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School Board Journal
November / December 1995
January / February 1996

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Quality goes to school
By MARC HEQUET

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Mike Graff suspected total quality management had a chance at Dowling Urban Environmental Learning Center as soon as he stepped into the principal's office. There with principal Jeff Raison were two other interested parties, both of whom played a key role in the Minneapolis grade school.

Administrators? Teachers? Parents? Students? No, it was a brace of janitors, one of them just off his shift, his broom against the wall.

The custodians were among the first to meet with TQM consultant Graff, invited in by Raison. "Jeff's point was that these guys really have an important role in the school," says Graff, manager with St. Paul, Minnesota-based 3M Co.'s quality management services. "He wanted them to learn more about this process. He really broke the code."

Can the principles of total quality management help K-12 schools in the tough job of education? Some say maybe. Some say absolutely. Still others suspect total quality is just another school-reform fad that will ultimately fade meanwhile perhaps doing more harm than good by diverting attention and resources from other promising change efforts.

Mixed feelings notwithstanding, at least 132 K-12 U.S. schools are using total quality management principles, says Quality Progress magazine. School quality programs come under various labels, including total quality education and total quality teaching. Let's just call it TQ.

Complicated customers

At first glance, TQ's fundamental principles including worker involvement and training, customer focus, continuous improvement, using data to solve problems, thinking systemwide, and working in teams would seem to apply anywhere people are trying to deliver a product or service.

But doubts that TQ concepts apply to public education are pervasive enough that schools seeking expert help may be spurned. "Nobody in the private sector has been able to help us get a bead on it," says David Romstad, a principal in Milwaukee suburb Peewaukee, Wisconsin, who used quality principles as superintendent at a three-community district called Parkville in south-central Wisconsin from 1988 to 1994.

Romstad says a consultant stiff-armed Parkville's appeal for TQ advice. "It would be a waste of time," the consultant said, "because the customer thing in public education is just way too complex."

Complex? Sure it is. Educators deal daily with situations that make other professions look like a picnic, Romstad argues. Bankers, doctors and lawyers quash their "easy job, summers off" gibes about teachers when Romstad retorts, "How well do you think you'd do if you had 20 clients in your office seeking attention at the same time?"

In the troubled waters of the turbulent classroom, school workers use whatever floats. TQ? Maybe. But what do we mean by "quality?"

"When you talk to schools it means different things," says Lewis Rhodes, who has followed the school TQ movement as associate executive director with the American Association of School Administrators in Rosslyn, Virginia. "For Deming, quality was always a result a result of the interaction of an informed, caring worker and his product."

School TQ enthusiasts think that equation can work in school. And TQ has another feature that makes it attractive to those who would transmute the combative tangle of fidelities we call the education system: TQ doesn't require scapegoats. "TQM is not about who is at fault. It's not about pointing fingers. It's about how do we get better," notes Jim Gilbert. a management professor at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Rhetorical vortex

Even when teachers accept TQ they're still foggy about what it means. "Right now a lot of people are confused with the swirl of rhetoric," says Julie Horine, assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. "The total quality concepts are very transportable. The challenge is overcoming business jargon."

Schools ranked unfamiliar language as the third biggest barrier to a 50-school Minnesota TQ effort-behind only "shortage of time, staff and money" and "changing state expectations." And in New Mexico about 100 trainees from 13 schools asked for, and in subsequent materials received, more school-based examples instead of the usual production-line cases in business TQ training.

One business concept that translates only clumsily to schools, for example: Who is the customer?

A number of TQ schools regard students as customers. On the other hand, what choice does the student "customer" have in public school? A few systems let students shop schools. At others, "K-12 students are yours. You own them," says Horine.

Aside from students, a case can also be made for school customers as being parents, businesses, taxpayers, the community, colleges, technical schools, even the military. Likewise a case can be made for teachers as internal customers of the administration, and for teachers as internal customers of each other. The fifth-grade teacher is a customer of the fourth-grade teacher because the fourth-grade teacher is delivering a product the fourth grade to the fifth-grade teacher. So who's the customer? They all are, in a way. Ready to give up yet? Maybe schools are just too complicated for TQ principles. Stakeholder relations may be similar to those in business, but evidently far more complex aren't they?

Students as products

Maybe we can make some progress by asking what's the product of a school. Smart students? Good grades? Young people who can pass college exams? Graduates who can make a smooth transition into a new-hire training room?

Students don't always hold up well as products. In the factory, where Deming's TQ principles were honed, the objective is to crank out a product precisely machined within narrowly defined specifications. Try doing that with a squirming gradeschooler or a sullen teen.

A timber-state principal once told the local lumber-mill operator/school critic that the crucial difference between schools and business was this: If a two-by-four comes out of the mill warped, you scrap it But schools can't just scrap teens who come out warped.

Brain factories

If that still leaves residual dissonance, maybe its because we're still thinking of schools as brain factories. Joseph Erickson, an education professor at Augsburg College in Minneapolis who has worked with two self-managed "charter" schools, is cautious about importing a factory technique TQM into a setting that he says shouldn't be a factory schools.

