Deming on Education: A View from the Seminar.

Mr. Holt shares his insights on the current thinking of W. Edwards Deming, garnered from a seminar in Detroit that was sponsored by General Motors. IN WRITING about the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming in the January 1993 Kappan, I suggested that Deming's ideas on the reform of business had significant implications for the reform of education. [1] Much to my delight, one of the responses to my article was a phone call from General Motors, inviting me to attend Deming's GM-sponsored seminar in Detroit in March 1993. [2] This gave me an opportunity to catch up on Deming's current thinking and to take part in an experience closely associated with the Deming diaspora. The opening welcome from an heir apparent to the GM throne signaled the seminar's importance to the company and to the 3,000 employees linked to the proceedings by satellite. Punctual as ever, the 92-year-old Deming drew warm applause from the 400 on site in Detroit. He began promptly in his direct, challenging style. We were there to learn and to have fun, he said. Moreover, he continued, "One way we're going to have fun is for someone to arise with a stupid question. "[3] The promise was soon fulfilled, when an earnest seeker after truth inquired whether, in education, the student could be both the customer and the product. Deming's answer was prompt and pointed: "We go overboard on words. Society should be the beneficiary. We don't have customers in education -- don't forget your horse sense. " It was good to know that education would receive attention and to understand why many people -- from senior company executives to Father Bob, head of the Sacred Heart League in Memphis -- return again and again to the four-day Deming seminars. Deming's ideas are expressed not as written procedures but rather as narratives, experiences, experiments. To understand how Deming's points work out, we need to examine them, discuss them, and above all contextualize them. To suppose that, because the notion of "customer" is central to business, it must be transferred directly to schooling is to misunderstand the essence of Deming's position. It came as no surprise that, at the conclusion of the seminar, Deming emphasized "personal transformation. " This transformation is not a matter of religious conversion, but rather of coming to recognize that one must look at the whole and not the part, at the particular and not the general -- at people, not procedures. One must set aside technical rationalism and the positivist view that all will be well once we have determined what everybody should do and how to make sure they are doing it. Hence Deming rejects proposals for improving schooling by formulating higher standards and enforcing them with performance assessments. For goals in themselves are meaningless; method alone counts, and the improvement of method does not yield to bureaucratic simplicities. Thus the Bush Administration's 1991 education strategy, America 2000, is for Deming "a horrible example of numerical goals, tests, rewards, but no method. "[4] Regrettably, the same emphasis on goals and tests seems to be favored by President Clinton and his education advisors. Deming's dislike of grading, rating, and testing is fundamental to his approach. It is not difficult to see why: these are all ways in which we make judgments about people not in terms of who they are and the context in which they think and act, but in terms of their measured performance in response to some specified task. How can we believe that such assessments are a sensible measure of human capacity? Only by assuming that performance can be separated from the circumstances -- the systems, to use Deming's term -- that give rise to it. People whose employers hold such rationalist assumptions will conform to them. But they will pay their employers back in their own coin: by a dependence on extrinsic motivation. The result, as a General Motors manager put it at the seminar, is that we've lost touch with what really turns us on at work -- intrinsic motivation. …