In this case, efforts to reduce variation among students succeed, but with tragic consequences. Contrasting the amazing successes of modern quality management systems in industry with the shocking failures of modern school systems reveals a difference that is one of the main causes of the current educational disaster. Successful industrial quality improvement systems treat all the human beings involved in the process as individuals worthy of respect, and marshal everyone's work toward reducing variability in their physical products. Some schools are breaking out of this trap, by applying the quality improvement systems developed for industry. The community pays the school system to help students learn.
Teachers become managers, who are there to do whatever they can to help the workers do their jobs.
Here we will discuss four very different examples. Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming taught that reacting to random ups and downs as if they mean something always degrades the process. By doing so, one can learn how to improve processes so that quality is increased and costs are decreased. Betty Edwards found that drawing realistically requires shifting to a different way of seeing. This slightly altered state of consciousness which enables you to see accurately also enhances creativity.