Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306070120
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
College campuses were hotbeds of radical reform ideas, or at least slogans - like empowerment, decentralization, abolition of traditional hierarchies, participatory democracy, small is beautiful, etc. Big corporations, it was assumed, stood in the way.
Now a funny thing is happening. Change is needed more urgently than ever. Bureaucracy remains the oppressor. But the assault on irrational authority seems finally, slowly, to be catching on - in the business world!
Instead of holding out as a last bastion of the old order, under which people simply do as they are told, the work place may prove a source and model for liberating innovations, such as flattened hierarchy. These ideas are flowing gradually to other institutions, eroding their bureaucratic defenses.
They're even spreading to schools.
Businesses find themselves at this cutting edge not, of course, because they want to instigate social change, but because they're suffering cuts themselves. They live or die today in an unforgiving marketplace, increasingly exposed to global competition. Those unable to adapt won't survive.
Hence, among happening companies, an effort to focus more intently on customers. Firms are extending decision-making to front-line employees; collecting data and measuring performance in search of ways to heighten quality and productivity; organizing work teams to bridge departmental lines; defining missions that everyone in an organization can understand.
Hence, too, the growing flock surrounding W. Edwards Deming, a crusty statistician credited with helping Japanese industry register dramatic gains in quality management after World War II.
I am acquainted with Deming's ideas, I should note, because this newspaper is committed to implementing some of his theories in our work place.
As with a lot of things, so-called total quality management (TQM) is easier to talk about than to do, and the trick is in the doing. I must confess that many colleagues at the newspaper, if not quite apostles yet at Deming's side, are farther than I along the path to continuous improvement.
But I'm getting there. I'm on a team that's looking at ways to improve our work. I have learned that Deming's wisdom is not mysterious or miraculous so much as it is a collection of analytical tools and common sense - and a powerful collection at that.
So I don't have the sense of being brainwashed into a brave new world. On the contrary, I'm enjoying a reacquaintance with old ideals, albeit in new clothing, which the real world had supposedly discredited and discarded. Now from the mouths of management consultants come assertions of the dignity of fulfilling work, the right of all to a say in their work place, and so on. We are keeping the faith.
During the '60s, people used to talk about "the system." The system was pervasive, irrational, unfair, corrupting. Many things unpleasant were blamed on it.
Deming, too, blames the system. He contends that about 96 percent of problems in any organization are attributable to poor system design, not poor performance by the people in it. To which a lot of people would say, Right on.
And his assessment applies to organizations other than businesses. As one total-quality management convert, Lt. Gov. Don Beyer, has suggested, government is an obvious candidate for reform.
So are schools. The educational relevance of the business world's quality techniques is gradually being recognized. Applications aren't always obvious, much less quick or easy. Innovations are provoking fierce resistance.
Yet schools well might be where it's at, TQM-wise.
Take grades. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the following exchange took place between Deming and a public-schools superintendent after the latter completed one of Deming's four-day seminars. On learning of the superintendent's profession, the angry prophet asked:
"Did you get rid of grades yet?"
"No."
"Do it Monday."
"It's not that simple . . . ."
"Do it Monday."
Perhaps Virginia schools won't do it Monday. But they could, soon enough, get rid of grading on a curve. They could test knowledge - and mastery of skills - more frequently, so problems could be corrected along the way. Deming would approve.
Teaching in teams, and organizing students into learning teams, are a clearer application of his ideas. Increasingly, work in the outside world will occur in teams and be judged as much on the basis of collective accomplishments as on individual performance. Schools must adjust accordingly.
They also need to get with decentralizing, or empowerment. Some call it anarchy; others, site-based management. By any name, it's spreading. Several school districts in our region, including Montgomery and Franklin counties, have set up site-based councils with varying degrees of (still mostly minimal) decision-making authority.
"Our philosophy is to put the authority for certain decisions, and the responsibility for certain decisions, back to the lowest level in the school division - the schools," says Richard Kelley, business affairs executive with the Roanoke city schools.
As any respectable member of the management consultants' proliferating ranks could tell local officials, you have to have (1) alignment on purposes and goals, (2) a system for measuring progress, and (3) accountability for meeting the goals, before you can let school councils run off and decide for themselves how they're going to spend money or choose curricula.
Even so, most people would agree - especially most people who aren't educators - that change should liberate schools from the oppressive, bureaucratic, industrial model of education.
In his reform primer, "Horace's School," Theodore Sizer describes the rightly redesigned institution. It won't be, he says, "a place of managers and workers . . . . The administrator-teacher distinction that arose from the early twentieth-century factory floor must give way, as it already has done in the most progressive American enterprises."
Several progressive educators have noted that schools mirror society, yet too many schools today mirror a society passed away - an obsolete economy in which mass standardized production is married to mass standardized consumption.
This won't compute anymore. Schools will have to be more flexible. For one thing, they'll never get all the funding they want. For another, they are producing citizens for a changing universe - what management guru Peter Drucker calls "the post-capitalist world."
In his book by that name, Drucker argues that the "real and controlling `resource' and the absolutely decisive `factor of production' today is neither capital, nor land, nor labor. It is knowledge."
If owners of capital aren't the big bosses, and knowledge instead is power, it follows that education must be society's engine. Education for young students, lifelong learning on the job.
Drucker's "knowledge workers" will need superb schooling.
One hopes they also will need newspapers, or a recognizable equivalent. If they don't, perhaps journalists could find work as post-capitalist consultants.
by CNB