Every few years a new idea captures the imagination of educators. The journals are filled with breathless accounts of its importance, a cadre of consultants materializes to offer workshops, and a new vocabulary insinuates itself into discussions of familiar topics. The idea that currently fits that description is Total Quality Management (TQM), based on the work of the renowned statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming in corporate settings.
Because I am raising concerns about the application of TQM to schools, I should begin by acknowledging not only my admiration for Deming but also my involvement with the movement he helped to set into motion. Some of my own writing is apparently regarded as relevant in these circles, and I have been invited to lecture at a number of Quality conferences, as well as to exchange ideas with Deming as part of a videotape series on his work. I mention these things only by way of emphasizing that I have some connection to the field I am discussing.
Not only am I enthusiastic about TQM in a business context, but I believe that many of its underlying values resonate with some of the best work in educational theory. Deming and his followers offer an essentially positive view of human nature, emphasizing people's fundamental desire to learn and challenge themselves. TQM advocates promote democratic environments and shared decision making. They stress the benefits of cooperation and the destructive consequences of competition. They insist that a climate of trust must replace one based on fear. And they urge the abolition of systems of rating, ranking, and behavioral manipulation, including grades.
While none of these ideas is new to education—indeed, each has been articulated by a variety of educational writers over the decades—we should be pleased to see them corroborated by people from other fields. But pointing out parallels in passing is very different from what is happening with TQM. Educators are attempting to transplant a model native to the business world, along with its methods and metaphors, to the classroom.
A Marketplace Model in the Classroom
Part of the problem, to be sure, is that some educators waving the Quality banner have either misunderstood Deming's work or drawn from it selectively to lend credibility to their own objectives. If TQM offers any imperative to schools, it is the need to abolish standardized tests (Holt 1993) and grades (Deming 1991). Yet higher test scores are sometimes cited by self-styled proponents of TQM as the measure of their success at transforming a school or district (McLeod et al. 1992, Schmoker and Wilson 1993)—or even used as the basis for redesigning the curriculum (Abernethy and Serfass 1992). Likewise, there is reason to believe that the abolition of grades, admittedly a difficult feat, is not even on the agenda of many champions of Quality. (Some of them have moved to allow students to participate in determining their own grades [AASA 1992] but seem to regard this modification of current practice as sufficient.) Moreover, the use of extrinsic motivators appears to be widespread among those who invoke Deming's name.
But my complaint goes deeper than a failure to understand the implications of Deming's ideas or to implement them properly. I believe that a marketplace model, even correctly applied, does not belong in the classroom. The difference between two management approaches (old and new, top-down and participative, Taylor and Deming) is less significant than the difference between any method for managing workers and what happens in classrooms.
Notwithstanding Deming's admonition to eliminate slogans and exhortations, some articles about TQM and education consist of just that: a string of shibboleths about systems theory, profound knowledge, the need for vision and leadership, and so on. Of course, the repetition of favored phrases tells us nothing about how to make meaningful change, but at least no one will disapprove. By contrast, there is cause for grave concern when we come across pointed assertions that “quality is achieved ... by acknowledging that education is a business” (McLeod et al. 1992) or “the modern school should look ... like our best high-tech companies” (David Kearns, quoted in Blankstein 1992). Likewise, when this philosophy is put into practice by enterprising teachers, the results verge on self-parody: 2nd graders being instructed in the fine points of filling orders, pleasing customers, and turning out products to rigid specifications.
Something has gone terribly wrong here. But, again, the problem is not that proponents of Quality fail to understand Deming's work so much as that they fail to understand where that work belongs.
The Nomenclature of the Workplace
When the process of teaching children is forced onto the Procrustean bed of management theory, it is necessary to designate an educational counterpart for each role in a business setting. Because TQM is about satisfying customers, the first order of business is to figure out who should be called the customer of education. Some writers nominate students. Some insist that the word is best applied to parents or other adults in the community. Some say it depends on the situation.
That it is so difficult to agree on the educational correlative to a company's customer—one who purchases a product—should alert us to the possibility that the question is misconceived. Attempting to answer it is about as sensible as trying to figure out which member of a family is most like a colonel and which is most like a lieutenant.
