Many of the current trends of education reform in America
are attempting to improve the quality of our public schools by applying various
management strategies used in the business world. However, the supposed lessons of business
being heralded as education reform don’t often enough look like the strategies
being seen in business-to-business advice about managing systems and working
effectively with people.
One person’s principles that the business world holds in
high regard is that of
Edwards Deming. Deming is best known for
his 14 points of quality management.
Deming and his principles were instrumental
in working to improve the quality of Japanese manufacturing after World War 2.
As companies in the United States began to
see the improved quality of Japanese products, they too adopted Deming’s
principles.
However, for some reason, the Deming strategies of quality
that businesses utilize are all but ignored when trying to improve education in
America.
For example, consider Deming’s third point of quality,
“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for
massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place”. In the United States current education reform
initiatives seem to be totally ignoring that Deming principle by our reliance
of depending on inspection with standardized testing.
Another current trend in education is that of developing
punitive teacher evaluation systems.
While there is a need to evaluate teachers, the current trends seem to
be ignoring Deming’s seventh and eighth principles.
Number seven being “the aim of supervision
should be to help people and machines and gadgets do a better job” and number
eight being “
drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for
the company”. Instead of using
a system
to help teachers improve their craft, many new teacher evaluation systems
tend to be pitting school administrators against the teachers and
putting fear into teachers of losing their job.
Furthermore, Deming’s ideas included his list of "A
Lesser Category of Obstacles". On
that list are many ideas that schools should pay attention to including:
Deming during his lifetime did not seem to comment much on
education but
in this one interview
he did share his views for reforming and improving education.
In that interview he made three particular points
that seem to stand out people in the education reform movement seem to be
overlooking:
- ·
Quality goes down when ranking people.
- ·
Cramming facts into students’ heads is not
learning.
- ·
People talk about getting rid of deadwood (bad
teachers), but there are only two possible explanations of why the dead wood
exists: 1) You hired deadwood in the first place, or, 2) you hired live wood,
and then you killed it.
Our country has attempted to fix education with
recommendations beginning in 1983 in reaction to the “
A Nation At Risk”
report, in the 1990’s with “
Goals2000”, with “
NoChild Left Behind” in 2001, and in 2009 with the “
Race To The Top” initiative.
None of these fixes considered the
quality ideas of Edwards Deming . If we continue to ignore such quality ideas
such as Deming’s, we will never truly succeed in meeting the challenges that
education reforms in the 21
st century present.