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Educational Leadership November 1992 | Volume 50 | Number 3 Improving School Quality Pages 38-41

How Systems Thinking Applies to Education Frank Betts Nearly a century of change has left schools playing catch-up, and it will take a whole-system approach to meet society’s evolving needs. Our piecemeal change efforts of the last decade have taught us a valuable lesson about Total Quality Management: we must seek improvement through systemic change. Current approaches to solving problems in education are the same ones used by generations of educators and are stoutly defended as having worked in the past. But we can now see clearly that the environment within which education is embedded has been changing at an increasing rate since about 1900. It wasn’t until 1950 that the magnitude of change became evident and stimulated a series of reforms, which have had little apparent impact (Banathy 1991). Currently, the call for systemic change in education is becoming increasingly strident. Unfortunately, the word system has been popularized without a fundamental understanding of its implications, to the point where everything is a system but nothing really is treated as one. Many people say they are using a systems approach, but almost no one really is. Furthermore, popular interpretations of systems tend to use inappropriate mechanical models and metaphors. Decision makers need to fully understand why our current approaches won’t work and what is different about the systems approach.

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