Whether or not they call it Total Quality Management (TQM), educators in many schools and districts are studying and applying principles derived from the quality movement in business. Several Conference presenters discussed the rationale, the tools, and the problems associated with pursuing TQM in schools.
Jay Bonstingl, author of ASCD's Schools of Quality, said that the principles of the quality movement can help create a learning organization that "improves over time in a deliberate, systemic way." The concept of kaisen (a Japanese word meaning "dedication to continuous improvement") is key. Bonstingl said that if educators take nothing else but kaisen from the quality movement, they will bring about the paradigm shift needed in education today.
Using Quality Tools
- Customer/supplier focus
- Dedication to continuous improvement
- Process/systems approach to change
- Consistent quality leadership
School systems applying TQM to education are learning to use a variety of tools to gather, interpret, and manage information. These tools include the affinity process, Ishikawa diagrams, and Pareto charts. Superintendents from three school districts in Wisconsin explained the use of these tools, which are helpful in problem solving in schools.
In the affinity process, team members brainstorm and categorize various causes of a problem. The virtue of this process is that everyone's ideas are "on the table." Then teams place the causes—and the "causes of the causes"—in a fishbone diagram called an Ishikawa chart, named for the Japanese businessman who first used one in his factory.
The next step is to construct a "Pareto" chart, which helps limit the team's attention to the "vital few" factors that should be concentrated on first. This chart combines a bar graph and a line graph to depict the consensus of the team about which causes of the problem are the most important.
Quality tools like these help educators answer a question that Deming always asks: "How do you know?" The superintendents emphasized the importance of teamwork and a focus on pleasing the customer, whether "customer" is defined as the teacher at the next grade level, the parent, or the student.
Barriers to Confront
"Isn't this just another bandwagon?" "How much does it cost?" "How can a business approach work for schools?" "What does quality mean, anyway?"
These are a few concerns voiced by educators about TQM. Glenn McGee, superintendent of the Deerfield, Ill., School District 109, said such questions are valid. While many of the quality tools and systems approaches to improving education are valuable, he said, educators should be aware of certain barriers to a comprehensive TQM program. These include threats to stability (the current system must undergo continuous change); the difficulty of translating business terms to education (uncertainty regarding who the customers, suppliers, and markets are); budget problems (conducting even one survey is expensive); the management orientation of TQM (will staff members buy into it?); and the lengthy time commitment.
McGee advised educators interested in the TQM approach to proceed slowly, use the quality tools, tackle one simple problem first, mandate training, and emphasize process problems—not people problems.