TOTAL QUALITY MADNESS    BY JED BROWN:

I copy this piece because it is the best explanation I've ever read regarding the use of Total Quality Management (originally designed for corporate management) to control the American public through their schools.  If the reader does not understand what has been afoot for fifty years, he cannot see the destruction of public education that has occurred.  The intent of the Liberals is huge.  It is overwhelming. It is destructive to our humanity, and it needs to be stopped.  I have been trying to stop it for almost fifty years.  I first saw it as a teacher in the 1970's, and then as a parent in the 1980's and finally as a Katy ISD school board member in the 1990's.  It is the WORST thing that has happened to America.  If someone doesn't stop it in its tracks, there will only be Snowflakes left to run our country, and America will cease to be.  My concern is that our new President, Donald Trump, doesn't understand what has happened.  Even though he is a product of the corporate world, I think his heart embraces a free and capitalistic society.  But we cannot be free if someone is manipulating our educations for nefarious purposes. If our educational system is not rescued, nothing President Trump does will endure.  As soon as he is gone, things will go back like they were because our people will have been educated to refute his traditional American ideals.

I have tried to explain this problem for years, but it is hard to get across because it is such an intertwined effort.  Those from the corporate world (at the local level) dismiss the use of TQM because they are so used to it at their places of business.  What they don't realize is how devious the use of it is for the purposes for which it is being used in our schools. Please read this article so that you understand the problem! When you finish reading it, ponder the actions of Goldman-Sachs and all the rest of the financial entities. Why are they and all the corporate Business Roundtable members pushing this agenda?  It's all about power and ideology and money.

If you haven't a clue about the importance of the teaching practice of Outcome Based Education (OBE) to this entire scenario, you can read about it elsewhere on my web site.  No one calls it "OBE" any more.  That phrase became anathema and was discarded, but the practice never went away.  We have it in spades in the KatyISD schools.

Who started this stuff?  President Woodrow Wilson is given credit for the initial political impetus, but in modern times, credit goes to Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner.  Surely one could have guessed that!

If you want to read more on this topic by people who understand the deal go here:  http://agenda21news.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Written-Submissions.pdf

Total Quality Madness

Jed Brown

School Policy Institute

P. O. Box 4572

Rolling Bay, WA  98061

1998

In true Frankenstein fashion, the social engineers who are at work in our schools have hatched a most diabolical plan to produce "Zero-defect" children and adults for the 21st Century.  Like the mad scientist who pieced together the monster, these self-deified Orwellian masters have found a way to create an endless supply of robotic automatons for a utopian world that will serve their economic lusts.  The method, the brother of Outcome Based Education (OBE) is Total Quality Management (TQM).

So what is Total Quality Management?  What are the dangers of implementing TQM in education?

Developed from the theories of W. Edwards Deming, Walter Stewart, and Elton Mayo, Total Quality Management (TQM) is a business philosophy founded on the ideas of product quality and customer satisfaction.  According to the Federal Total Quality Management Handbook, "Total quality control may be defined as:  An effective system for integrating the quality-development, quality-maintenance, and quality-improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization...for full customer satisfaction."  (Appendix A)

Beyond establishing the concept of quality as the first priority of an organization, TQM redefines the word 'quality.' The Federal Handbook for Total Quality Management goes further to state, "In the phrase 'quality control,' the word 'quality' does not have the popular [and legitimate MM] meaning of 'best' in any absolute sense."  Thus, with TQM, 'quality' is no longer an absolute based upon perfection.  Total Quality Management asserts that quality is now relative, defined only by what the customer wants.

TQM corporations, to maximize profits, must tailor their products or services to the needs of their customers.  Edward Sallis, in Total Quality Management in Education, states, "Staying ahead of the competition requires organizations to seek out their customers' requirements and then to be single minded in the way they organize to meet and exceed them.  (p. 17)

Sallis drives the point home stating that "Quality must be matched to the expectations and requirements of the customers..."  (p. 39)  With TQM, customers are the final authorities of quality.

Total Quality Management is more extreme than the old adage that 'the customer is always right.'  "TQM is a process for changing the organizational culture by constantly and radically re-assessing an organization's ability to meet the requirements of all its staff and customers."  (NZQA, Feb 93, p. 16)  Sallis agrees that the essence of TQM is cultural change.  "TQM is about creating a quality culture where the aim of every member of staff is to delight their customers...In the total quality definition of quality the customer is sovereign."  (p. 26)

Given a traditional mind-set that children and parents are the customers of education, who could argue with the language of TQM?  In the traditional view, schools should indeed be responsive to customer needs, doing for the children that which parents expect and want.  Like OBE, the language of Total Quality Management presents an attractive picture, but, like OBE, there is a darker side.  With TQM, children and parents are no longer considered the customers of education.

