Glasser - The Quality School RI

THE

QUALITY

SCHOOL

Managing Students
Without Coercion

REVISED EDITION

William Glasser, M.D.

B rad has been working with me since the mid-1980s when he was the principal of the Apollo School in Simi Valley, California. He had been following my ideas since the early 1970s and asked me to join him at Apollo to see if, together, we could figure out how to move that school to a Quality School. In the five years we worked together we came very close to that goal. Had Brad stayed at Apollo I am sure it would have happened. But he became so involved with the ideas in this hook, many of which we created together, that he wanted to work directly with the Glasser Institute as an instructor so he could spread what he had learned to other schools. He successfully completed our training and has been one of our outstanding instructors for many years. The thousands of teachers and administrators he has taught and continues to teach confirm what I discovered when I began to work with Brad. I am proud to be associated with him.

Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom

Staying Together

The Quality School Teacher

The Quality School

Choice Theory in the Classroom
(formerly Control Theory in the Classroom)

Schools Without Failure

Reality Therapy

Positive Addiction

S ince the publication of this book in 1992, I have changed the name of the theory that governs all I do from Control Theory to Choice TheorySM I did this because the term control theory is both misleading and hard for people to accept. It was not my term to begin with, and I think changing to the new term, choice theory, will be much more acceptable for both teachers and students. While the name has been changed, everything written about the theory in this book is completely accurate.

Choice theory, however, has been expanded and clarified in my 1998 book, Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom. All school personnel should find Chapter 10 of that book, Schooling, Education and the Quality School, especially helpful. In it, I introduce a great many new ideas that can be very effective in the classroom and will help you to reach students who seem uninterested or even antagonistic to school. If you have any questions about what is written in any of my books or how to get more involved as an individual or as a school with my quality school ideas, write, call, fax, or e-mail me at:

The William Glasser Institute
22024 Lassen Street, Suite 118
Chatsworth, CA 91311
phone: (818) 700-8000
fax: (818) 700-0555
web site: www.wglasser.com
email: wginst@wglasser.com

S hayle Uroff, who helped Brad Greene to describe work being done at the Apollo School, gave me the following:

A boss drives. A leader leads.

A boss relies on authority. A leader relies on cooperation.

A boss says I. A leader says We.

A boss creates fear. A leader creates confidence.

A boss knows how. A leader shows how.

A boss creates resentment. A leader breeds enthusiasm.

A boss fixes blame. A leader fixes mistakes.

A boss makes work drudgery. A leader makes work interesting.

As you read this book, return to this page periodically and reread these statements. They will help keep you on track.

P icture the students in a required academic class at a randomly selected secondary school as a gang of street repair workers. If they were working as hard as the students sdo in class, half or more would be leaning on their shovels, smoking and socializing, perfectly content to let the others do the work. Of those who were working, few would be working hard, and it is likely that none would be doing high-quality work.

It is apparent, however, that students have thought about quality and have a good idea of what, in their school, is considered quality. I have talked at length to groups of high school students about this subject, and most of them see quality in athletics, music, and drama, a few see it in advanced placement academics or shop classes, but almost none see it in regular classes. While they believe they are capable of doing quality work in class, all but a very few admit that they have never done it and have no plans to do it in the future. The purpose of this book is to explain how to manage students so that a substantial majority do high-quality schoolwork: Nothing less will solve the problems of our schools.

If we accept that the purpose of any organization, public or private, is to build a quality product or perform a quality service, then we must also accept that the workers in the organization must do quality work and that the job of the manager is to see that this occurs. In school, the students are the workers, and right now almost none are doing quality work in class. Those who manage in the schools.teachers who manage students directly and administrators who manage teachers and some students.are in most instances highly dedicated, humane people who have tried very hard but have yet to figure out how to manage so that students do significant amounts of quality work.

Is this problem unsolvable? Should we, as we seem to be doing, give up on the idea of many students doing quality work and instead increase the amount of low-quality workas we do when we settle for trying to reduce the number of dropouts? But if quality education is what we need, does it make that much difference whether a student stays in school andleans on his shovelor drops out andleans on his shovel?

Or should we look for organizations in which almost all the workers are working hard and doing a quality job and try to apply to the schools what the managers in these places are doing? Although not widely known or applied in this country, there are far better management practices than most school managers know about. This book describes these highly successful practices and explains how school managers can learn to use them. What is significant about these practices is that they are specifically aimed at persuading workers to do quality work. In todays competitive world, only organizations whose products and services are high quality thrive, and our schools are far from thriving.

Among those who have taught managers to manage so that almost all workers do high-quality work, one name stands out. To quote from Dr. Myron Tribus, one of his disciples:

The man who taught the Japanese to achieve high quality at low cost (after World War II) is an American, Dr. W. Edwards Deming.. The Japanese faced anexport or diesituation. They had a reputation for shoddy products.. With the aid of the MacArthur government, they located Dr. Deming, and he proceeded to teach them the methods rejected by our managers. The rest is history.

What this history tells us is that the Japanese workers, led by managers trained by Dr. Deming, for the first time in modern history made very high-quality products, especially automobiles and electronics, available at a price the average person could afford. Given the opportunity to get high quality for the same price as low quality, consumers are stampeding towardmade in Japan,and the result is that Japan is now one of the worlds richest countries.

I must mention that today, many years after Dr. Deming introduced his ideas so successfully in Japan, some people have become critical of both how the Japanese now manage and of American managers who claim to be using the same ideas.Deming as they return to the traditional, coercive management practices that have been associated with the problems Deming has shown how to solve.