New Rules, Roles and Relationships: Total Quality Schools
Continually today we
hear the term paradigm shift, a
redefining of "rules, roles, and relationships". Education, as now conceived under this paradigm
shift, is not to educate the child, but to produce a socially productive
human resource unit for the benefit of the global economy. Education, as now conceived, is to
produce in the child those traits deemed needed for the future workforce, producing
children who have mastered…
the new basic skills —
teamwork, critical thinking, making decisions, communication, adapting to
change, and understanding whole systems. [1]
Education, as now conceived, is…
a single comprehensive plan for
workforce training and education. [2]
When fully
implemented, a school-to-career system will change the way students are taught,
grouped, counseled, graded, evaluated and graduated. It will effect
relationships between student and teacher, between student and student, between
teacher and teacher, and between school and community. … It is not
possible to do a little school-to-career, while insisting on maintaining the
existing system. [3]
The new role of the
school, rather than graduating well-educated students, will be to produce a
workforce, focusing on a framework emphasizing the importance of customers,
outcomes, and accountability. [4]
You have just entered the world of the
Total Quality school, based on the holistic concept of Total Quality
Management (TQM).
Traditionally, parents have believed
themselves, as the parents of the child in the school, as the taxpayers paying for
the schools, to be both the owner and the customer, that the school should meet
the expectations of the parent in the education of the child. In the world of TQM,
new rules, roles and relationships exist, defined in terms of internal
customer, external customer, and vendor.
Quality schooling
becomes defined in terms of the expectations of the external customer and
becomes measurable in terms of the co-responsibility of all the school
participants. … Everyone focuses on the needs of the external customer in
light of his or her responsibilities. [5]
In the language of TQM … This changes the role of parent to be one of a
"vendor" of precious, incomparable resources to teachers. [6]
Who is the ultimate external customer?
The Organization
receiving the student is the customer. The organization will be the
community and may be a university, a business, the military, a government service, … [7]
The paradigm has
just shifted. No longer is the
school there to meet the expectations of parents in the education of their
child; the school is now there to meet the needs of business…
The trend today in
business is to certify vendors, that is, describe specifications that must be
met for the supplier to bid and eventually to supply. These specifications direct not only the
work standards but also the process controls, the quality assurance standards,
and continuous site visits to ensure compliance. [8]
The writing was on the wall when, in
1991, the New American Schools Development Corporation, a consortium of
businesses, was established by the Bush Administration to oversee the
restructuring of the American education system. And just recently, ACHIEVE — the
new unelected national school board was established with business well
represented on the board of directors.
In the Total Quality world it can only
get better, if only incrementally! Total
Quality for Schools; A Suggestion for American
Education further defines the role of the parent…
Parents learn that
they must provide the best ready-to-learn student possible. … In the
internal customer concept, the parent is serving the teacher. Teachers could identify reasonable specifications
for parents relative to the home learning environment and certify parents who
will cooperate. [9]
This gives new insight into the HIPPY
and Parents as Teachers (PAT) programs for parents, and school compacts that
parents are being asked to sign which are legally binding (although parents are
not told this). This also gives
greater insight to the bringing of social and health services to the school
campus, accessing children without the knowledge or consent of the parent and
on site visits by social workers to the homes of new parents. The parent has been relegated to the
mere role of "producer."
This is reminiscent of the Aryan master race of Hitler Germany in which
males and females were carefully selected for breeding purposes.
Will parents and taxpayers have any say
in what happens to their child, in or out of school?
Citizens would no
more be allowed to put obstacles in the way of public educators than to
interfere with public medical, police, or fire protection personnel who are
doing their duty, writes Fields.
Title V of the
Goals 2000 Educate America Act established the National Skills Standards Board
to …
serve as a catalyst
in stimulating the development and adoption of a voluntary national system of skill
standards and of assessment and certification of attainment of skill standards
… that can be used … by the Nation.
These "skill standards" are
known as industry skill standards and flesh out the SCANS [10] Competencies as
established by the Department of Labor in 1991. It is interesting to note that three of
the people who sat on the SCANS board also sat on CSAW
[11] — the group
that produced America's Choice: high skills or low wages! Those three people were William Brock,
chair of the SCANS Commission; Lauren Resnick of the
New Standards Project; and Badi G Foster, President
of Ætna Institute for Corporate Education. Both CSAW and
the New Standards Project are programs of National Center on Education and the
Economy (NCEE), Marc Tucker, president. NCEE was
formerly Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy. In a pamphlet published by NCEE, it is acknowledged that NCEE
played a major role in the writing of both Goals 2000 and the STWOA of 1994; both conceptualizing the recommendations of America's
Choice: high skills or low wages! and another NCEE publication, A Human Resources Development Plan
for the United States. Both
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ira Magaziner sat on the
board of NCEE when America's Choice: high
skills or low wages! was written and produced.
