School administrators looking for ways to meet tough federal requirements have found a new ally in a rather unlikely place—the quality profession.

The need for continual improvement is familiar to quality professionals, but it’s relatively new to the education community. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in early 2002, includes requirements for school districts to have improvement plans and processes. That’s where the American Society for Quality comes in.

ASQ’s Koalaty Kid division recently started consulting with school districts looking to both meet federal requirements and improve the quality of their administrative processes. The results have been dramatic.

“The training approach really gives (administrators) the ability to focus on the root causes of problems and the ways to fix them in the short term and the long term,” ASQ education market manager Suzanne Keely says.

The training uses W. Edwards Deming’s plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle to show administrators how to get to the root causes of problems. It’s often foreign to them until they see the benefits the methodology brings.

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