Quality in Education

How satisfied are customers? How content are stakeholders?  Leaders focused on continuous improvement find themselves asking these questions to get a "pulse" on the system and to have an ear for the voice of the customer.  It has long been recognized that the key to success of any organization- is customer satisfaction.

The idea behind "customer focus" is to understand what the customers (students, parents) need and want, and then provide it in an efficient way. To be successful, customer and stakeholder satisfaction metrics and measurement processes need to be embeded and ongoing- a best practice that is often misperceived. Requesting feedback from customers once a year is just not enough for continuously improving processes in schools. More importantly, once customer or stakeholder satisfaction data is collected, it must reviewed by stakeholders, analyzed for trends and be used to drive improvements within the school or district. 

Typically, the concept of a "customer" has not been greeted with open arms by the education community. Educators have believed this foreign concept has been reserved for companies or corporations outside of public education.  I belive this is true, in part, by the fact that public schools have traditionally benefited from a monopoly on the education market and have not concerned themselves with customer satisfaction.  Regardless of the quality of the school, parents continue to send their child.

Schools that don't focus on customer satisfaction, may find themselves losing enrollment to a variety of competitors including:  online or virual schools; home schooling; private/parochial schools or chronic absenteeism and drop-outs.  School districts need to create systems of strategically obtaining customer and stakeholder satisfaction data from students, parents, staff and community members.  Classroom teachers need to gauge the level of satisfaction from their students and parents so that improvements can be made "in process" and immediately. 

Several quality tools can be used by the teacher to gauge student satisfaction levels including: 

• Fast Feedback-  This instrument allows teachers to capture "fast feedback" from students through a series of questions measured by a likert scale
• Plus/Delta- This quality tool allows students to share "strenghts" and "opportunities for improvement"
• Quality Quadrant- This tool allows feedback in 4 areas including: concerns; compliments/kudos; questions; and suggestions for improvement

How do you check the pulse of customer satisfaction? Do you have processes in place to hear the voice of the customer? How do you gauge satisfaction in your school, your classroom?  Are your students, parents and community satisfied with the educational process?  How do you know? 

Jay