Quality School

William Glasser, M.D.

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062035295
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

"This should be required reading by every school administator, every teacher, every board member and all university faculty involved in the training of teachers. There is no doubt that we need to squeeze all blame, all coerion and all criticism out of any people-related business. Not until we realize that schools are in a people business will we ever be able to make meaningful changes."
--Dr. Albert Mamary, former superintendent of schools, Johnson City, New York

CHAPTER ONE

Quality Education Is the Only Answer to Our School Problems

Picture the students in a required academic class at a randomly selected secondary school as a gang of street repair workers. If they were working as hard as the students do in class, half or more would be leaning on their shovels, smoking and socializing, perfectly content to let the others do the work. Of those who were working, few would be working hard, and it is likely that none would be doing high-quality work.

It is apparent, however, that students have thought about quality and have a good idea of what, in their school, is considered quality. I have talked at length to groups of high school students about this subject, and most of them see quality in athletics, music, and drama, a few see it in advanced placement academics or shop classes, but almost none see it in regular classes. While they believe they are capable of doing quality work in class, all but a very few admit that they have never done it and have no plans to do it in the future. The purpose of this book is to explain how to manage students so that a substantial majority do high-quality schoolwork: Nothing less will solve the problems of our schools.

If we accept that the purpose of any organization, public or private, is to build a quality product or perform a quality service, then we must also accept that the workers in the organization must do quality work and that the job of the manager is to see that this occurs. In school, the students are the workers, and right now almost none are doing quality work in class. Those who manage in the schools.—teachers who manage students directly and administrators who manage teachers and some students.—are in most instances highly dedicated, humane people who have tried very hard but have yet to figure out how to manage so that students do significant amounts of quality work.

Is this problem unsolvable? Should we, as we seem to be doing, give up on the idea of many students doing quality work and instead increase the amount of low-quality work—as we do when we settle for trying to reduce the number of dropouts? But if quality education is what we need, does it make that much difference whether a student stays in school and“leans on his shovel”or drops out and“leans on his shovel”?

Or should we look for organizations in which almost all the workers are working hard and doing a quality job and try to apply to the schools what the managers in these places are doing? Although not widely known or applied in this country, there are far better management practices than most school managers know about. This book describes these highly successful practices and explains how school managers can learn to use them. What is significant about these practices is that they are specifically aimed at persuading workers to do quality work. In today’s competitive world, only organizations whose products and services are high quality thrive, and our schools are far from thriving.

Among those who have taught managers to manage so that almost all workers do high-quality work, one name stands out. To quote from Dr. Myron Tribus, one of his disciples:

The man who taught the Japanese to achieve high quality at low cost (after World War II) is an American, Dr. W. Edwards Deming.…. The Japanese faced an“export or die”situation. They had a reputation for shoddy products.…. With the aid of the MacArthur government, they located Dr. Deming, and he proceeded to teach them the methods rejected by our managers. The rest is history.¹

What this history tells us is that the Japanese workers, led by managers trained by Dr. Deming, for the first time in modern history made very high-quality products, especially automobiles and electronics, available at a price the average person could afford. Given the opportunity to get high quality for the same price as low quality, consumers are stampeding toward“made in Japan,”and the result is that Japan is now one of the world’s richest countries.

I must mention that today, many years after Dr. Deming introduced his ideas so successfully in Japan, some people have become critical of both how the Japanese now manage and of American managers who claim to be using the same ideas.² When this criticism is examined, however, it becomes clear that what is being criticized is not what Dr. Deming taught but rather the distortion of his noncoercive ideas by managers who are only paying lip service to Deming as they return to the traditional, coercive management practices that have been associated with the problems Deming has shown how to solve.

This book will explain how Dr. Deming’s ideas can be brought undistorted into our schools so that the present elitist system, in which just a few students are involved in high-quality work, will be replaced by a system in which almost all students have this experience. Once they do have this experience, which for almost all of them would be a totally new one, students will find it highly satisfying. They will no more turn down the chance to continue doing this kind of work than does the well-managed factory worker. But further, as I will soon explain, students are not only the workers in the school, they are also the products. Once they see that they themselves are gaining in quality, they will make an effort to continue this option, just as we continue to buy the quality products of Japan.

