Posts from — July 2005

I just read some information about high school graduation requirements and another article on how states report their graduation rates (this article exposes how the information that is shared with the public is ‘not what’s actually going on’).

In the work that I’ve done with schools and educators it was apparent (back in the early 90′s) that there was a dropout rate of approximately 30%. At this point in time some educators who are being really honest with themselves are suggesting that that rate is closer to 50-60%.

And, from the graduation rates combined with the number of high school graduates that attend a 4 year college or university we know that high schools are only really reaching about 5 to 10% of it’s students.

Do you know of any business or industry where it’s acceptable to have a 50-60% defect rate? Do you know of any business or industry that could survive one day that has a process that satisfies 5-10% of it’s customers while producing below satisfractory results for the remaining 90-95%?

What’s going on that the United States of America would allow a process like this to exist when this process directly impacts the lives of several hundred million young people (let alone their families and the communities they live in)? Not just allow a process like this to exist but ‘we’ designed this system and we continue to support it?

I typically give people the benefit of the doubt – that people are good and their intentions are good. So, therefore we might say that the education system was designed with good intentions and with the ‘peoples’ best interest at heart.

Dr. Deming used to say that 85% of the problems come from the first 15% of the process. Design is a large part of the first 15% of the process. So, we can extrapolate from that that 85% of the problems the education system is experiencing comes from the first 15% of the process (the design).

That alone is a good enough argument for me to look at redesigning public education. There are other reasons as well – which I hope to write about over the weeks and months ahead.