School District Takes Lesson From Industry in Putting Heads Together

Teachers, secretaries, janitors and other employees of the Centinela Valley Union High School District will soon be given a voice in the daily operation of the 6,000-student district through a novel experiment in shared management.

The system, called Quality Circles, has been credited with helping improve productivity in Japanese industry, and several hundred major American firms have started using it in recent years in an attempt to improve efficiency and worker performance.

First District

But Centinela Valley, which operates Leuzinger High School and Lloyde Continuation School in Lawndale and Hawthorne High in Hawthorne, may be the first public school district to formally adopt the Quality Circles--small groups of employees that, in effect, tell the boss how jobs could be done better.

State and county education officials said they were not aware of any other district, in California or elsewhere, using the system developed by private industry.

“It’s quite a departure from the traditional, hierarchal style of governing schools,” said Jean Katz, a management development consultant with the county Department of Education.

McKinley Nash, the superintendent who persuaded his school board to give the idea a try, said that traditional hierarchy will still exist in Centinela Valley even after Quality Circles are set up in all its departments.

But, he said, administrators at all levels will be expected to pay close attention to the suggestions of their staffs before reaching decisions on everything from how to trim a bush to the best way to teach irregular verbs to students.

“In the past, when an employee complained, the supervisor could say, ‘I am the boss and you shall do it my way,’ ” Nash said. “But now the worker can say, ‘Hey, we’re doing this backward,’ and the boss will have to sit down with his workers and listen to how they think the job should be done.”

Focus on Solutions

The result, Nash believes, will be a “non-adversarial style of management” in which supervisors and employees can focus their talents and energies on solutions to problems, rather than on bureaucratic maneuvering to gain advantage or to avoid blame.

Nash, who was appointed to his post in 1984, said he first learned about Quality Circles while working for a school district in Illinois.

“Some friends there showed me how it works in private industry and I began thinking about how it could be applied in schools,” he said. “I saw it as a way to help people satisfy their own needs through interaction with the bigger group.

“This is a highly regulated, people-intensive business with a constant, ongoing need for solutions to problems, for resolutions to people conflicts. We need the Quality Circles even more than an industrial company like Northrop does.”

Nash said he approached the aircraft division of Northrop Corp. in Hawthorne and asked the company to help set up in the school district a Quality Circle program based on the model used at Northrop and at other South Bay aerospace firms, such as TRW Inc., Hughes Aircraft and Rockwell International.

About six months ago, he said, Northrop agreed to add the project to the partnership agreements it has with local schools. Under the agreements, widely promoted by South Bay firms in recent years, companies contribute expertise, equipment or money for school programs designed to turn out better-trained graduates for the labor market.

Two of Nash’s administrators, Eleanor Hooper and Jean Lukas, took Northrop’s training course on Quality Circles, and company experts have been assigned to help set up the management system in the schools.

Hooper said the first circles will be formed next month at Hawthorne High School among secretaries and other clerical workers. From there, the program will expand to clerical workers at Leuzinger, then to teachers, groundskeepers and other employees throughout the district over a period of at least two years, she said.

She said a typical group will involve 10 to 20 employees in the same work area, a facilitator to keep track of group activity, and a group leader who will usually be a member of management.

The groups will meet on district time for one hour each week to review conditions affecting their work, she said. Leaders and facilitators will receive three days of training at Northrop and the circle members will take part in six one-hour sessions on how to analyze problems and their causes, she said.

Explain Rejection

The groups will be taught standard techniques for working out solutions and presenting them to their supervisors. The supervisors will not be obliged to accept a proposal, but must explain the reasons if they reject an idea, Hooper said.

“The person who actually does the job, whether it’s teaching a class or making a cabinet, is presumed to be the ultimate authority on how to do it best,” she said. “This system will help us make fuller use of that experience.”

Membership in the circles will be strictly voluntary, Hooper said, and the district believes that most employees will want to participate. She said one major selling point is that the circles can provide a showcase for an employee’s problem-solving talents and thus may lead to faster promotions.

