Ruts and Ladders

Quality Control, the Vital Missing Ingredient in Education

As mentioned in the last blog post, Public Action Required, educators have demonstrated the ability over and over to ignore legal requirements thus avoiding facing up to the needed change in their performance to benefit our kids. The example given in that post of how they manage to continue using Whole Language methods in spite of the NCLB requirement that if you want federal education money you must use SBRR programs is hardly unique. They do this by asserting that Whole Language methods do comply with SBRR (even though they definitely do not) and so continue to harm our kids. How do they get away with it? They get away with it because our education system is running “open loop.” That is, there is no quality control process to close the loop. Oh, the federal and state departments of education do many audits but they are ineffective, “going through the motions” affairs done by people who have been trained in the same false doctrine as all educators. They also have been taught that conflict is bad and that suppressing the truth is ok if it creates a sense of harmony. In this sort of arrangement, there is no concern for how the kids are being served only for maintaining harmony at all cost. This can’t be argued because the results betray the truth to anyone willing to look.

This is not to say that school districts are not competent at managing their spending to be in line with their budgets. They generally are. However, the problem is that the resources are not spent wisely. That is, the inertia in the system favors the “we’ve always done it this way” status quo, instead of prioritizing the areas that would really bring about the massive improvement that is needed and possible. Oh, there is lots of spending on “new sounding” initiatives, but the underlying foundational things that need changing are not addressed. It is creating a façade of activity, but productivity measures results per unit input and the results never really change while the input costs have risen dramatically for decades. Thus, productivity of the education fiefdom has declined precipitously over that time. This entrenched “rut habit” harms kids greatly because while all, even the educators, know that improvement is called for, no one is acquiring ladders to climb out of the rut allowing better performance.

Unlike other government funded activities in which the quality function takes the form of an inspector general, education has no such entity. Part of the problem is that control over education is spread out between federal, state and local political venues. In reality this gives the school districts, education schools, curriculum providers, and so-called education researchers and curriculum developers ample room to continue avoiding accountability.

Any quality function must have independence so that they can be objective about the performance of the organization which they are tasked to evaluate. Thus, the reporting relationship at both a district and state level would require a direct reporting relationship to the appropriate board of education. Only in this way could the truth of performance be reported without fear of reprisal. In actual practice this reporting relationship would foster a cooperative effort with administrators over time to be able to “keep the board out of most issues.” This would allow much faster resolution of performance problems which are currently swept under the rug or ignored.

What would be the benefits of a properly conceived quality function in K-12 education?

• Improved accountability--this would stimulate much better performance over time. Problems are only given priority if they are highlighted within the organization. That does not happen in any productive way in education. Oh, achievement test results are there but there is no objective analysis of the causes of poor performance and their priority for solution. A quality function would facilitate for the first time in education the identification, prioritization and solving of biggest drags on performance first. There is no real discipline in education so that problems are not faced and solved. There is no penalty for poor work. There is no accountability.
• Non-compliance to legal requirements would be spotted early and corrected. This would prevent the problems as were discussed in the previous blog post where Whole Language was allowed to continue harming kids in spite of the legal requirement for SBRR reading programs. In the current state of education there is no closed loop to correct such violations or ideally prevent them from happening in the first place.
• Much better staff morale and satisfaction. No one wants to perform badly but in the current top-down management style, change is prevented even though it is desperately needed. Staff members are not allowed to participate in any meaningful way in problem identification and solutions. People have higher self-esteem and job satisfaction when they know they are doing a really good job. Today’s educator self-esteem is based on trying to believe that poor performance is really good performance. You can’t fool people and you certainly can’t lie to yourself without it negatively affecting your real self-esteem.
• It would stimulate improved leadership performance. This is because leaders would have to lead real change to solve the problems caught by the quality function. The days of ignoring problems and sweeping them under the carpet would be gone forever. Shining the light of reality on the situation would make upgrading leadership skill and knowledge unavoidable.
• Best of all, there would finally be an advocate for the kids with real power to stimulate urgency in pursuing improved performance.

Of course, now in a time of tight education budgets, the excuse will be, “We can’t afford to implement a new quality control function. I can guarantee you that a QC function well done would pay for itself many times over. Philip Crosby in his book Quality is Free points out that a quality function more than pays for itself by eliminating waste and the cost of doing things wrong. It would force districts to face the fact that they are wasting huge amounts of resources on counterproductive efforts. The people are working hard doing the wrong things. This is especially true of Central Office administration functions. When a new function is added it has a life of its own even after it is obvious that it is not providing any benefit. District leaders would rather continue doing a wrong, counterproductive and worthless function than eliminate it and the positions that go with it. That might cause stress and unpleasantness, something that the weak and overpaid leaders in education do not think they should have to deal with even though kids are being harmed.

And yet, by judiciously using hiring freezes and expecting staff to be flexible in doing a job that needs doing as opposed to one that is not worth doing, the situation could be corrected relatively quickly through attrition. If people chose to not be flexible then they would have the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere. Our kids are not served by continuing to pay a price in money and time for activities of no value.