Beyond Piecemeal Improvements
How to Transform Your School Using Deming's Quality Principles
Description:... Ways that educators can improve America's schools using Deming's total-quality-improvement methods are detailed in this book. The book draws upon the following beliefs: (1) people should be recognized for excellent work; (2) evaluation is essential to improvement; and (3) intrinsic motivation must be enhanced and pride in workmanship nurtured. The book begins with an overview of the perceived crisis in the schools, offering an historical perspective of the situation. The book shifts the focus of improving education from evaluating education professionals to evaluating the educational system. It defines a system as a network of functions, elements, and processes within an organization. The book then focuses on what schools can do to implement quality instruction, pays special attention to improving quality through system transformation, ways to optimize educational systems, how to understand common and special causes of system variations, how to use knowledge to gain improvement, and how to draw on psychology to enhance motivation. The last section looks at how to maintain continual improvements--providing concepts, implications, steps, strategies, and tips on transforming the system--and what leaders must do to transform themselves and others. Three appendices list Deming's 14 points as applied to different systems, as well as field reports of educational transformation in action. (RJM)
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