The difficulties that are come across during the application of total quality management in primary schools and perceptions of principals and teachers about the reasons for these difficulties

ABSTRACTTotal Quality Management (TQM), besides with its development in the world, is an administration model which is accepted quickly in the managements of our country. Although it appears first in the industrial managements, it is applied in schools which shows the quality of a social system today, too. But the practises of TQM in educational instutions are different from industrial instutions.The aim of this study is to make the difficulties in TQM practises and the reasons of these difficulties clear by the views of the school managers and the teachers.The universe of this research consists of 68 school managers and 1569 teachers who are working in formal primary schools which are depends on to The Ministry of National Education in Aydın. The sample of this research consists of 25 teachers and 10 school managers chosen randomly from 10 schools.As a research method, ?Interview?, a qualitative method, is used. The interview forms prepared for the managers and the teachers, are used and collected the data.These are some results reached by the researcher:An effective strategic plan isn?t done in primary schools. Plans are prepared carelessly and aren?t applied many times. Bureaucracy overweighted, the managers and the teachers seem to be in a hurry to finish their daily routine works. The strategic plans of our schools has become a formality work.The participation to the school management of the stakeholders in schools is blocked for several reasons. One of the most important reason is that, democracy consience hasn?t developed in our schools. Student represanters are chosen as a formality and parents have the chance to participate while deciding in parent-teacher associations. But the number of these meetings isn?t enough.Team works and cooperation aren?t actually done in our schools. The employee in OGYE and the school teams are chosen for school management. And these teams are far from showing productive working. The studies are done thanks to a few loyal employee. Our schools have got financial and physical problems. These problems affects the quality and continuity of team works.Communication between school employee is generally good. This may be related with that being a teacher has got lots of social sides. But there are groups, quarells and seperations between employee and these are said by lots of managers and teachers. This causes some problems on the effectivity of communication.The school employee have low job satisfaction and lack of motivation for several reasons. These reasons can be classified as; the reasons inside school, the reasons outside school and personel reasons.Rewarding system doesn?t work effectively. Especially while rewarding a teacher, too much bureaucracy, unclear and unobjective criteria, financial problems of the schools, favoritism etc. caused educationists to lose their belief to this system.School managers are far from being an effective quality leader. Because of their work load, they can?t be interested in their employee. There are also lots of school managers who haven?t got any quality of being a leader. There are some managers whose communication skills are low and they can?t follow innovations. The schools where these kind of managers work haven?t got a democratic control.The gladness level of the school stakeholders shows some changes. The gladest group between the school stakeholders are teachers. But they complain from the system as it only focuses on the exams. The parents have the least gladness between the school stakeholders.Our educationists don?t show enough participation to the inservice training which helps to develop their vocational development. It?s told that, these educations have some important problems such as; the number, the place, the time and the quality of them.The financial and human resources, which help the continuity of our school?s development, aren?t enough. Works are being done under big difficulties, but these don?t depend on any certain plan or systematic. Our schools don?t evaluate themselves according to scientific criteria. Naturally, our resources aren?t enough and they are used ineffectively.