“Some person we’ve never thought of might come up with a creative idea that could improve things tremendously,” Nash said. “This system will help us find that person.”

Nash said he recognized the risks in drastically changing the established system of governing school districts. In a worst-case scenario, he acknowledged, the district could get bogged down in endless discussions over what to do, or conflicts could be made worse by getting more people involved.

“Sure, I’m laying something on the line,” he said. “Some people will be suspicious of what we’re trying to do. Things could go wrong.”

Needs Better Methods

But, he said, the district needs better methods of handling the steady stream of big and small problems that hamper the system’s ability to educate children.

“The laws give us a structure and tell us what we shall not do, but they do not ensure our success in carrying out our mission of educating children. Success comes from the people who actually do the job.”

Mary Lou Ward, an adult education teacher in the district, called use of Quality Circles in schools an “exciting concept” that will help establish better two-way communication between supervisors and workers.

“I think it will help tremendously in getting people to work together to solve problems,” she said.

Walker Williams, a social studies teacher and president of the Centinela Valley Teachers Assn., said he sees “possibilities” in Nash’s idea.

“But at this point, we’re taking a wait-and-see position,” he said. “We know the idea has been used in private industry, but it hasn’t been tested yet in an educational setting.”

Cautious Interest

Administrators in other South Bay districts expressed cautious interest in the Centinela Valley experiment.

“I think it is a worthy effort in a continuing search for ways of involving more people in decision making,” said Richard Bertain, superintendent of the El Segundo Unified School District. “Dr. Nash is an innovative leader and I admire what he’s doing.”

Bertain said the collective bargaining process mandated by state law may be one hindrance to the use of Quality Circles in schools. “Collective bargaining can be a highly adversarial process and that’s not what you want in the kind of system that Dr. Nash is introducing,” he said.

Supt. Nick Parras of the Redondo Beach Elementary School District also saw possibilities in the circle approach to school management. He noted that a number of schools are experimenting with various systems designed to foster more employee involvement in setting priorities and establishing goals.

Other districts said they use advisory committees to brainstorm problems and keep in touch with the ideas and concerns of employees.

Information Gathering

Administrator Lukas, a program specialist at Centinela Valley, said an information-collecting technique, developed by the Rand Corp. and called Delphi, will be used in conjunction with the Quality Circles in the district’s new management system.

She said Delphi, a computerized method of polling people and evaluating their responses, was given a test run, sampling opinion on how the district should spend its share of state lottery money--about $273,000.

In the first round of polling, school and community groups were asked to list six priorities for spending the money. The second round measured the degree of concern from “very important” to “not at all important” for the various areas, such as salaries, class size, more textbooks and security.

“We have people looking at the realities of a situation and making hard choices on what’s most important to them,” Lukas said.

He said that a very clear picture of priorities emerged from the results. The survey, which the school board will use next month in deciding how to allocate the lottery money, showed, for example, that teachers rank pay increases at the top of their priorities, followed by class size and instructional supplies. But community groups felt that such things as program and plant improvements are top priorities.

One of the surprises, Lukas said, was the low priority that most students gave to campus security--19th in a list of 23. Students also surprised administrators by asking for more and better academic courses, she said, noting that six out their top 10 priorities dealt with the district’s instructional program.

‘Squeaking Wheel’

She said the use of Delphi could provide an alternative to the “squeaking-wheel principle” that gets results for department heads and employee groups that complain the loudest or push the hardest for money and other resources.

Such demands, she said, will have to be brought into line with the needs and wishes of the larger group indicated by the Delphi poll.

Nash said the use of Delphi and Quality Circles also will be an aid in contract talks with teacher and other unions. “In the past, collective bargaining has been a reactive process,” he said. “They (unions) make a proposal and we react.

“But the new way makes it possible to define the issues and priorities in advance, so that we can all look at the total picture as we try to respond to specific needs.”

Nash said he hopes to see the day when Quality Circles “will surround every piece of work that we do.”

“We are committed to this program,” he said. ‘We believe it will have a profound impact on our ability to provide quality education to our students.”