Schools adopt Total Quality

Business methods gain favor in classrooms as students take more control of their education

By ADRIENNE LU, Staff Writer

If your third-grade daughter comes home from school this week chattering about consensus building, flow charts and customer satisfaction, there's no need to worry she's been hypnotized by Dilbert.

More likely, she attends one of an increasing number of schools in the Triangle that have adopted the business philosophy known as Total Quality Management, or TQM.

TQM began infiltrating corporate culture in the United States in the early 1980s, when faltering American industries were struggling to compete with a dominant Japanese market.

By now, many ideas first heralded by TQM are second nature even to those beyond cubicle walls: placing the customer first, replacing top-down management with empowered employees at every level, striving for continuous improvement and strong reliance on data for decision-making.

In fact, some say TQM is so ingrained in corporate America that many companies take it for granted and have lost sight of how useful the concept is.

But the opposite is true in education, where TQM has been widely embraced.

In 1993, six pilot school districts in North Carolina, including Johnston County Schools, were chosen to participate in the Total Quality in Education initiative, sponsored by the North Carolina Business Committee for Education and the governor's office.

Total Quality in Education translates TQM to the classroom, with teachers, parents, community members and students serving as the customers.

"Quality is not something else to do," said E.D. Hall, an assistant superintendent for Johnston County Schools. "It is a better way to do what we are doing already."

Today, there are 45 districts statewide involved with Quality, as the movement is known in brief. In the Triangle alone, Orange County Schools, Durham Public Schools and the Wake County Public School System have signed on -- Wake and Orange in 1998, Durham in late 1997 -- and Johnston County's program is still going strong.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools have not formally integrated the philosophy but use some Quality tools. So what does Quality look like in action?

In Johnston County Schools, one example of Quality at work is when teachers, students and parents fill out an annual survey, which asks questions about everything from vandalism to parking facilities to pride in the schools.

One survey found students and parents rarely had the time to eat dinner together. So last year, a group that included about 15 students at South Johnston High School studied parental involvement to seek a solution.

In the end, the group decided to stage a "no homework night," in which teachers pledged not to assign homework and students pledged to spend the extra time talking with their parents over dinner. The point of the exercise was to reiterate the importance of parents and children spending time together -- perhaps an obvious conclusion but one that had not been reinforced by the school.

On a recent school day, seniors in Judy Rose's Academy for Vocational Certification at South Johnston High School debated when to leave for a field trip to an agricultural trade show, where to stop for breakfast and when to return. Rose stood back and watched the debate, forsaking the traditional role of a teacher, stepping in only to make suggestions to the student directing the discussion.

Giving students more control over how they learn -- whether it means letting them choose where to go for a field trip, the criteria on which they should be graded or what book they should read next -- helps teach students to be responsible for their own education, teachers say.  [I note that while enough leeway to fail is essential, choices must be "informed."  A student vote for an All-TV-All-The-Time Curriculum gets no consideration.]

"I see a real impact on students taking more responsibility for their own learning. They're more empowered," said Joyce Matthews, a third-grade teacher at Benson Elementary School.

Another important benefit deals with how work is done. Before Quality, teachers at Matthews' school worked in isolation within the walls of their classrooms, meetings dragged on endlessly and management was very much top-down, she said.

Now, teachers, students, parents and administrators work together more often to reach common goals. Meetings, with the help of Quality tools, run smoother and faster.

One measure of Quality's success has been rising test scores.

Although many Triangle schools are too new to Quality for its effects to show, Johnston County officials credit rising end-of-grade and SAT scores -- which rose consistently until an unexpected drop this year -- to Quality.

Durham Public Schools, which adopted Quality in December 1997, already reports improvements.

"I think that the evidence is that, for the past two years, our student achievement scores have been up across the board," said David Holdzkom, an assistant superintendent in the district. "We would attribute that, at least in part, to some Quality tools and some Quality activities."

Some might wonder how long Quality will last in the education field, infamously fickle for welcoming and then abandoning teaching trends, such as whole language, fuzzy mathematics and outcome-based education.

In the business world, TQM is a firmly-entrenched management philosophy in some corporations, a fading symbol of the '80s and early '90s in others.

Still, many teachers and administrators say they see Quality as more permanent.

Randy Bridges, superintendent of Orange County Schools, said the district encourages everyone to think of Quality as "a process to examine what you're currently doing, with a focus on the customer," rather than as the latest flavor of the month.

"You hear people talk about fish-bone diagrams, or they talk about coming to consensus, issue bends, brainstorming," Bridges said. "When you talk about all those kinds of things, what it spells out is structure and evaluation.

"When you do that ongoing, it has to make things better," Bridges said.

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