School Cannot Be A Chick-fil-A

Last week it happened again. Over on Elon's Bot Emporium, a live human made this observation:

I was thinking this morning that education could learn some valuable lessons from Chick-fil-A (stay with me here). They are unapologetic about their systems for running a restaurant, preparing food, and serving customers. Anyone who wants to be part of the Chick-fil-A team has to (pretty strictly) adhere to their standards, whether they prefer to do it that way or not. 

What this means is that people can go into any Chick-fil-A restaurant and expect the same quality, cleanliness, and customer service. It’s rare to find an exception. 

Franchise owners, managers, and the other employees aren’t left to wonder how to do their jobs. It’s specifically laid out for them and they are given ample training to fully understand before they’re let loose on their own.

The author, a woman who describes herself as "the mother of four, educator, and advocate for all children," blogs about education, and occasionally posts things I agree with was making an understandable call for more order and systematic approach to schooling. And lord knows I can sympathize with someone who makes an analogy that doesn't quite hold up. But this idea, versions of which keep turning up over and over again, does not hold up.

So what could education learn from Chick-fil-A? To be more efficiently standardized? 

But how does that work, exactly. In the Chick-fil-A model, where are the students? Are they the customers? If so, how do we come up with an education menu that offers a very limited one-size-fits-all set of selections that customers can either take or leave. If a student/customer has special dietary needs that the limited Chick-fil-education menu does not serve, what is that student supposed to do? I mean, I suppose we could say that the student/customer has to go to a different restaurant, but then the whole standardization thing goes right out the window. 

Or maybe in this model the students are analogous to the chicken being served, in which case they would be the result of a process that throws out any pieces of chicken/students that don't meet the standards of Chick-fil-education. Chick-fil-A gets to decide which pieces of food it is going to cook and serve, and the rest goes to the curb. 

And since we're using Chick-fil-A, I have to also point out that they have decided when to offer their services, and customers can take it or leave it. As with everything else about this highly standardized operation, customers do not get to assert a parental right to have the company do what they want it to do.

Look, I totally get the desire for a certain amount of standardization in education. That teacher who ignores the district's scope and sequence and just kind of goes where the wind takes her-- nobody is more annoyed by her than the teacher who gets those same students the following year. I never needed us all to be on exactly the same page, but it sure helps if we can all act like we're on the same team.

But Chick-fil-A is a terrible analogy. The restaurant fails as an analog for education because A) it does not have to serve all customers and B) it can pick and choose what materials it works with. Chick-fil-A can standardize all of its outputs and methods because it can also standardize all its inputs. And only when you standardize all the inputs can you say "If all of our workers do X, then the result will always be Y."

That does not work in education, because "If all teachers do Y, then all students will learn X" is always false. It is always false because students are humans, and humans are not standardized. This does not mean that there are not some approaches that work better or more often than others, nor does it mean there are not some approaches that are almost always a bad idea. 

But the kind of neat standardization represented by Chick-fil-A (or McDonalds or an industrial assembly line) does not map onto schools because schools deal with actual human beings, and students are not products.

This kind of industrial business thinking is a regular issue in some sectors. One of the first posts I ever wrote was in response to a sentence from Allan Golston, Gates Foundation big wig who was, at the time, pushing the Common Core. In a piece entitled "America's Businesses Need The Common Core" he wrote

Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.

Double yikes. Students are not "output" and they are definitely not meant to be consumed. But just a couple years later, a special report in Fortune included this choice quote from Rex Tillerson, who was at the time an Exxon big wig:

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

Again, yikes. 

Schools are not industrial producers of meat widgets. They are not fast food chains. They are not performing a highly standardizable task that can be deskilled to the point that any shmoe can be quickly and effectively trained to perform their task without deviation. And all of this is true because A) students are not products and B) the "customers" are not just their parents or their future employers but every single person who will ever cross paths with them directly or indirectly, which is why we have such a hard time deciding exactly what outputs we really want.

Once again, I will argue till death that some guardrails and some standards are absolutely necessary for schools and teachers and students, but the perfect one-size-fits-all standardization that some folks dream of, the kind of standardization that makes Chick-fill-A successful for the part of the population that chooses to eat there-- that kind of rigid standardization will not work for education because we are dealing with human beings and not slices of breaded chicken and chopped up potatoes.