Language shapes reality.
When we begin to speak of schools as “service providers” and families as “consumers,” we are not simply describing a neutral arrangement. We are enacting a transformation—one that quietly reshapes how we understand education, community, and responsibility itself.
This shift may seem benign. After all, schools do provide services. Families do have legitimate expectations. What could be wrong with clarity about roles and accountability?
The problem is not with accountability. The problem is with what gets lost when education becomes primarily transactional.
The Service Provider Model: A Brief History
The language of service provision entered education through the influence of market-based reforms and New Public Management—movements that sought to make public institutions more “efficient” by modeling them after businesses.
The logic was simple: schools should operate like service organizations. Families are customers. Quality should be measured by satisfaction and outcomes. Competition should drive improvement.
This framework promised clarity, accountability, and responsiveness. And in some ways, it delivered. Schools became more attentive to parental concerns. Performance metrics became more transparent. Inefficiencies were scrutinized.
But something else happened, too—something quieter, harder to measure, and far more costly.
What Gets Lost in Translation
When schools operate primarily as service providers, several fundamental shifts occur.
1. Responsibility Becomes Outsourced
In a service model, the provider is responsible for delivering a product. The consumer is responsible for evaluating whether the product meets their needs.
This sounds reasonable—until we apply it to education.
Education is not a product that can be delivered to someone. It is a process that requires active participation, sustained effort, relational trust, and shared responsibility between educators, students, families, and communities.
When families relate to schools primarily as service providers, it becomes easier to outsource responsibility for learning. “The school should fix this.” “Why isn’t the school doing more?” “We pay for this service; we expect results.”
These are not unreasonable sentiments. But they reflect a deeper problem: the erosion of shared ownership over the educational process.
Learning does not happen to children. It happens with them—in collaboration with families, educators, peers, and communities. When we reduce this collaborative process to a transactional exchange, we lose the reciprocity that makes education transformative.
2. Relationships Become Instrumental
In a service model, relationships exist primarily to facilitate the delivery of a service.
The teacher-student relationship becomes: “I teach, you learn.”
The school-family relationship becomes: “We provide, you consume.”
The school-community relationship becomes: “We offer programs; you participate (or don’t).”
But education has never been about instrumental relationships. At its best, education is deeply relational—rooted in trust, care, mutual respect, and the slow, unpredictable work of human formation.
When relationships become instrumental, they lose depth. Teachers become technicians. Students become clients. Families become customers. And the school becomes a site of transaction rather than transformation.
3. Success Becomes Individualized
The service model inherently individualizes success.
A good school is one that produces good outcomes for individual students. A successful graduate is one who achieves individual markers of success—high test scores, college admissions, career placement.
There is nothing inherently wrong with individual achievement. But when individual success becomes the only measure of educational value, we lose sight of education’s larger purpose: the cultivation of capable, caring, and connected communities.
This is not about sacrificing individuals for the collective. It is about recognizing that individuals flourish within healthy social, ecological, and relational contexts. When education ignores these contexts, it produces isolated individuals—highly capable, perhaps, but unprepared for the collaborative, interdependent work of living together.
The Illusion of Choice
One of the promises of the service provider model is choice. If schools operate like businesses, families can “choose” the school that best fits their needs.
But choice, in this context, is an illusion for most families.
Choice requires resources—time, information, mobility, cultural capital. Families with fewer resources have fewer real choices. They must accept whatever “service” is available, often in under-resourced schools that serve marginalized communities.
Meanwhile, wealthier families exercise choice aggressively, seeking out schools that offer competitive advantages for their children. This is not morally blameworthy—it is rational behavior within a system that treats education as a private good rather than a public responsibility.
But the result is deepening inequality. Schools become stratified. Communities fragment. And the shared commitment to education as a collective good erodes.
What Is Education, If Not a Service?
Education is many things. It is intellectual development, moral formation, social integration, cultural transmission, and preparation for economic participation.
But fundamentally, education is a relational process through which individuals and communities grow together.
It is not something that happens to people. It is something people do together—across generations, across differences, within the messy, unpredictable, deeply human work of learning to live well.
When we treat education as a service, we flatten this complexity. We reduce a fundamentally relational and communal process to a transactional exchange between providers and consumers.
This is not merely a semantic issue. It changes how people relate to schools, how schools relate to communities, and how we collectively understand what education is for.
The Costs Are Quiet—But Real
The costs of the service provider model are not always visible. They do not show up in test scores or graduation rates. They manifest as:
- Erosion of social trust between schools and families
- Fragmentation of communities as education becomes privatized
- Burnout among educators who feel reduced to technicians
- Alienation among students who experience school as something done to them rather than with them
- Loss of shared responsibility for the educational flourishing of all children
These are not minor costs. They are existential costs—costs that undermine the very possibility of education as a collective good.
A Different Model Is Possible
What would it mean to move beyond the service provider model?
It would not mean abandoning accountability or responsiveness. It would mean situating accountability within a framework of shared responsibility—where schools, families, and communities recognize that education is a collaborative endeavor, requiring reciprocal commitment from all parties.
It would mean treating schools not as businesses, but as community institutions—embedded within the social, cultural, economic, and ecological life of the places they serve.
It would mean recognizing that education is not a private good to be consumed, but a public process through which communities regenerate themselves—intellectually, socially, morally, and ecologically.
This is not idealism. It is pragmatism. Because the service provider model, for all its promises, has failed to deliver the kind of education communities need—education that cultivates not just individual success, but collective capacity, relational depth, and shared responsibility.
Reclaiming Education as a Collective Process
The question is not whether schools should be accountable. Of course they should.
The question is: Accountable to what? And accountable for what?
If schools are accountable primarily to market metrics—test scores, rankings, consumer satisfaction—they will optimize for those metrics, often at the expense of deeper educational goods.
But if schools are accountable to communities—understood not as aggregates of individual consumers, but as living, interdependent social ecosystems—then accountability becomes something richer, more relational, and more transformative.
It becomes accountability for the collective flourishing of children, families, and communities—not just in measurable outcomes, but in the relational, social, and ecological health that sustains all life.
This is the third essay in Series I: When Education Loses Its Way. The next essay explores what changes when a community sees a school not as a service provider, but as a partner.