One of the long-lasting bits of wisdom handed down from generation to generation of retail success stories is that “the customer is always right.”
The advice is tricky, of course, because it tends to mean something a bit different than what it suggests on the surface.
The reality is that the customer is often wrong-headed, idiosyncratic, unfair and breathtakingly dumb. But if the business in the aggregate, and each sales clerk, cashier, greeter at the door, and other assorted staff were all unleashed to tell the customers that they were morons, then sales might slip a bit.
On occasion, of course, the customer, or, perhaps, a cluster of customers, gives off vibes that are in fact correct; that are better than what the retail colossus might have crafted.
Retail clothiers that are upscale, but try to sneak into “casual,” often face the wrath of the loyal base. “Family” restaurants that sneak in some upscale entrees tend to get apple pie in their faces.
And there are times when the retailer and the customer fight to a draw; where neither side proves its point of view superior. When religious denominations fiddle with their prayer books, a sizable segment of the congregational population rises up in a holy war. But, others think that calling God “she” is just fine.
In the big business called public education, there is one segment of the customer base that was stomped on and ignored for decades in terms of their major preference. But, as is sometimes the case, their idea is making a comeback, because, as we all know, the customer is always right.
It’s called “tracking,” a once-popular strategy that fairly early on in one’s educational career, funneled you into clusters of classes that marked you as either a smarty-pants college type or a handy guy destined to repair heating and air conditioning systems. As schools became more “diverse,” and the huddled masses of middle-class folks became more nervous about the fate of their neurotic high achievers dragged down by “remedial education,” tracking was often a way to reassure the customers that they didn’t have to start shopping around for snobby suburbs or private schools.
The tracking system fell out of favor, in the face of fears that minority kids and children of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker were routinely placed in lower-level classes, whatever their level of intellectual fervor.
Let the poor teachers figure out how to educate the genius and the grunt at the same time, in the same place.
As a new report last fall indicated, Connecticut schools (even suburban schools) are becoming much more “diverse,” which is to say, in the absence of tracking, the college-bound upper-middle-class is continuing to escape the urban schools and the ring suburbs most attractive to aspiring minorities.
Hartford, for one, played the game as well as it could for many years. The school system juggled boundaries and protected a West End elementary school signed to encourage the middle class to stay in town — followed by a period of ferocious, if unofficial, tracking at Quirk Middle School, in a desperate (and eventually, unsuccessful) effort to keep the middle class in the school system.
The trend across the nation now is to bring back tracking — without calling it that. “Advanced Placement” classes funnel the high achievers into classes with each other, while entire curricula have been created to “prepare” the less academically inclined for community colleges.
Is any of this sinister? Snobby perhaps, but hardly evil. The customers are always right. Almost.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