Lose the factory model and its Taylorist trappings, Erickson urges. "Maybe its not so much TQM I'm against." he adds, "but the fact that TQM is embedded within the industrial assembly line model. The idea behind school improvement isn't to tune up the factory. It's to dump the factory metaphor altogether."

Nevertheless, TQ made the move out of the factory long ago and now is used widely in the service sector. Such reservations notwithstanding, schools are plunging ahead with TQ techniques.

Here's what a real-life TQ school looks like, says consultant Francke, who has worked with about 25: Students are involved and responsible for their own learning, and able to solve problems related to that learning. Students, teachers, staff and parents work in teams to solve problems. Walls are covered with data charts and fishbone diagrams. Students are involved in their work and work hard. "You would not see the teacher being the hardest worker in the room," says Francke. "The teacher becomes more of a coach and mediator. Groups of teachers begin to ask for data before making a decision, as opposed to acting on hunches."

And here's a key: "You get people focusing not on the students or the students' performance, but on the process," says Francke. "In a factory, you don't get mad at the car for having a defect. In school, you don't get mad at kids who didn't perform well. You stop focusing on that. You focus on the process."

TQ in practice

• Empower teachers. Should one-on-one tutoring start in September or midyear, after teachers know better which students need special help? Teachers in the Redding, California, Enterprise School District mulled that problem. Starting too early might "label" capable youngsters as special-needs students, possibly stunting performance for years.

  Teachers nevertheless were allowed to make the tough, politically sensitive choice to start special tutoring first thing in the autumn with first-graders. Result: Of the approximately 400 first-graders, the number missing more than 90 words on a 100-word year-end reading test has declined steadily from 72 in 1992 to 11 in 1995.

• Empower students. Westinghouse Vocational & Technical High School, in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood, uses what it calls student-directed learning. "Students own the process, and the teacher facilitates and coaches," says retired TQ advocate Schargel. Results: A year ago Fortune magazine reported daily average attendance up to 87 percent from 81 percent; dropout rate down to 2.1 percent from 12.9 percent in 1988; the parents' group ballooned to more than 200 from 12 in just a year; and a tutoring program cut the number of failing students from 151 to just 11 in a school of nearly 1,800. Moreover, the improvements came during a period of budget cuts and staff reductions.

  Students take charge of certain processes at Westinghouse. The school has become so well-known as a turnaround case that it limits tours to groups of 12 once a month. Those admitted must have read three of eight books assigned by the school, and must pass a quiz on the readings administered over the phone by students.

  When a Westinghouse junior flunked a New Jersey superintendent on the quiz, the official hit the ceiling and wrote an angry four-page letter to the school board. When the stunned Schargel asked what happened, the junior told him: I wasn't rude. The man said he had read Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and I asked, `Are you in Quadrant Two yet?' He said, `What are you talking about?' I said to the superintendent, `Either you haven't read it or you don't understand it. Please go back and reread the book. Here's my phone number. Call me at home. I'll help if you want.'" Now that's an empowered student.

• Use hard data. At Del Norte High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1994, an unacceptable 27 percent failed the government class required of all ninth-graders. The teachers' professional instincts led them to conclude that absenteeism was to blame and that a tighter attendance policy would help. But using the TQ principle of relying on hard data, teachers found failure associated with more complex root causes: low reading comprehension levels and not doing homework. They also found in interviews with students that kids preferred less lecture in class and more group projects. Solution: Buy an easier text; redeploy some federal funding to help ninth-graders work on reading skills; put homework assignments on a voice mail message that student or parents could call; and do more group projects.

  Team work

  To bolster performance long-term for the school's 600 freshmen, Del Norte expanded its orientation program. Ninth-graders come in for a full day ahead of the other grades to find their classes and sign up for clubs and activities. And added as a freshman requirement was a three-week course on Covey's Seven Habits to prompt ninth-graders to take responsibility for their own actions.

  Results: The government class failure rate plunged to 10.7 percent last year and freshmen grades have improved overall. Moreover, a survey suggests that kids are using what they learned from Covey's book.

  Case closed? Not exactly. "We felt like part of the improvement that we've seen is really just the Hawthorne effect we've paid so much attention to those kids," says Patricia Renken, assistant principal.

  Too, Del Norte is comparing apples to oranges: The improved performance was by a different bunch of kids. The 27 percent failure-rate group has moved on in school or to the streets. "It's messy," sighs Renken. "This is not a pure experiment. To test anything we have to wait for teachers to implement it and then for them to give grades. We give grades every nine weeks. Instead of doing what we ought to do one little change and then test it to see if it works we implement a whole bunch of things at once, and then see which are working and which are not"

• Work in teams. Special education teachers at Dowling, the Minneapolis K-6 school, establish "coaching" teams with parents to help students who have various challenges physical and otherwise make the most progress. Physical rehabilitation or special group physical education activities? That's a call for the team, including the parents. "Maybe we'll decide working on walking is more of a priority for a student than an activity in sixth-grade gym," says LeeAnna Hanson, Dowling's lead special ed teacher.

