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Developing an Industry-Education Community: The United Auto Workers/General Motors Quality Educator Program *

In this paper we review the evolution of the Quality Educator Program (QEP), a program sponsored by the United Auto Workers (UAW)/General Motors (GM) that employs school teachers, administrators, and college and university faculty each summer in GM assembly plants. The QEP provides educators and those in industry the unique opportunity to interact and observe one another in a common workplace for a 4–6 week time period. Participation in the QEP allows educators the chance to observe first-hand the UAW/GM's use of “quality networks.” We argue that quality networks hold promise for improving the day-to-day operation of public schools by allowing new and better relationships to develop among educational professionals, and between educators and the communities they serve. Implicit in this work is the fact that a larger community is being developed, a community of labor and management from industry working closely with educators to improve the quality of public education for their mutual benefit. To better understand the implications of this emerging community, a brief review of conceptual differences in the dominant social relationships characteristic of communities as compared to organizations is developed from Tonnies’ (1887) distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft societal types, Sergiovanni's (1993) distinction between organization and community as dominant school metaphors, and Maxwell's (1994) and distinction between similarity and contiguity as modes of relationship central to community solidarity.