A widely accepted definition of quality is “adherence to specification.” The realization of the principle that product quality requires a formal product specification was the beginning of a conceptual revolution in the manufacturing industries. “Standards-based education” recognizes that principle.

Consider the case of automobile manufacturing. The American automobile industry has always practiced standards-based manufacturing. There was a standard that defined a 100% specification-compliant automobile, and some sample of the output of each production line was tested against that standard. Until Japan entered our market in the 1970s, however, 100% final inspection was performed by customers, who would compile their lists of one or two dozen defects in the first few weeks they had their new car, in the hope (of both the customer and the manufacturer) that these defects could be fixed by the dealer. Now, thanks to Toyota and others, expecting the customer to perform final testing on an automobile is unthinkable.

Today education is where the American automobile industry was before the 1970s. The education establishment has recognized the importance of standards. The current attempts of Federal and State governments to impose standards-based assessment on our public primary and secondary education systems demonstrate the recognition that you can’t even talk about quality until you have specifications and ways of measuring output against these specifications. As for improving quality, that’s another matter; we don’t know how to do that.

I find it astonishing that two major American industries, primary and secondary education, which consumes over 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and health care, which consumes 16 percent of GDP, are right now in the midst of national quality crises of scandalous proportions. In 1999 the Institute of Medicine published a report stating that “adverse events” occurred in approximately 3 percent of hospital admissions, with consequences variously estimated as producing between 44,000 and 98,000 error-induced deaths per year. And who can even attempt to estimate the social costs of the generally low quality of the output of public education, given that we barely have well-established measures of quality?

The health care industry is beginning to get a handle on its quality issues and is establishing successful programs that in some cases are changing the quality numbers dramatically. I wish we could say the same about education.

What is it about the education system that makes it so resistant to quality improvement? Clearly, manufacturing is straightforward by comparison, and one-in-a million error rates are becoming commonplace there. Health care shares many difficult-to-control factors with education: unpredictability and resistance of disease, human variability, incomplete knowledge of diseases processes, lack of control over what comes in the door, and the inertia of professional prerogative, for example, but health care started getting its house in order once the studies were done and the bad numbers started appearing.

I can think of only one factor that significantly distinguishes public education from other hard-to-control processes such as health care: it takes twelve years to “manufacture the product” of the education system. (In reality it takes eighteen years; realizing that makes the problem even harder.) No other industry deals with such an extended process from which we expect to see high-quality products.

If we are going to get a handle on our quality issues, we are going to have to start thinking in client-centered process terms, as the health-care industry does. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to have a conversation with an elementary or middle-school math teacher about a student or, indeed, about anything. Nobody has ever raised the notion that each student who shows up in my classroom comes with an individual history that the system needs to make known to me in specific enough terms that I can base teaching decisions on it.

How can we expect our quality outcomes to change significantly until we all re-conceptualize our work in terms of a long-term student-centered process?

© Copyright 2006 Mel Conway PhD