A Total Quality Management school does not recognize traditional definitions.  Instead, TQM redefines the players in education, giving each a new role.  It is the assigning of these new roles to the participants that is at the heart of the "cultural change" taking place in our schools.  According to the TQM view, the customer of schools becomes corporate business.  Schools are actually thought to be the service providers or suppliers to business.  Children and parents are looked upon as mere clients. [As evidence of this fact, note the interference in public education of the Business Roundtable, The Texas Alliance of Business, the now defunct Texas Business and Education Council (TBEC), and so on.  Their prominence is not happenstance. MM]

The key to understanding this "cultural change" imposed by TQM is to first understand the change that has already occurred in the public's perception of the purpose of education.  Throughout the history of the United States, in fact since the time of Aristotle, the purpose of education has been two-fold:  to learn the proper use of language and to discipline, or train, the  mind.

[To reiterate the point, having a liberal arts education has been the focus of American education for hundreds of years.  It has always worked to provide our populace with the tools to become whatever they are intellectually able and financially capable of becoming.  This TQM/OBE movement takes away the free choice that Americans have always had to become whatever they want to be! MM]

To discipline the mind may be defined as training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character of the individual.  The training of the mind is accomplished by the study of knowledge.  Knowledge is orderly.  Thus, knowledge is broken into different broad fields, or DISCIPLINES, such as science and mathematics.  Each discipline is further subdivided into various subjects like algebra, geometry and biology.  Within each subject area there is a collection of facts and theories.  As the child studies the facts and theories of a subject, he not only begins to understand the world, but also develops a disciplined mind to become a true life-long learner. [Educrats have co-opted this phrase 'life long learner' to mean something that it doesn't! They have also corrupted the various disciplines of knowledge undermining content with manipulative intent. MM]

The facts and theories that are gleaned from the study of different fields of knowledge are the seeds of thought, but the crop to be harvested is the disciplined mind.  Academic freedom is therefore, preserved in the individual mind that is honed to a disciplined edge by logical study, and thus, free to accept or reject knowledge as it is presented.  It is the orderly and disciplined study of language and of knowledge that results in a self-controlled, thinking individual, the true measure of an education.

Unfortunately, over the past thirty years, [now fifty years MM] our current reformers and their predecessors have succeeded in redefining the purpose of education.  The purpose of education has become that of mere vocational training.  In our materialistic society, people have been conditioned to think of education only in terms of the job the child will be able to secure upon completion of the schooling process.  To use employability as the only criteria of a quality education is destructive not only to children, but, also to the schooling process and to the larger society.

While no one should diminish the importance of employment in present-day society, this anti-intellectual view of education has allowed those who proselytized the TQM/OBE reforms to pervert education.  In the name of global competition, the reformers show their ignorance of education, desiring to throw out the traditional subjects and disciplines.  They argue that the traditional form of education only teaches facts.  It is further argued that there are now too many facts to learn and, therefore, schools must change.

There is a dangerous parallel between Total Quality Management and Outcome Based Education.  Is it only a coincidence that the OBE remediation matches perfectly with the concept of 'rework' in TQM?  Is the Communities in Schools Program (forcing social services through education) being pushed to control the 'spoilage"?  What about 'scrap'?"  Do the TQM/OBE fanatics believe in the concept of human 'scrap'?  What will be done with the human 'scrap'?  Is this the real reason for boot camps for children'? [Recall how the Katy ISD school board in 1993 asked if we had OBE in the KISD schools.  The absolute answer was "NO!"  However, we did have it. OBE was explicitly designed to implement and go hand in hand with TQM to achieve the goals of these deviants. Also recall that Harris County endeavored to bring a "boot camp" to Katy, and the president of the school board at the time, welcomed them with open arms until the public heard about it! The Katy City Council had a great deal to say about it! MM]

The Federal Handbook goes further to state, "An important feature of a total quality program is that it controls quality at the source."  What is the source of the flawed children that enter our schools?  Flawed parents and flawed families.  In terms of Total Quality Management it becomes easy to understand other aspects of education reform.  The Parents as Teachers (PAT) Program from Missouri and the Washington (state) Healthy Family Home Visitor Program are indeed TQM programs to control quality at the source. [Every school district in America now has similar programs that are clearly invasive of parents' personal privacy as well as that of their children. A representative from a public school district has no business coming to one's home. MM]

With the new "corporate" culture firmly in place in our schools.  Total Quality Management (TQM) poisons not only the education system, but also families.  TQM reduces educators and parents to nothing more than workers on an assembly line, mass producing interchangeable human resource units to be installed in the work force.  Like toasters and widgets, children, now considered human capital, must meet the customer's standards.  Parents and teachers must give up the pursuit of excellence as measured by perfection on an intellectual standard.  Instead, human-resource units will measure to the corporate standard.

