ALBANY, N.Y. -- Back in November, I came across a booklet distributed to staffers by the administration of the suburban Albany school district where I pay taxes -- taxes that are, by the way, half again the national average.
The booklet contained a disturbing perversion of the customer service creed that guides almost every private business. You know the one I mean. It's headlined, "What is a customer?"It then goes on to remind employees that, "The customer is not an interruption of our work. The customer is the purpose of it. . . . The customer is the most important person . . . in person, on the telephone or by mail." And so on and so forth.
Which is fine if you're in business. The customer is kept happy because the customer pays the bills. The problem with this booklet was that it substituted the word "student" for the word "customer."
I pointed out in that column that the district had improperly identified the customer. The true customer is me and you, the taxpayers. We pay the freight for these public schools, and what we demand is quality performance.
Or, as I put it in that column, we demand, "an educated graduate."
That column seemed to seriously annoy the New York State School Boards Association. They reprinted it in the latest edition of their newspaper, "On Board." They printed beside it an outraged rebuttal by Harris Dinkoff, the vice president of the association's board of directors.
Mr. Dinkoff characterized that column as "vitriolic" (Moi?) and suggested that I should "be visiting classrooms and looking into the faces of children as they learn. Then he (That's me, by the way) will know who the true customer really is."
Well, I know who the true customer really is. It's still me. I pay for the product. That product is still the graduate. And quality control of the product isn't remotely what it should be.
The Higher Education Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles recently completed its 34th annual, highly respected national survey of college freshmen. These kids are the finest examples of the product the public schools turn out. Take a look at these findings, and decide how impressed you are with the product.
More than one-third of today's college freshmen report that they finished high school last spring with A averages. In the UCLA survey of 1969, only 12.5 percent of college freshmen finished high school with A averages. Ask anybody who was in college in 1969, as I was. Getting into college was tougher then. Staying in was tougher yet.
When more than one-third of college freshmen report finishing high school with A averages, you're seeing a rather blood-curdling example of grade inflation. Also, these kids told the UCLA researchers, fully 40 percent of them did less than three hours of homework a week in high school, and about 40 percent reported that their senior years bored them into comas. They weren't challenged by the work. The result is record numbers of them now enrolled in remedial college courses.
That's what you get when you decide that you provide a service rather than producing a product, when you identify the student as the customer and not the larger community.
Dan Lynch is a columnist for the Albany Times Union.