(FORTUNE Magazine) – U.S. students returning to school this fall may run across a new acronym besides the three R's -- TQM. The trade magazine Quality Progress reports that 415 schools, colleges, and universities now use Total Quality Management, up 43% from last year. The old business buzzword has quietly become a teacher's tool. And in 1996 a prestigious Baldrige Award for quality will be given for the first time to a school. A prime contender may be George Westinghouse Vocational and Technical High School in Brooklyn, New York, an inner-city school where 62% of the students come from homes below the poverty level and all pass through a metal detector on the way in to class. Franklin Schargel, the school's quality coordinator, can point to real results: When the school started its quality program in 1988, the dropout rate was 12.9%; by the end of 1993, it was down to 2.1%. Over 200 parents are members of parent-teacher associations, up from 12. And a lunchtime tutoring program has helped cut the number of failing students from 151 to 11. The school's success attracted Japanese manufacturer Ricoh, which has specially equipped a classroom where students learn how to repair fax machine circuitboards while earning money for doing so. Baldrige Award program director Curt Reimann thinks TQM is taking hold because when done well it engages everyone. Says he: "The major role of the teacher is to light fires of interest, not deliver a certain amount of material. Students are co-producers of their education." --J.M.G.