K-12 Educational Reform

Posted on April 17, 2007 by John Hunter

Educational Reform Failing K-12 Students, Educator Says [the broken link was removed] by Victor M. Inzunza:

Educational reform has failed to substantially increase K-12 student achievement despite a “massive expenditure of resources,” but the system can be improved if some of the concepts of the influential quality-control expert W. Edwards Deming are applied to schooling, said a former New York Department of Education official
…
it’s turned itself into a one-size-fits-all, mass-production system where the individual needs of young people are often overlooked to the detriment of their learning.

Applying Deming’s ideas to education is a challenge (it is not as simple as applying the ideas in another business – some additional thought is needed to see how ideas apply to education systems) but very worthwhile. David Langford has done some great work in applying Deming’s ideas to education.

Related: education related posts – Quality in Our Schools [the broken link was removed] – K-12 (kindergarten though high school) quality improvement links – Applying Total Quality Management Principles To Secondary Education [the broken link was removed], Mt. Edgecumbe High School, Sitka, Alaska by Kathleen Cotton [the broken link was removed] – Feel Bad Education [the broken link was removed] by Alfie Kohn

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2 Responses to K-12 Educational Reform

  1. Jeremy Garrett says:
    July 13, 2015 at 7:39 pm

    I myself have been applying Deming\’s ideas in my teaching career and it has made a HUGE difference. I have in fact begun writing a sequence of articles on this this topic; I would love to share my experiences with you. My articles are available on my LinkedIn profile page and at How lean six sigma saved my teaching career

  2. Sam Farada says:
    September 8, 2016 at 10:59 am

    If the US paid more attention to Deming’s ideas we would have been better off…it took Deming decades of success in Japan to find some recognition back home. I think we need to require school administrators to go through six sigma training and be aware of quality management tenets

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