To talk about learning in terms of buying and selling not only reflects a warped view of the activity but contributes to the warping. To the best of my knowledge, only one individual has expressed misgivings in print about this use of language (see Sztajn 1992). Most educators who have addressed themselves to the topic of TQM adopt the terminology uncritically—and, in one case, even suggest that anyone who resists it is suffering from “a fear of industrial models” (Rhodes 1990b).
Other words borrowed from the manager's lexicon are no less disturbing than customer. Students are sometimes said to be raw materials, while parents are suppliers. USX ships steel to General Motors to be made into cars; Mom and Dad (having shed their status as customers) ship their children (ditto) to school to be processed into some other sort of commodity. Alternatively, teachers have been described as “delivering instruction” to students (Willis 1993). All of these phrases have disturbing pedagogical implications.
The deafening clash of metaphors gets louder when students are also referred to as workers (Bonstingl 1992, Schmoker and Wilson 1993). This locution, perhaps the most troubling of all, represents the logical conclusion of a well-established trend of seeing education as an investment. Many business leaders and public officials, after all, have argued that the primary objective of schools is to turn out willing, skilled employees whose labors will help corporations triumph over their counterparts in other countries. It is probably not a coincidence that the rationale for adopting TQM in particular is often couched not in terms of how students can be helped to become self-directed, lifelong learners, but rather in terms of improving corporate competitiveness in global markets (Leonard 1991, Schmoker and Wilson 1993).
Implicit in this perspective is the view of students as potential workers. But in the last few years, we have witnessed a shift to something even more ominous: a view of students as actual workers. Businesspeople and politicians are not the only ones who describe the activities of schoolchildren in economic terms. Albert Shanker (quoted in Perry 1988) declares that “we must start thinking of students as workers.” William Glasser (1990), whose books have supported many educators in transforming schools into more humanistic places, insists that “the industrial analogy of workers and managers ... is both accurate and appropriate.”
- Workers are adults. Most students are children, whose capacities and limits demand a developmentally appropriate set of strategies. Age differences not only inform what and how we teach, but also affect our response to inappropriate behavior.
- If workers are helped to acquire skills, this is intended as a way to build an effective organization; it is rarely a goal in its own right. By contrast, helping students to acquire skills, to become good learners and good people, is the very point of school.
- While it is undesirable for many reasons to manipulate workers with incentives (Kohn, in press a, b), they still have to be paid. Nothing, including grades, is analogous in a school setting.
- Most important, workers produce goods like automobiles and houses; they are hired to make things. The only thing students should be making is meaning. To turn the classroom into a workplace, through our practices or our parlance, is to put at risk the intellectual exploration and development that ought to be taking place there.
Teaching by the Numbers?
What is striking about the articles and books on the application of TQM to education is their failure to address any fundamental questions about learning, per se, or, even more remarkably, curriculum. Incredibly, page after page written by educators enamored of business models typically contains not a single reference to whether the things we are teaching are worth learning—whether the curriculum is engaging and relevant to children's experiences. In fact, one influential introduction to the topic promotes TQM as “content-free, applicable to any instruction or structural reform” (AASA 1992).
This is hardly the first time educators have been offered a package said to be compatible with any curriculum. That TQM takes the same approach should not be surprising, since its use in a corporate context is not dependent on what people in an organization are doing: whether a company manufactures medicine or missiles is of no consequence to consultants who talk about moving toward Quality.
At best, then, TQM offers little challenge to the curricular status quo and leaves students with the same material to learn. But if, as I suspect, TQM turns out not to be content-neutral in practice, its impact may actually be counterproductive. The premise of TQM seems to be that the trouble with organizations of all sorts, including schools, is a lack of data. Great importance is placed on the use of statistical control diagrams and other pictorial representations of quantitative information about performance. New converts to TQM frequently display examples of these tools, along with pride at having mastered them.
Is it really true that the principal problem with American classrooms is a lack of data? I think not, but we can put off this question to another day. Instead, let us consider the possible effect on the curriculum of this way of thinking. In academic social science, the questions addressed in a given discipline often seem to be selected on the basis of how well they lend themselves to the methodologies native to that field: the method drives the content. Similarly, it is entirely possible that TQM classrooms will incline toward the analysis of data and the assignment of tasks where progress can be easily quantified and analyzed. While Deming has said unequivocally that “the most important things we need to manage can't be measured” (quoted in Rhodes 1990a; also see Deming 1991), an emphasis on statistical analysis is likely to accelerate the tendency toward teaching by the numbers.
