This booklet presents information on how total quality management can be applied to school systems to create educational improvement. Total quality management offers education a systemic approach and a new set of assessment tools. Chapter 1 provides a definition and historical overview of total quality management. Chapter 2 views the school district as a system and explains how it fits into the larger community system. Guidelines for fostering a consumer-supplier relationship to transform the school system are provided in the third chapter, and the principles of managing processes to ensure the cooperative interaction among subsystems for the optimization of the system are outlined in chapter 4. The fifth chapter describes analytic tools to measure educational change, and chapter 6 presents a flowchart and plan for continuous educational improvement. The final chapter offers 13 recommendations generated from the experiences of other school districts. Two figures are included. Research organizations and acknowledgments are listed. (LMI)