  Last year Dowling teachers focused on building their team skills by setting norms and expectations of each other like starting meetings on time and sticking to the agenda. "It sounds so simple, but it could be a big thing," says Hanson, former co-chair of the 20-member council that runs the school. "If a meeting is supposed to be at 8:30 and it doesn't start until 9, people shouldn't be penalized by being there on time."

  A Wilson, North Carolina, project has redeployed the district's federal remedial reading funds for all grades to an intensive focus on improving reading skills of young children. The district hired a master teacher who studied reading at a university for a year and now is training about 30 Wilson faculty in how to teach reading to grades K-2.

  In place of the time-honored assessment method occasional observation of teachers by principals those Wilson reading teachers observe and coach each other. "They get behind a two-way mirror with a child and they do what they've learned and their peers are outside critiquing," says superintendent Ann Denlinger. "It's absolutely the best way for the teachers to learn."

  Students work in teams, too and that takes pressure off teachers. "It's much easier facilitating 14 teams than 28 students," says Schargel of Westinghouse. "If students write papers in four-person teams, you have only seven papers to grade."

• Bring down barriers. At Dowling in Minneapolis, teachers felt the rooms weren't clean enough. A cross-functional committee analyzed every factor, from student pride to custodial staffing. Teachers now make thorough cleanup a standard part of any classroom project. Janitors were allowed to buy a better, longer-lasting grade of floor wax. And custodians themselves suggested keeping the building open later giving them more cleanup time after kids left.

  Pesky missionaries

  Students as young as third grade can learn and use TQ principles for example, looking at a Dow chart of the day every morning at Oakwood Elementary in the Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata, Minnesota, to see what they're going to do.

  At Westinghouse in Brooklyn, Schargel spread the TQ gospel with student missionaries from his quality-improvement class. "We wanted to bring 35 students up to speed so they would force the teachers in the school to accept the process," explains Schargel.

  The cunning plan: Students would seed other classes with pesky questions like: "I've been learning to use cause-and-effect diagrams in Mr. Schargel's class. How come we're not doing it here?"

  Some students, teachers and other staff will resist such TQ evangelism for a long time. That's the hard part, say believers not going back to help stragglers. But don't, they say. "You could see some people take off like a rocket and other people their shoes were in cement," says Bill Denkinger, director of resources at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, a public boarding school in Sitka, Alaska, well-known for its TQ efforts.

  "You're always worried about the ones who had their shoes in cement while others were off doing wonderful things. In fact, we spent too much time worrying about those that were stuck. You should go with those that want to and not spend time and energy with those other ones. We find that eventually even those stuck in cement start to move."

  Same old same old

  Advocates say TQ works best when all the schools in a system go TQ at once. But in practice sometimes TQ happens school by school which means schools trying to fly find themselves snagged in the old-fashioned bureaucratic net.

  At Minneapolis' Dowling, empowered special ed teachers can choose their own curricula for their 60 students in grades K-6. But who enrolls is a district decision. So teachers may carefully adapt curricula to match the special needs of their enrolled students only to have newcomers with new needs show up unannounced. "And then we have to change the curriculum again," sighs Dowling lead teacher Hanson.

  To help them with such glitches, school TQ enthusiasts welcome private-sector help in spite of the schools' sometimes-cool relationship with business. But don't assume that business know-how translates directly into running a school. Business TQ enthusiasts need to get up to their elbows in sweaty little learners to see what school are really like.

  In exchange, business people may pick up a few pointers to take back to work. What can businesses possibly learn from schools doing TQ? Human resource professionals anticipate some training and assessment tools, for one thing. "How do we change our curriculum to meet current needs, and how do we assess incoming employees? Those are areas where we can learn a lot from schools," says Valerie Pace, who works with schools as external programs manager with IBM Corp.'s Rochester, Minnesota, plant.

  Rowdy rainbow

  Another area in which schools can guide business is in managing a multiplicity of stakeholders customers, if you will. A related area is diversity. Business already has a tough time with diversity and business gets to pick and choose who it will deal with as employees. Schools have had to learn to deal with everybody in America's rowdy rainbow.

  And then schools may cast light on the concept of the learning organization toward which business has striven mightily.

  "Education organizations are centrally interested in being learning organizations." says James W. Dean Jr., associate professor of management at the University of Cincinnati. "I actually think most companies have no clue about what `learning organization' means. I think that's something they can learn from schools."

  Not least, schools can teach business the most basic lesson of all: Involve everybody. Lest we forget, hark back to the meeting in the principal's office with those two janitors an important part of the team at Dowling school, but easy for an organization to forget when it powers up its workers.

  "Those are the guys who clean up, and the principal wanted me to meet them," says 3M consultant Graff. "Any business can learn from that."