On the Road to Quality.

Abstract

I was halfway out the door heading home when the office phone rang. "You don't know me," the voice said. "I'm a middle school civics teacher in Sioux City. I read your Deming articles," he continued, "and I want you to know that for me Deming is the last great leader of the Enlightenment. ... He's provided the final, and missing, element of natural law." Normally a comment like that would have surprised me. But this was one more of a series of unantici pated reactions evoked by an article I had written six months earlier about the acknowledged founder of the quality movement, W. Edwards Deming (Rhodes 1990). What was going on? For example, "For an administrator who just 'hung it up' after 29 years of trying to influence public education, I found Deming's words heartening." The most frequent reaction, however, was "I thought I was the only one who saw possibilities for schools!" These, and other reactions, were different from those I'd heard regarding other "new" ideas in educa tion, and they started me on a yearlong quest to discover why. This article suggest some answers. Why Quality? Why Now? It's relatively easy to answer the ques tion, "Why has America suddenly become so interested in quality?" One need only listen to economic news about America losing the productivity race to world-class competitors. However, it's more difficult to find answers to why these ideas are proving so attractive to educational practitioners, even before being touted by university-based theorists or outside reformers. Why the growing interest and commitment when there are no full working educational "models" as there are in other systemic programs such as OutcomeBased Education? Why such appeal, when few can even agree on a defini tion of "quality"! And why such seeming understanding now, after decades of exposure to many of the same ideas in the writings of organiza tional researchers and theorists such as Drucker, Herzberg, Argyris, Likert, Maslow, and McGregor? Apparently Deming's words and ideas resonate with something that many people already personally believe is "right." The ideas seem to validate long-held feelings of working individuals who know they want to be effective in their jobs, and who by and large have given up on their organiza tions ever acting as if they believed it, too. As one midmanager, whose orga nization had sent her to a Deming seminar, realized with a shock, "You mean our organization might actually do this . . . when now they're rewarding people for doing just the opposite?" It's becoming clearer to me that the power of Total Quality Management concepts of Deming and others derives (1) from their psychological and value-driven base, and (2) from their "totalness." They deal with an organi zation's work processes as a single system. As one elementary teacher wrote to me, "Schools have a head start over industry in implementing quality concepts because we have a better foundation in psychology and human development than industry." On the other hand, it's also clear why school people don't feel they can act on those principles. The prevailing organiza tional paradigm has all the characteris tics of a dysfunctional family. That is, its members believe that their present roles and relationships (isolated practi tioners, relying on little but their own experience and expertise to respond to children's needs) are the way things are supposed to be. If there's a problem, they — not their "family" — are the ones responsible and in need of fixing. Until now, this dysfunctional condi tion has characterized most modem organizations — not just schools. Humans are born as purpose-driven, trial-and-error learning, self-regulating organisms. But most organizational life limits this natural behavior.