselves trapped. To avoid this vortex, administrators end up taking a “spray and pray” or “adopt and hope” approach, pursuing the agendas of various stakeholders in the hope that one of them will be the key to institutional success. Group A wants enhanced security. Group B wants better Internet access. Group C wants better facilities. Group D wants to develop athletics.

It’s an understandable desire to make everyone happy. However, Mittal and Jung believe that the “stakeholder appeasement” approach dilutes strategic direction, wastes resources, and creates a multitude of ineffective initiatives.

Initiative bloat is not a trivial problem. The work of implementing programs inevitably falls on teachers and front-line staff, which can lead to poor performance and burnout. As initiatives multiply over time, lines of communication become strained and, distracted by the administration’s efforts to please everyone, teachers and front-line staff fail to satisfy students and families.

Pay attention to the potential for increase

Using data from interviews with administrators and more than 10,000 parent surveys, Mittal and Jung find that students and families only value a few policy areas. By far the most important is family and community engagement, followed by academics and teachers. Extracurricular activities, such as athletics programs, are the least important, which is somewhat surprising.

The assumption that athletics would be high on the priority list of students and their families raises a crucial point in the study. Mittal and Jung note that it is a serious mistake to assume that the more a strategic area is mentioned, the more value it generates for the customer.

“The confusion of the two – salience and lift potential – is the most important factor that can mislead strategic planning,” the researchers say.

A customer-centric strategy prioritizes improvement potential, meaning it allocates budgets, people, and time to areas that have the greatest ability to increase customer value, as measured by satisfaction. customer. If family and community engagement is the most important strategic area, then wise administrators will invest in the “execution levers” that will improve it.

For example, Mittal and Jung believe that enabling participation in school policies is the most effective lever for demonstrating family and community engagement. Another important strategic area is improving the quality of teachers, and one of the most effective ways to do this is to emphasize their academic qualifications.

Implementing effective customer-focused initiatives is just as important as minimizing ineffective ones. It can be difficult to stop and minimize initiatives, no matter how ineffective they may be. But ultimately, the benefit is that teachers and frontline staff will be able to focus on the execution levers that matter.

This strategic transformation cannot happen overnight. Developing the framework will take 18 to 24 months for a school district, Mittal and Jung estimate. Putting it into practice may take an additional 12 to 18 months. For example, this would involve changing the way senior administrators, principals and teachers are held accountable. Instead of focusing on standardized test scores, which add nothing to customer satisfaction, it is more effective to focus on input factors that have a direct impact on the quality of studies and learning.

To help schools develop and implement a customer-centered strategy, future research could focus on frameworks to guide schools to maximize the value areas that are most important to students and families.

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This article was originally published on Rice Business Wisdom. For more, see Mittal and Jung, “Revitalizing Educational Institutions through Customer Centricity.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences (2024): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01007-y.