Deming, before his death in 1994, labored for thirty years in Japan before more than a few American industrialists paid attention to him. More are now listening because they have become aware that paying attention to what he had to say may mean their very survival, but teachers and administrators have no such incentive. They have every reason to believe that they will survive whether or not bethey change what they have done for so long. So as much as Deming’s ideas are likely to increase the quality of our education, moving“managing for quality”into practice in our schools will not be easy.

To help administrators and teachers to accept these new management ideas, I will explain the principles of choice theory, with which I have been identified for well over ten years. Choice theory reveals, far better than any existing theory, both why and how all of us behave. It explains both why Deming’s ideas, when they are used correctly, work so well and how these ideas can be brought into schools. I do not believe those who manage students will make any major changes in what they do if they do not clearly understand the reasons for these changes. Therefore, choice theory, as it relates to managing for quality, will be explained in detail beginning in Chapter Four.

To me there is a remarkable parallel between the American manufacturers who ignored Deming’s suggestion that they make quality their number-one priority after World War II and our seeming lack of concern today that only a few students in any secondary school do what we, or even they, would call high-quality schoolwork. Like the automakers in the seventies who concentrated on building low-quality, high-profit cars and might have gone bankrupt had competition been unrestricted, our schools have focused on trying to get more students to do enough work, even though that work is almost never high quality, to reach the low-quality standard required for graduation. But, for reasons I will explain in this book, as long as our goal is to“get more of them to do enough to get through,”we will only fall further behind.

This claim is confirmed by the disturbing reports printed almost daily in our newspapers that show American college students to be in the minority among graduate students in math and science in our own country; foreign students predominate. And as flawed as any machine-scored tests may be, the latest studies show that American thirteen-year-olds, whose scores on achievement tests have been dropping steadily, now rank below almost all their counterparts in the rest of the world in math and science.³

As difficult as this is for most teachers to believe, I contend that this continuing drop is caused by the fact that our traditional system of managing students sends a clear message to almost all students that low-quality work is acceptable. Probably fewer than 15 percent of those who attend do quality academic work in school, and even many of these do far less than they are capable of doing. We fail to realize that the way we manage ignores the fact that very few people—and students are no exception—will expend the effort needed to do high-quality work unless they believe that there is quality in what they are asked to do.

While the manager cannot make people do quality work—choice theory contends that no one can make anyone do anything—it is the job of the manager to manage so that the workers or the students can easily see a strong connection between what they are asked to do and what they believe is quality. And as long as we continue to embrace expediency (“get them through”) as an excuse to compromise on quality, our schools, already behind, will continue to slip.

That we are not doing this is supported by the fact that many public school teachers, desperate for better education for their own children, are strapping themselves financially to send their children to private schools, which they believe are doing a better job of quality education than the public schools. This is not to say that private schools are actually better than public schools, but only that they are perceived to be so by many people, including many teachers.

It would be extremely difficult to come up with an exact definition of quality education that would apply to all situations. Even without being able to define it, however, we can almost always recognize quality when we see it. Ask any school administrator to take you through the school and show you some high-quality work in any subject area, and I am certain that you will agree that what you are shown is quality. What is similar about all this work is that none of it could be graded or evaluated by machines—quality never can. Further, as I will explain later when I discuss choice theory, it is almost impossible for us to do or see anything without making a fairly accurate appraisal of the quality of what we see or do.

Throughout the rest of this book, I will continue to use the industrial analogy of workers and managers because I think it is both accurate and appropriate. The students are the workers of the school, and high-quality work, whether it is waiting on tables or academics, is the difference between the success or failure of the organization. The teachers are the first-level managers, and the administrators are middle- and upper-level managers. As in industry, the productivity of any school depends mostly on the skill of those who directly manage the workers—the teachers. But according to Deming, their success depends almost completely on how well they, in turn, are managed by the administrators above them.

