Understanding systems may be our best hope for making meaningful change across the many dimensions of our lives at home, at school, and at work. The system lens helps us see events as a part of trends and those trends as a part of an underlying structure. This understanding provides us with improved ways of managing in this world of complex education systems.
Read MoreContinual improvement guided by the 14 Principles is not a project or program to be implemented, but rather a never-ending commitment to quality. With that mindset framing in hand, a recap of each of the principles that have been discussed in this series follows.
Read MorePrinciple 14: Clearly define top management's commitment to continual improvement of quality and its obligation to implement the 14 Principles. Plan and take action to put everyone in the organization to work to accomplish the transformation; the transformation is everyone's job. Start with education for all in positions of leadership.
Read MorePrinciple 13: Institute a vigorous program of education and encourage self-improvement for everyone. A school system needs not just good people, but people that are improving with education. Advances in teaching and learning processes will have their roots in knowledge.
Read MorePrinciple 11: Eliminate arbitrary numerical targets in the form of work standards that prescribe quotas for teachers and numerical goals for people in management. Substitute leadership in order to achieve continual improvement of quality and productivity.
Read MoreIn January and February, I outlined six common management myths. The point of those two posts was to help education systems leaders see what not to do. I’m now turning to a set of principles that can be used by these same leaders to guide their transformation work. Last month, I introduced the 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation. In this post I’ll describe the third principle, Cease Dependence on Inspection to Achieve Quality. It is worth noting that the 14 Principles are mutually supporting, so it is important to understand all of them rather than studying them in isolation. An in-depth discussion of the Principles for Transformation can be found in Chapter 3 of my recently released book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools.
Read MoreLast month, I posed the following question - Do we really need to transform our education system? - and posited that any attempts at transformation needed to sit on top of a solid philosophical foundation. The purpose of this blog post is to make the case for transformation from the prevailing style of management to the philosophy developed by W. Edwards Deming across a lifetime of continual improvement work. It is on this foundation that our education system should stand rather than constantly shifting in the wind based on management mythology, the latest testing data points, and political pet projects.
Read MoreThe case I’ve been making for organizational transformation is based on the premise that our education system is not broken. Rather, it is a system that is operating exactly as it was designed to operate, and it’s producing exactly what it was designed to produce. I do not believe that our schools need reform or restructuring but rather a change in state. This transformative change in state does not occur overnight, but instead is a process that unfolds over 5-10 years (as Deming would put it, “There is no instant pudding!”).
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