There is evidence, in fact, that this is already happening. In one case, proponents of systems thinking have talked about computer simulations of the actions of Shakespeare's characters to maximize “the use of precise numbers to talk about psychological motives” (Senge and Lannon-Kim 1991). In another case, people committed to Quality have built into assessment instruments such measures as “the number of poems a student [has] memorized” (Harris and Harris 1992). David Langford, a pioneer in the field, recently dismissed “the argument that much of what happens in the classroom is intangible and hence not subject to the statistical scrutiny TQM prescribes. `It can all be measured,' he maintains” (Willis 1993).
It was e.e. cummings who declared that “nothing measurable matters a good goddam.” Even if we are not willing to go quite that far, it is hard to deny that much of what is worth learning cannot be reduced to numbers without doing violence to its substance. In fact, anyone sensitive to the tyranny of standardized testing should be just as skeptical about turning the process of children's intellectual creation and discovery into bars on a Pareto chart.
At the heart of Deming's approach is a repudiation of the use of numerical goals and mass inspection at the end of production. What we choose to quantify, and how we do so, is highly relevant within the Quality framework. But what are we to make of the assertion that “improving the system” for educators as well as managers means trying to “narrow the amount of variation within it” (Blankstein 1992)? Or that it means “removing inefficiencies” in the curriculum itself, or even worse, subjecting children to “frequent assessment of quality at every stage” (Schmoker and Wilson 1993)?
Back to the Goals of Education
Assuming that these writers have not misinterpreted the goals of TQM, the issue once again is whether such a system is consistent with our goals as educators. If we prefer to focus on process rather than product—if efficiency is a goal incommensurate with the act of discovery—then we have reason to question the appropriateness of TQM in a classroom setting. Nor will our concerns be allayed when some of the recommendations are modified. Even if students' performance isn't construed in terms of reducing variation and even if it isn't relentlessly quantified, there is no getting around the fact that the Quality model is designed to draw attention to performance in order to improve it.
Unfortunately, a performance focus is inherently problematic in a classroom. The work of leading motivation researchers (Ames 1992, Dweck 1986, Nicholls 1989), none of which has been mentioned by defenders of TQM's role in education, converges on a single crucial distinction concerning how to think about what happens in schools. Variously framed as “mastery vs. ability,” “learning vs. performance,” and “task vs. ego,” the point is that there is an enormous difference between getting students to think about what they are doing, on the one hand, and how well they are doing (and therefore how good they are at doing it), on the other. The latter orientation does a great deal of harm.
Students who are overly concerned about how well they are doing may come to see learning as a means to an end and start to think that their performance, especially when they fail, is due to innate intelligence (or its absence): “I screwed up; therefore, I'm stupid.” That, in turn, leads them to assume there isn't much point to trying harder next time, which means they are unlikely to improve.
- undermine their ability to apply scientific principles to new situations (Dweck 1986);
- reduce the quality of their work as measured on tests of creativity (Butler 1992);
- increase their fear of failure (Heyman and Dweck 1992);
- undermine their interest in what they are doing (Ryan 1982, Butler 1987); and
- lead them to choose the easiest possible task in an effort to avoid the sort of challenge that might lead to failure (Harter 1978, Elliott and Dweck 1988).
Getting students to think about grades or performance on tests is a particularly potent way to inhibit creative thinking and conceptual learning (Grolnick and Ryan 1987, Butler and Nisan 1986). But the point here is that any sort of performance orientation can be detrimental—and TQM is unavoidably based on just such an orientation.
I do not fault the theorists or practitioners of corporate management for ignorance of these and other findings, because there is no reason to expect them to have thought carefully about how children learn. But why, then, are we looking to these people for guidance on educational practices?
When someone in the business world asks me for advice, I unhesitatingly recommend the work of Deming. Educators, though, would do better to turn to Dewey. Before we jump on the bandwagon carrying another corporate model into our schools, we need to ask some hard questions about the nature and purposes of education. No one can object to “quality” as an abstract concept, but if a set of practices revolving around that word requires us to treat students as customers or workers, then we should leave management practices to managers and get on with the challenge of educating.
