This essay describes quality assurance practices in APPAM member schools' teaching, as observed through a mail survey in the winter of 1994-1995. The emphasis is added because informal conversation has shown that the two words are easy to miss. I will not say much about quality assurance as a curriculum element, nor how to do administration or research better, nor how individual instructors are improving their own teaching: my concern here is with what public policy schools are doing institutionally to improve the process of instruction. Such practice might have implications for curriculum or research, but if so it is an incidental benefit.
Why should we worry about this at all? Surely the success of public policy graduates is evidence of excellent preparation. And teaching, like courting, might not be the sort of thing that can use formal quality management. My own answer to this question is that we should worry about it for several reasons, and the next section presents the motivation for the present study.
Teaching and Management
I begin with the observation that the battle over quality assurance (as a fundamental element in the management of any enterprise) is over, and its advocates have won. Different "faddish" or fashionable embodiments of quality assurance, such as TQM and Zero Defects, come and go, but the basic principles are now conventional in every successful organization, including much of the public sector. If you want to create value, you have to attend to quality: quality is as much a part of management as personnel administration or human relations.