Statistics Skills Would Help U.S. Compete

When it comes to “quality,” more American companies are like symphony orchestras whose musicians and conductors can’t read music. The people might be talented and the instruments magnificent, but what you’re going to end up with is a lot of noise.

America is not going to get a quality revolution until its managers and workers have some grasp of probability and statistics--the lingua franca of quality. Unfortunately, corporate statistical literacy is abysmally low. Even our much-vaunted Baldrige Award winners have trouble interpreting the language of quality.

“It’s difficult to overestimate it as a problem for us,” says Brian Joyner, a Wisconsin-based quality control consultant who works with several Fortune 500 companies on statistical process control issues. To his dismay, Joyner frequently discovers that much of his consulting time is spent on remedial statistical education.

“It’s just as bad in the executive suites as it is on the factory floor,” he asserts. “There’s ignorance of variation . . . how to learn from data. Every week, managers get data that all fall within (normal ranges of error) so they end up reacting to noise instead of statistically significant information.”

A basic knowledge of statistics would make it easier for people to learn more from market research data, scientific research, customer service feedback and all the other information that organizations relentlessly insist on gathering. For example, at one large automobile parts supplier, the defect rate dropped in half less than five weeks after employees were given a simple course in statistical process control and began to make simple charts to track problems.

But today, it doesn’t matter whether they’re at the assembly line, boardroom, lottery or racetrack, the odds are that most people don’t understand what the odds are. Despite the fact that our lives are increasingly surrounded by probabilistic risks and uncertainties, we have an educational system that virtually ignores any appreciation of statistics and probability. It is no small irony that a serious 12-year-old baseball fan who tracks batting averages probably has a better grasp of statistics than the average liberal arts college graduate.

“From a civics perspective, an understanding of probability and statistics is probably more important than an understanding of algebra,” asserts Temple University mathematics Prof. John Paulos, author of the best-selling “Innumeracy” and the forthcoming “Beyond Numeracy.” “It is much more germane to a lot of the news in people’s lives.”

Part of the problem, Paulos notes, is that statistics doesn’t quite fall within the traditional definitions of mathematics. “There is kind of a mathematician’s snobbery, for lack of a better term, for dealing with the mathematics of everyday life.”

To its credit, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has suggested revisions in the math curriculum that would integrate basic probability and statistics into classroom teaching. This is a small but significant step.

Interestingly, council President Iris Carl observes that the major source of resistance to the proposed changes has been in the nation’s high schools. “Teachers there are less apt to broaden the curriculum,” Carl says, because they tend to engineer the lesson plan around the College Board exams--notably the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

There is a straightforward solution to this problem: Put elementary statistics and probability questions on the standardized tests. Currently, the SAT only asks questions in arithmetic, algebra and geometry. There is no reason why the test cannot include questions that assess statistical literacy. Indeed, it would take no more than five years to phase such questions in.

A spokesman for Educational Testing Service, which designs the SAT for the College Board, is quick to point out that the purpose of the SAT is to predict freshman performance. That’s true.

But perhaps the Motorolas and Procter & Gambles of America--as well as the Department of Education and Student Loan Marketing Corp., which bankrolls college loans--might want to pressure the College Board to reconsider the importance of statistics and probability in the education of well-rounded college students.

In other words, if you change the test, you go a long way toward changing the curriculum. I don’t think that there’s any question that it’s time to change the curriculum--especially if American companies are serious about offering measurably superb goods and services over the long haul.

“If you look at Japan, all this stuff goes right back to high school,” says Andrea Gabor, author of “The Man Who Discovered Quality”--a profile of quality control guru W. Edwards Deming and his impact on Japanese and American business.

“The Japanese students are inundated with statistics in high school. You realize that statistics is now a part of their culture. Just as our bookstores have sections on science and technology, their bookstores have sections on quality control and statistics.”