Edwards+Deming

=Edwards Deming= Tom []

Kellee Hill []

Becky Edward Deming was hired by the Japanese government after WWII to help it shift the world’s perception of Japanese manufacturers as makers of cheap products, toward viewing them as makers of innovative, high quality goods. Following Deming’s principles, Japanese manufacturers were able to achieve this in four years.
 * Name of the theorist - Edward Deming **

· Stay focused on purpose, taking into consideration society’s long term needs and the basic elements needed to keep the organization running well · Don’t accept the status quo · Rather than relying on inspection, build quality into the product and use follow up metrics around performance and sales · Develop loyal partnerships with a few suppliers and emphasize quality rather than cost as the basis for the relationship · Hunt for problems in every aspect of an organization as a trigger for continual refinement/improvement. In addressing them, avoid short-term gains that may yield long-term losses;rather, stay true to the larger purposes of the organization. · Keep focused on ongoing, job-embedded professional development · Focus supervision on quality products and processes · Emphasize communication/accessibility among the parts of the organization to reduce unproductive emotions like fear · Develop cross-functional teams to increase shared understanding and efficiency. · When goals are not met, avoid blaming and lecturing people; look for the source of problems within the system itself and aim to tackle those instead. · Instead of naming a specific target, aim instead, to develop supports for continual progress toward high quality, productive outcomes · Help people feel pride in their work through authentic means · Encourage knowledge development in all members of the organization · Ensure that top management is actively involved in creating the conditions needed to bring out the other 13 principles A major connection that I see has to do with helping all parts of a complex organization like a school district to own and understand the goal: Student achievement of valued knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Some parts of a school district can focus on one part and fail to concern themselves with other parts, but truly we are graduating whole human beings who are a synthesis of their combined experiences, and the more the different parts of the entire district (curriculum, counseling, IT, buildings and grounds, finance, HR) can understand one another and work together, the closer it will come to realizing its mission.
 * Description of the theory/beliefs** - Demings ideas have been distilled into 14 points:
 * Description of how this applies to school-based administration **

NCLB was an attempt to push past the status quo, which is that 40% - 60% of school age students do not achieve their academic potential. Deming would applaud the intention of the Bill, but question the means of achieving it. Mandating a particular number to equate with “adequate yearly progress” and leveling sanctions against schools for failing repeatedly to achieve it would not result in honoring the long term mission of schooling, in his view, because a single number cannot do justice to the multiple goals schools have for students and students have for themselves.

Deming would be asking the administrators of such schools to take an active and ongoing stance toward altering the conditions under which students learn and teachers teach, continually seeking the gap between vision and practice in order to address it. He would have administrators looking at the taken-for-granted structures by which we do school (master schedules, grouping for instruction, organization of space, assumptions about learning, assumptions about quality assessment, learning materials) and asking them to organize teams of stakeholders to come up with more effective ones for achieving the desired results. Deming would challenge teachers to change their methods of instruction to yield more formative assessment data, so that students’ progress could be more visible to all stakeholders earlier in the process. He would expect that the target for instruction be more explicit, so everyone understood what we were collectively aiming for and that the target would be broader than a single academic outcome, able to be measured by a single standardized assessment. Such an assessment he would equate to the “mass inspection” practice so common in Japanese factories prior to WWII and so clearly out of step with achieving the quality later manufacturers sought and the learning for critical and creative thinking, collaboration and transfer that progressive administrators now seek.

Deming would cringe at the idea of merit pay now being tied to Race to the Top funds, recommending instead that teachers be compensated by how well they contributed as a team to the growth of their students. Recognizing all members of the school for demonstrations of excellence would be one way he would encourage school leaders to develop organizational pride. He would recommend that more time be given over during the day and the year for common planning with colleagues, so that good ideas and additional development had a chance to take root, because teachers and administrators would have a greater understanding of the mindsets and contributions of all members of the organization and the profession as a whole.

A natural starting point for supporting Deming’s value for cross-functional adult teams to help problem solve the gap between mission and reality in schools would be the collaborative spaces afforded by Web 2.0 tools. They are free and readily accessible to anyone with Internet access. These tools could also help address the current paucity of collaborative planning time most secondary teachers have during the school day. These tools (online discussion spaces through Moodle, collaborative creation spaces like Etherpad and Google docs, additive knowledge spaces like Wikis and blogs) can be an efficient way to promote shared understanding, take advantage of collective creativity, and expand angles of perception and analysis.
 * Description of how the theory can promote the use of technology to support teaching and learning **

In terms of supporting student growth toward valued learning outcomes, Web. 2.0 platforms also offer the motivation of sharing important knowledge for real audiences if students are asked to apply their learning to real problems, with meaningful feedback coming from audiences students care about. Some examples of social networks for this type of sharing are Youthvoices.org (http://youthvoices.net/)and Scratched (http://scratched.media.mit.edu/).

