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Educational Quality Assurance

Everyone believes in quality education. Yet we rarely talk about quality assurance. Why the disconnect? Why the resistance?

The answers to these questions are several. Educators often think of quality assurance as the province of engineers and scientists involved in the manufacture of “things“. They think the world of quality assurance is cold, arcane, and lifeless. Most educators don’t understand it; and they don’t think it is workable in the dynamic and very human endeavor of education.

Once upon a time these critics were right. Forty years ago we didn’t have the technologies available to “humanize” quality assurance. Standardized sameness was the rule of the day, and every unit of production had to be virtually the same.

Today all of that has changed. With the use of 21st century technology, quality assurance has taken hold in the world of health care. QA systems are now providing valuable health care services to humans, and in the process recognizing and enhancing each human’s individuality. Certainly the tests, tools, measures, and desired outcomes in health care are very different from those of manufacturers. But the fundamental principles of quality assurance are proving to be just as valid.

Quality assurance is of course a discipline. It requires a lot of up-front work. Minimum, measurable, written standards of quality must be identified. Tests, measures of progress, and feedback loops must be established. And once the QA system is operational, the process of measuring progress and correcting glitches should happen daily.

To educators untrained in quality assurance, QA requirements may seem terrifying. Teachers are already burdened with crushing paperwork, reducing their time and effectiveness in the classroom. Any new program that would add more paperwork to the pile would not be well received, nor well executed. Our task is therefore to show teachers how “state of the art” QA programs would reduce their paperwork burdens, maximize their time teaching, dramatically improve the final product, and, in the process, put the fun back in teaching. And quality assurance programs can do just that!