Despite the importance of education in terms of spending and its impact, dissatisfaction with traditional public schools is growing due to students’ underperformance. One reason, among many, is the lack of strategic focus among educational institutions. The authors theoretically and empirically demonstrate the benefits of a customer-focused approach to strategy planning and execution for improving student performance. A customer-focused strategy enables educational institutions to identify customer needs providing the most value to customers, align strategy execution to those needs, and ultimately improve customer loyalty and academic outcomes. We demonstrate the approach using data from qualitative interviews with school leaders and surveys from 10,644 K12 parents. We conclude that a customer-focused approach helps educational institutions satisfy their customers and achieve higher academic outcomes.