In his 1982 book, addressed to industry but whose message applies even more urgently to the schools, Deming says,“This book teaches the transformation that is required for survival, a transformation that can only be accomplished by man. A company cannot buy its way into quality—it must be led into quality by top management. A theory of management now exists. Never again may anyone say that there is nothing new in management to teach.”⁴

Most of those concerned with the problems of our schools have not focused as specifically on how students are managed as I will in this book. When pressed for a solution, both professionals and nonprofessionals say better teaching is the answer, without realizing that much of what they consider better teaching is really better managing. They call for better teaching because we all remember, regardless of the course, working harder and learning more from some teachers than from others. We also remember thinking how good it would have been to have had more teachers like those.

Our main complaint as students (and this has not changed) was not that the work was too hard, but that it was boring, and this complaint was and still is valid.“Boring”usually meant that we could not relate what we were asked to do with how we might use it in our lives. For example, it is deadly boring to memorize facts that neither we, nor anyone we know, will ever use except for a test in school. The most obvious measure of the effective teachers we remember is that they were not boring; somehow or other what they asked us to do was satisfying to us.

Here perhaps is a major difference between a teacher who understands his or her role as a manager and one who does not; the manager is willing to expend effort to assign work that is not boring because he or she knows that it is almost impossible for bored workers to do high-quality work. As I will explain in Chapter Four when I introduce you to choice theory, the teacher who is a good manager is not boring because he or she has figured out how to teach in a way that makes it easy for students to satisfy their basic needs when they do the work. If teachers do not teach in need-satisfying ways, then they almost all resort to coercion to try to make students learn.

As this book will attempt to explain, effective teachers manage students without coercion. While less effective teachers may be just as concerned about students personally, when they teach they slip into the coercive practices that destroy their effectiveness. Coercive teachers are the rule, not the exception, in our schools. But, if increasing the number of teachers who manage students without coercion, like the good teachers we remember, is the solution to this pressing problem, no one in power seems to want to address this issue.

For example, none of the recommendations in A Nation at Riskfocused on how teachers managed students. That report claimed that what we needed was a longer school day and year, stiffer graduation requirements, and more homework, all coercive practices.⁵ Since it failed to address the fact that longer hours and harder courses with the same teachers for whom students were not now doing quality work would change nothing, it is hardly surprising that this report has not led to any significant improvement in the schools.

What has surfaced that seems effective is a new focus on changing the school structure, and the most popular new configuration is the magnet school. Here, both teachers and students have more choice: Teachers can teach more of what they enjoy, and students can learn more of what interests them. When this occurs, there is no need for coercion. There is already clear evidence that both students and teachers work harder and do more quality work in magnet schools than they do in the less flexible, more coercive neighborhood schools in most school systems.

But, published research documents that magnet schools and other structurally innovative schools can also fail if traditional coercive management prevails. For this reason, many of these schools are now doing much less than they are capable of doing. This is not because their structure is faulty but because, after a good start, many teachers who made a successful effort to improve the way they managed students are being hampered by administrators who tell them that the quality work both they and their students are doing is not acceptable.

And it is not acceptable to administrators, according to the research of Linda McNeil, Professor of Education at Rice University, because it does not include enough of the low-quality schoolwork that state-mandated achievement tests measure.⁶ Nothing of high quality, including schoolwork, can be measured by such standard, machine-scored tests. If we were interested in measuring what these successful magnet school teachers are doing, this could easily be done through in-depth interviews, observation of a statistically significant sample by qualified observers, and follow-up studies to see if future academic performance was enhanced by this good work. It is symptomatic of our present self-destructive system that students are made aware in a wide variety of coercive ways that low-quality work that can be measured by machines is the top administrative priority of almost all school systems.

This is beautifully illustrated by the following academic equivalent of the Boston Tea Party:

A group of seniors at Torrance’s academically rigorous West High School intentionally flunked the latest California Assessment Program test in an attempt to send a message to administrators who they believe place too much emphasis on the exam.…. At the school Wednesday, student body President Kelle Price, who said that she did not intentionally fail the test, said some seniors became disgruntled when some teachers interrupted classes to prepare them for the [state] tests. She said students also believed that administrators—who visited classes to stress the importance of doing well—were too concerned with maintaining the schools image.…. At West High, there was much debate Wednesday about who—if anyone—places too much emphasis on the tests. Bawden [the principal] blamed the state Department of Education and the press which does not publish other indicators of a school’s performance.…. Bill Franchini, who heads the Torrance Teachers Association, …. blamed it on a trickle-down ...