Within states, businesses are being
"encouraged", via incentive measures such as tax breaks, to align
with and train their employees to meet the industry skill standards. In order for businesses to participate
in the apprenticeship program, they will have to 1) be high performance work
organizations; 2) comply with industry skill standards, and 3) be ISO 9000
(human systems) and ISO 14000 (environmental systems) certified. At the local level, the industry skill
standards will be incorporated into the performance standards that every child
will have to demonstrate mastery of via different assessment tools.
Even though the CAREERS Act failed at
the federal level, Washington state and many other
states are moving forward with the one stop career center concept, dividing
states up into regions with a central one stop career center that may have
peripheral centers depending on the size and population dispersal of the region. Here unemployed workers will apply for
unemployment benefits, seek retraining and employment. Every employer, individual and job will
be registered in a massive state-wide data base that will interface with
federal computer systems. The one
stop career center will work with schools and community and technical colleges
in its region to establish training programs according to the local economic
development strategies and local labor market needs. High Skills, High Wages
(1994) states,
Workforce training
must be linked to economic development strategies so that the supply of highly
skilled workers is coordinated with the demand… In order for business and labor to be
full partners with training and education providers, there must be greater
capacity on the part of both business and labor to participate effectively in
designing programs, ensuring that programs meet labor market needs and
providing meaningful work-based learning opportunities.
At or about the age of sixteen,
children who have demonstrated mastery of the state s essential learnings (exit outcomes) will receive the certificate of
initial mastery — the CIM. The CIM will
be required for higher education and employment. Pursuant to the CIM,
the student will enter into a career pathways program in which s/he will spend
half days on campus in an integrated applied academic and vocational
curriculum; the other half of the day in a work-based learning environment
(apprenticeship) with a partnering business. As shown above, career pathways will be
according to the needs of the local labor market and economic development
strategies.
Johnny lives in Region X. Johnny wants to be an aeronautical
engineer. But because Region X
economic development strategies and labor markets quotas have no need for an
aeronautical engineer, there is no training or apprenticeship program for
Johnny. Unless Mom and Dad wish to
uproot the family, quit their jobs and move to a region where Dad and/or Mom
may not be able to get a job because their job skills are not needed in that
region, Johnny will not be able to fulfill his dreams of becoming an
aeronautical engineer.
Suzie wants to be a family doctor. But she is encouraged, when consulting
with the school counselor, to choose another career pathway based on her
(psychological) profile completed (in most states) at the eighth grade
level. When Suzie investigates
further, she finds that the quota of medical students has already been filled.
With the move of individual schools to
site-based councils, moving decision-making authority, maintenance and
operations decisions, and budgeting decisions to the local school site; with
the move to a regional structure for funding school-to-work suggesting the
probability of the funding of schools moving to the regional structure, the
probability is that individual schools will become satellites of the regional
one stop career center. The school
site partnering with business for the purposes of workforce training; the
provision in Goals 2000 and the push in most states to the charter school
concept, more than suggests that all schools will become charter schools
connected directly to a business or a consortia of businesses. In other words, the school will exist
specifically to meet the labor market needs of the partnering business or
consortium of businesses.
Through all of
this, the school will continue to be funded by the taxpayer, the parent, the
citizen whose wants in the education of the child will be swept aside in the
interests of the new customer of education — business. A public/private partnership for private
gain (business) is known as corporate fascism. In whole, the system being implemented
in America under the guise of "raising the standards," producing
"world-class workers," producing children who are prepared to
"participate fully as workers, parents, and citizens" has another
name — polytechnical education — the system of education/workforce
training used in the former USSR, still used in Russia to produce socially
productive human resource units.
And just as in Russia, American parents will have no say in the
upbringing and education of their child.
Wrapped in aesthetic but obfuscatory terms,
what is being implemented has all the vestiges of Marxism. This gives insight to the claim of state
and federal documents that the high performance work organization requires a
"cultural change."
Marxism and capitalism are not compatible.
In a slave state,
vocational training may be education enough. For the education of free men much more
is required. [12]
___________________
[1] High Skills,
High Wages; Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board; 1994,
1996. [Back]
[2] Working and
Learning Together: Creating Washington's Comprehensive School-to-Work
Transition System; June 1995. [Back]
[3] What is
School-to-Career?;
Crow, Cal PhD; Center for Career and Work-Related Education, Highline Community
College. [Back]
[4] Employing Our
Resources; National Association of State Workforce Investment Policy
Council Chairs; Washington, DC; 1996. [Back]
[5] Total Quality
for Schools; A Suggestion for American Education;
Fields, Joseph C; Milwaukee: ASQC Quality Press;
1993. [Back]
[10] Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. [Back]
[11] Commission on the
Skills of the American Workforce. [Back]
[12] William Pearson
Tolley, Chancellor of Syracuse University; 1943. [Back]
©January 1997; Lynn M Stuter
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