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Accrediting agencies, legislators, pundits, and even higher educational professionals have become enamored with applying the language of continuous improvement to learning outcomes. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges specifically uses the term “continuing improvement” in Core Standard 2.5, one of its non-negotiable markers of institutional effectiveness. Yet for all the effort, many of us, particularly faculty, still aren't convinced that we are getting what advocates of continuous improvement seem to have promised.
The standard response to doubt is to be urged to do more: collect more data, act more frequently, document more thoroughly—this has to work. But the problem may not be insufficient effort. It may lie instead in disconnects between the continuous improvement model as operationalized in business and industry and the attempt to apply it in an unexamined fashion to educational environments.
David Arnold is the dean of professional studies and professor of managerial studies at St. Catharine College in Kentucky. He has also served in non-academic settings, including as a military training commander; managing editor; and commander of a major government-owned industrial facility, where he was responsible for operational effectiveness and quality assurance.
Ted Marchese is a senior consultant at Academic Search, Inc. Formerly a vice president of the American Association for Higher Education, he introduced CQI into the association's Assessment Forum. He was also the editor of Change magazine for 17 years.
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