As typically practiced, Total Quality Management (TQM) concentrates on doing things right. However, doing things right doesn't necessarily mean we are doing the right things (Drucker 1973).
While TQM works to increase the efficiency of processes to ensure customer satisfaction, organizations often assume that what they produce is desirable for society both now and in the future. History is filled, though, with examples of products and services that have satisfied individuals but, in the long run, proved to be unhealthy for society: cigarettes, DDT, aerosol sprays, non-biodegradable plastics, disposable diapers, leaded gas, and asbestos insulation.
Similarly, educators might be pleased with 100 percent attendance or 100 percent graduation from high school, but what if high school graduates don't get jobs, go on welfare, or become criminals? What do we need to learn about quality to ensure that public school graduates will be self-sufficient, self-reliant, and contribute positively to our society? How do we hook TQM to a vision that goes beyond that of a satisfied customer to one who is well-served by schools—ethically, socially, and environmentally (Kaufman 1991, Kaufman and Zahn in press)?
A New World
Futurists agree that, ready or not, a new world is coming our way. That world will have a global economy and a shared destiny, and calls for increased productivity and improved competitiveness will not be enough to bring us into it. By widening our vision of quality to include societal payoffs, we can not only be responsive to our coming world, but we can also be masters of it.
A satisfied customer is not enough; a continuously healthy, safe, and well-served customer is better. To achieve this, we must be creative, innovative, practical, and open to change. We must add to current models, techniques, and approaches so that they can identify and deliver products and services that will be useful in tomorrow's world.
Piecemeal interventions within our current educational system have done little to increase the productivity or usefulness of our schools. Recent evaluations indicate that the educational improvement strategies advocated by various interest groups in the early 1980s have not resulted in any significant changes or payoffs. Some argue that our current system's effectiveness and efficiency has reached its upper limit and, therefore, significant improvements can only be made through a fundamental restructuring of the system (Branson 1987). Total Quality Management provides a framework for doing just that, but we believe it is incomplete. TQM addresses education as a system of linked organizational elements, and it attempts to please the external clients who hire students and pay taxes to support the system. What's missing is the idea that we must also deliver results that are good for society as a whole and contribute to an ideal vision of an exemplary world (Senge 1990).
Ideal Vision
A practical, ideal vision defines a safe and satisfying world where everyone is self-sufficient, self-reliant, and mutually contributing (Kaufman and Herman 1991, Kaufman 1992). The vision provides the basis for deriving educational mission statements, which we can use to define organizational, departmental, classroom, and individual goals and objectives. An “extended” TQM process will link such an ideal vision with conventional TQM practices. Figure 1 illustrates such a “Total Quality Management Plus” framework.
Figure 1. Framework for Total Quality Management Plus
- Be ready for a challenge. Understand that people fear change and that education is made up of people. Proceed with courage, patience, and understanding.
- Create and use a quality system that will collect performance data, and share it with the TQM partners so everyone can clearly and continuously determine strategies and tactics for improvement.
- Define the ideal vision, the world in which we want our grandchildren to live. Identify results only; do not include processes, resources, or methods.
- Determine gaps between current results and the ideal vision.
- Based on the ideal vision, obtain agreement on what would deliver client satisfaction next year, five years from now, and into the next century. Agree on how satisfaction will be measured.
- Identify results that would demonstrate achievement of steps 3 and 4, and describe how you would measure each. These results might be mastery in courses, skills, knowledge, attitudes, and/or abilities.
- Define the activities that would deliver such results.
- Identify resources—including people, facilities, and funds—that are required to do the activities and deliver the required results.
- Specify what each person must do and accomplish to make certain that quality results and activities happen continuously.
- Continue to use the data-based quality system, which objectively and accurately tracks and reports progress, problems, and opportunities. The educational system should be revised as required, and new opportunities to improve elements of the system should be considered at each step. Improvement should occur steadily without sacrificing successful activities and resources.
As educators, we have a choice. We can concentrate on the efficiency of current instructional processes and inputs and do what we are already doing at lower cost and less waste. Or, we can develop quality systems that include the “plus” factor, which defines and creates what will be useful to society today and in tomorrow's world. Simply improving upon today's realities will once again leave us playing catch-up. If tomorrow's world is going to move closer to our ideal vision, education has to shape new horizons and new ways to get from where we are to where we want to go.