Because the object is to eliminate defects, Total Quality Management also requires the continuous assessment of product quality.  Given the supposition that children are these flawed little human-resource units from dysfunctional families, it is necessary to continually assess the degree to which the child varies from the standards.  [The term "standardized tests" has obviously assumed a double meaning. The school is not looking for evidence of academic excellence; they are looking to see if the child has been molded sufficiently to fit the paradigm. One cannot believe how many times as a board member in the 1990's I heard the phrase "paradigm shift" from KISD administrators! They were steeped already in the jargon of social change. MM] TQM, trying to control defects at the source, requires the use of invasive assessments of families.  Whereas before children were measured on their intellectual and academic abilities, under TQM the new assessment system will measure how well the human resource units and their families conform to the new cookie-cutter corporate mold. [The last time Katy ISD students were tested for their academic prowess was in the 1980's when they took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.  At that time KISD students as a whole were clearly just average. That's exactly where they are now and may have even slipped a little. Academic excellence in KISD belongs to those who have smart parents who teach them at home academic knowledge and how to think! Mostly it is Asian students whose parents have figured out the scheme and have sought to keep their children from being victims. The TABS, TAAS, and the STAAR tests were designed to hide the lack of academic progress while those in power dumbed them all down.  These tests are a mechanism to hide what "they" are doing!  There are those among us who prance about declaring that their statistics will prove this or that regarding the STAAR Test.  What fools they are!  The tests don't generate actual academic statistics.  It's all phony! Too often those among us who figure out a piece of this puzzle seek to attack that small part of the picture. To do so is exactly what these perpetrators want because while we are off chasing another rabbit down a hole, they are ruining America through our children. MM]

[There are Katy parents who have been alarmed for years at the personal information that has been collected on Katy ISD students, and unbeknownst to parents, for just this described purpose. Think as well of the use of excessive homework as a way to keep children from enjoying their families when they get home from school every day. The schools are doing everything they can to keep children away from their parents because parents with their own values are the one thing that stands in corporate America's way! MM]

To assure that schools do not stray from the imposed mass-production standards, Total Quality Management adds the element of "shared decision making' through teams."  Individual decision making is disallowed, as team members must form a consensus before action is taken.  It is said that the team framework is for the purpose of allowing valuable input from the workers, i.e., involvement.  Nevertheless, as the deception is unmasked, the use of teams becomes something quite different.  Using the Delphi Method, the team approach is used to establish "Group Think", a specious consensus that kills individual initiative and keeps the workers in the corporate mind set. [Pause to deliberate the enormity of the purpose of the "team." If one is on a team, he does not get to think for himself.  While he may be the "leader" or the one who comes up with all the intellectual ideas, he gets no credit.  His self-esteem is not enhanced--he's just part of the "team"!  [He is taught NOT to desire recognition! That is a perversion of reality. No real inventiveness or innovation occurs with a team. MM] The team concept is central to delivering this model of human manipulation.  Students spend time beginning in kindergarten being part of a team.  They and their compliant teachers think nothing of doing everything as a team. Teaching to a team is easier work--no need to worry about those who don't "get it" or who fall behind.  No one will notice. I'm always amazed that teachers seem not to mind just being a facilitator! I never heard even one of them object. Teamwork is lauded on all fronts.   A collection of baseball players, for example, who have a collective batting average of 185, will not make it to the District play-offs. They may be a team, but being a team does nothing to help them be winners. They are nothing without individual accomplishment and skill.  The same holds true for any sports team. Ever heard of a winning football "team" that didn't have a good quarterback? Ever heard a choir where no one can sing well?They aren't really a choir just because they've gotten together and call themselves one! The choir is only as good as the singing ability of all of its members. Think of the Odyssey of the Mind program, now morphed into the Destination Imagination program, for example.  This program is simply a commercial enterprise that is a camouflaged effort to perpetuate and promote "teams"!  It is the individual's singular intelligence and accomplishments that make the team work. MM]