I may be too uncritical, but Deming's principles make sense to me. Elements of them remind me of the empowerment at the heart of servant leadership, so were ahead of their time. My concerns stem from the difference between business and public education. Deming’s work focused on organizations whose survival was based on turning a profit and whose intention was to strengthen this likelihood by transforming the world’s perception of them as quality producers. As such, there was a built in motivation, even urgency to implement his principles. American public schools, on the other hand, have not felt the same urgency. The U.S. government has tried to engender it through NCLBA, by attempting to take schools who fail to make AYP for four consecutive years into ‘corrective action,’ the public school equivalent of going out of business as usual. But this has often resulted in states manipulating standards and assessments to make it seem like progress is being made, resulting in illusory short term ‘gains,’ while damaging the spirit of the enterprise, which should be true learning, not just providing a place for adults to draw a paycheck while seeming to educate the young. Deming would admonish such states to stop this counterproductive action. In fact, international comparisons have surfaced the inconsistency in states’ apparent progress, with our highest performing students only coming in at mid-level among nations on international assessments like theTIMSS and PISA (Haycock, 2008). The recent adoption by 37 states for national standards (Common Core State Standards Initiative, June 2, 2010) suggests that the climate is shifting toward greater real accountability for (at least in English Language Arts) reasonably worthwhile learning targets (my opinion!). Deming would applaud this shift as he believed it was not possible to improve if you did not know where to focus. The ELA standards provide a decent focus.
 * Brief critique of the theory**

Honoring Deming’s principles poses many challenges for schools as currently organized. (Alert: What follows is more a critique of schooling than of Deming.) Probably the greatest barrier to implementing his vision in public schools is the collective practice of limiting the amount of time we have with students to about 180 instructional days, switching the content addressed every 45 or 90 minutes, emphasizing individual learning, assuming the teacher is the source of learning, and de-professionalizing the teacher via heavy reliance on scripted curricula narrowly focused on raising scores on a single high stakes summative assessment after the time for instruction as passed. In short: We persist in an older factory model approach to a reality that must become more dynamic, personalized, and multi-modal. Deming’s ideas are sound, but they need money to implement -- more than we have currently allocated.

Deming’s principle that leaders take more responsibility poor outcomes by looking at the system is both refreshing and frustrating. Deming’s theory of Profound Knowledge includes the belief “ that every worker has nearly unlimited potential if placed in an environment that adequately supports, educates, and nurtures senses of pride and responsibility; he stated that the majority--85 percent--of a worker's effectiveness is determined by his environment and only minimally by his own skill.” (Skymark, 2010, para. 7). Yet working conditions (part of the system) in schools seldom provide sufficient support, particularly in low income districts, with class loads reaching as high as 150 per teacher in secondary school and little time to think or plan. Low salaries dissuade the best and the brightest from entering the field, while those who elect to teach may lack the depth of content knowledge needed to teach for conceptual understanding and transfer; equally, they likely lack the range of pedagogical skill to accommodate the increasingly diverse needs of today’s students. So how do administrators attract talented, well trained recruits to form the high functioning teams Demings advocates?

Administrators only indirectly influence what happens between teachers and students. The walk-throughs that many use now to monitor the implementation of the curriculum are often just inspections in disguise, which Deming would disavow. No real change can occur until administrators and teachers are empowered to think differently about their work, which involves more time to collaborate, study and be coached. This translates to more expense for the taxpayer. As Mike Rose (1989) has so eloquently put it,

...ours is the first society in history to expect so many of its people to be able to perform ...very sophisticated literacy activities. And we fail to keep in mind how extraordinary it is to ask all our schools to conduct this kind of education -- not just those schools with lots of money and exceptional teachers and small classes -- but massive, sprawling schools, beleaguered schools, inner-city schools, overcrowded schools. It is a charge most of them simply are not equipped to fulfill, for our educational ideals far outstrip our economic and political priorities. (p.188)

Does the U.S. population have the will to change schools the way they need to change? If so, Deming’s principles make a great deal of sense, leveraging the collective creativity of the whole, empowering all parts of the organization, adults and students like, through work-embedded development and recognition, focused on a sincere and relentless quest for evidence of growth.

Common Core State Standards Initiative. (June 2, 2010). //National governors association and state education chiefs launch common state academic standards//. Retrieved July 24, 2010 from http://www.corestandards.org/articles/8-national-governors- association-and-state-education-chiefs-launch-common- state-academic-standards
 * References **

Ed.gov U.S. Department of Education (September 7, 2003). //Stronger accountability: Questions and answers on No Child Left Behind, Accountability,// //Archived Information//. Retrieved July 24, 2010 from http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/schools/accountability.html

Haycock, K. (December 9. 2008). //Statement from Kati Haycock on the release of the 2007 TIMSS data//. Retrieved July 24, 2010 from http://www.edtrust.org/dc/press-room/press-release/statement-from-kati-haycock-on-the-release-of-2007-timss-data

Leadership Institute, Inc. (2005, May 26). //Who is Dr. W. Edwards Deming//? Retrieved on July 24, 2010 from http://www.lii.net/deming.html. Rose, M. (1989). Live on the boundary: A moving account of the struggles and achievements of America’s educationally underprepared. New York: Penguin. Skymark, Corporation. (2010). //Dr. W. Edwards Deming//. Retrieved on July 24, 2010 from http://www.skymark.com/resources/leaders/deming.asp. Para 7.