My Proposal

Relationship between Teachers’ Perception of Total Quality Management and Their Level of Organizational Commitment

1.0       BACKGROUND OF STUDY

1.1       TQM in Education 

In order to improve educational quality, highly developed countries have constantly implemented educational changes. The quality philosophy and principles have become central to international educational reform efforts in nations such as Canada, Australia, Japan, the United States and the

United Kingdom (Weller, 1996) as cited in  (Idris, 2009). The attraction of TQM philosophy is mainly because of its successful record in the world of business in producing quality products and services. In fact, TQM provides a structured and comprehensive delivery system which may lead improvements in education (Weller and Hartley, 1994) as cited in (Idris, 2009).

In Malaysia, in order to build a world-class education system the Ministry of Education (MOE) had started introducing the TQM in 1995. In 1995 the MOE had launched the ISO 9000. A "customer charter" had been launched by MOE on April 1, 1996. The Ministry formed a policy and quality section to monitor the education policy at all levels based on the TQM principles. Within 6 months of the launching of the customer charter, the National Higher Education Council was established in September, 1996 to monitor standards in the government HEIs and a "grading system" was laid down to assess the effectiveness of each academic department and its faculty. In the basic education, primary and secondary schools, the implementation of TQM had been introduced and implemented as well. After two decades of the implementation of TQM in schools, several scientific studies had been done to examine the success of TQM of the extent to which quality management (QM) has been effectively implemented in schools. The features of QM improvement implemented in secondary and primary schools include values and duties, system and teams, resources and changes and meeting pupil needs and empowering staff.