Transforming Schools through Total Quality Education

Abstract

Anyone who knows anything about public education knows that, in general, what Deming preaches -- and what Toyota does -- is not happening in our schools, Messrs. Schmoker and Wilson assert. The good news is that Deming's principles can easily be adopted. ABOUT A YEAR and a ago, we decided to visit the Toyota plant in Lexington, Kentucky. Our school district's move to site-based management was in full swing, and we went to Lexington hoping to learn more about implementing that change. Neither our experience nor the research coming out at that time indicated that site-based management, by itself, held much promise for raising levels of achievement.[1] Something was missing. We assumed that whatever accounted for the widely touted effectiveness of decentralized management at Toyota would apply to schools as well. We got far more from our trip than we bargained for. We believe that what we learned from Toyota could transform public education and make equal opportunity more than an empty phrase. It would enable America finally to reach that forgotten half of the student population that has traditionally been deprived of a high-quality education -- the group that economist Lester Thurow tells us is pivotal to a nation's ability to compete in an international marketplace.[2] Employees at Toyota work and think together in teams. To a surprising extent, these teams are self-managing: they meet regularly to identify areas for improvement, to set many of their own goals, to gather and interpret their own data, and to check progress and adjust efforts made toward attaining their goals. In this way, they do their own quality control. Most of Toyota's ideas for innovation and improvement -- thousands of them each year -- come from the employees. In any given year more than 90% of Toyota employees submit at least one suggested kaizen, a Japanese word for a small but significant improvement. That fact is interesting enough in itself. But what is more interesting is that more than 90% of these suggestions actually get implemented. A surprisingly democratic atmosphere prevails at Toyota. Management allows workers a considerable degree of autonomy. The chief function of management is to encourage and support employees, or as Toyota calls them, with guidance and with continual training and retraining. It is management's responsibility to ask the right questions rather than to tell employees what to do. the other hand, Toyota insists on something that is seldom practiced in schools: every decision, every improvement effort must be made collectively. These decisions are made within teams and by groups of teams, which, as members of the larger system, are given regular opportunities to interact. Whatever measures are taken are checked against data at every stage. Toyota believes that the key to improvement is knowing exactly how well -- or how poorly -- you are progressing in your efforts. A frequently heard refrain is Give me the data. But these data are never used to identify and blame individual employees. They serve only to improve the overall system. No one has ever been fired from Toyota's Lexington plant. In speaking with dozens of Toyota employees in Lexington-area bars, we learned that this approach is not only effective but appealing. It is no overstatement to say that employees seem to love their jobs. We found their enthusiasm startling. This is factory work, mind you. And yet we heard many comments like this one from an ex-jockey: On Sunday nights, I look forward to getting with my team and hitting the ground running on Monday morning. No kidding. The combination of management strategies used by Toyota, widely known as Total Quality Management (TQM), is based on the work of W. Edwards Deming, the statistician and management theorist whose success with Japanese industry has been so widely celebrated. And, as is inevitable with any large-scale movement, his theories are now being reexamined in some corners. …

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