As an added insurance policy, there is now a proliferation of school-business partnerships, because "delighting the customers" is the only concern, TQM requires that schools establish and maintain a close relationship with corporate business.  "The perceptions and expectations of customers are recognized as being short-term and fickle, and so organizations have to find ways of keeping close to their customers to be able to respond to their changing tastes, needs, and wants."  (Sallis, p. 27) [Partners in Education  (PIE)  is the vehicle (underwritten by YOUR tax dollars) for bringing local businessmen into the Katy ISD picture. The PIE gathers in the VIPS, Sister Schools, KEYS, Katy Business Promise, the Katy Education Foundation, etc. The local school needs to know the desires and needs of local business, and that information can be communicated in all sorts of ways  I recall at a board meeting asking if anyone vetted these (mostly) men before they were partnered with a student for an entire year. The answer was "NO." And the expression on the superintendent's face was "how dare you ask!" Not only was it "no," but parents could not even know who these men were or talk to them! (I notice that now they are subjected to a background check. MM) I can also recall expressing concern that businessmen were overly represented on the CAT teams at individual schools. I imagine that they still are. Recall too that bringing customers to a new housing area by doing everything they could to implement the process became paramount with KISD superintendents Hayes, Merrell, Frailey and now Hindt.  Building a new school in the middle of nowhere so that a developer could sell homes was de rigueur and still is. The original PIE co-ordinator, Michelle Hughes, was steeped in the Delphi technique and is still brought in to manage and direct the activities of bond committees.  New schools are needed, not to serve the students or because there is overcrowding, but to bring in more patrons for businesses! It is also notable and questionable that we see the proliferation of such groups as "local" magazines promoting in the extreme local businesses, the local Chamber of Commerce seeking to insert itself into everything about the public schools, and the Katy Economic Development Council (KAEDC) seeming not to know it's parameters and boundaries and which is ever encroaching on things KISD as well as Royal ISD. KAEDC is lauded for being dedicated to bringing "new business to Katy" but doesn't seem to be satisfied with just that role. The many activities all these groups sponsor are all part of the picture. I'm also concerned about the innocent parents and patrons of the school district that get sucked into the morass and aid and abet them without understanding what they are doing! Stop and ask yourself, "Why are these business people so interested in our schools--and relatively just all of a sudden? What business is it of a local insurance salesman what happens at my child's school?  What's in it for him?  The better question is, "Am I a fool for helping out such interlopers in our public schools?"  MM]

[A local Katy editor of an online news organ is constantly berated for printing real news about our school district.  He has had advertisers dump him because of their fear of reprisal from the above mentioned groups.  The Katy Rotary Club refused his application for membership. Apparently they cannot have anyone in their midst who might expose the true purposes inherent in this scheme.  Business "interests" are doing everything they can to destroy his existence in Katy, Texas!  If anyone does not see the peril inherent in such a matter, he has no brain or love of Country and Freedom of the Press! One thing is for sure--it's not hard to figure out who the players are! Their actions speak louder than any words. MM]

Having school-business partnerships, school personnel become the overseers, and corporations become the overlords of education.  The customer rules. [One also has to wonder at the involvement in all of this scheme by public school administrators.  I think most of them are initially not wise enough to know what they are doing.  Years ago, I think they hadn't a clue regarding the deleterious nature of this plan to undermine all of our freedoms.  I think that if they have finally figured it out, they have become so enured to the scheme and are so guilty for helping with its implementation, that they figure they should just keep their mouths shut.  It's sad to see that most of them don't have a conscience! MM]

As our society approaches the 21st Century [note that this piece was originally written in 1998 MM], our schools, and by extension, our children and our families, are being given over to a politico/industrial complex.  Total Quality Management, combined with Outcome Based Education fulfills an agenda of iron-fisted control in a velvet glove.  The entire concept and those who would be a part of its implementation are truly insane.

These new slave masters of the 21st Century have indeed become drunk with greed and avarice.  They have gone mad!  Total Quality Management is without question Total Quality Madness!

Will your child be spoilage, rework, or human scrap?

[Do not make the mistake of dismissing this piece because it was written so long ago.  The piece describes perfectly the process by which children have been dumbed down, taken away from their parents and been turned into "human capital."  What they have done is surely an outrage. MM]

 

[If you had been watching this process come down the Pike as I did, you would know that there are thousands of parts to the plan.  It is so enormous that no one can quantify it and explain it in 25 words or less.  That's by design! MM]

[Jed Brown is a consultant with the School Policy Institute.  He attended Colorado State University, majoring in Experimental Psychology for four years.  He received a BA in Education from Western Washington University.  He has an M. Ed. from the University of Washington.  He attended Stanford University doing post grad Curriculum Development.  He taught in the Bellevue, Kent and Vashon school Districts in Washington State. (Mr. Brown is now deceased.)]

[Annotations by Mary McGarr--wife, parent of two sons, grandmother of three, high school English teacher for twelve years, and twice elected to the Katy ISD school board in the 1990's when all of this mess was just getting a stranglehold on our schools. When I couldn't make people believe what I knew to be true, I resigned my position on the school board. I couldn't stand to have my name attached to what they were doing to children.]