I have just found a paper titled:
"Fulfilling the Proper Aim of Education"
By Myron Tribus
given at the National Governor's Conference
on Quality in Education in Detroit, Michigan in 1997
It outlines the application of the Deming business quality philosophy to the world of education. What a change that requires - at all levels!
Quality management was originally developed for industry. When
transferring its concepts to education certain differences should be kept in
mind:
1. The product is not the student. We do not manufacture students, nor do we determine most of their characteristics.
2. The product is the education of the student.
3. There are many customers for this product. In order of priority they
are:
- The student… who must live with the product for a lifetime.
- Parents or close family… who have a vested interest in the
student's future. - Potential employers… who will wish to "rent" the education
and pay the student for its use and improvement. Students,
in most cases, must become self supporting. - The rest of us… who must live among them and, therefore,
hope to be surrounded by decent human beings.
4. The workers who produce the product are the students, themselves.
This creates a situation quite different from industry. It is as though
the workers at Ford were building cars and then driving away with
them, never turning back.
5. The key process is learning. All other processes of education should
be support processes. In this spirit, teaching is not a key process. It
is a support process. Ideally, learning would take place without
need for teaching. Teaching would be replaced by mentoring.
Alas, too many managers think their job is to issue crisp orders and then
when things do not turn out the way they planned, they fix the blame
instead of the system.
Changes in the basic style of teaching and learning cannot occur if the schools
are managed as though they were but a collection of independent school
buildings housing teachers working in independent classrooms. Changes
cannot occur if the teachers know, through the reward system, that their pay
depends upon the scores children make in standardized tests in their
particular subject.
The relationship is reciprocal: It is also not possible to change the way the
institution is managed unless changes are made in the classroom.
1 comment:
Hi Stephen,
It's very refreshing to see somebody from a business background understanding the problems with applying business management theory or structures to education.
I think your comments are very helpful here. I work and research in FE, so I stick to that terrain. I think the policy has been to encourage FE providers to view students as customers of course, the products. The sale occurs when a college, for example, keeps a student on course until completion. The qualification is the receipt of sale and the college then draws down funding from Daddy LSC who foot the bill for student customer. Students are encouraged, through our assessment obsessed system, to view qualifications as tokens of currency. The great number of higher grade GCSEs you have when leaving school the wider your choice of course and provider for the A-Levels, or an equivalent (does that exist).
If education is the product, as you advocate, our current system reduces it do a pseudo-commercial value and I believe it is this that damages, what we have both supported on the Lib-Dem site, students development of a love of learning.
Fundamental it seems to me is a recognition, which you have, of what goes on in the classroom. Unless the models of accountability and quality control can be built around the learning relationships at this level, the whole enterprise of education becomes a fiction, a devaluing currency nobody recognises is worthless until it is too late.
Thanks for the blog. Great work.
Kind regards,
Nigel
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