Altering the Structure and Culture of American Public Schools

Abstract

Companies that have grown beyond the failed mass-production model have developed continuously improving work systems. Mr. Wilms points out that the same principles are found in an innovation that he believes holds great promise for improving the public schools, which were also formed in the mold of mass production. EVERY URBAN school district in America, it seems, is struggling to improve student achievement, and every politician, it seems, has a solution. Improving teacher training, reducing class size, lengthening school days, testing students, and tying teachers' salaries to test scores are just a few proposals. While some of these politically driven reforms may help, most will fail to have any impact in the classroom. Why? Because they are little more than symbolic political gestures designed to win the confidence of voters. Most have little to do with the problem of how to improve the quality of teaching and children's learning. To make matters worse, most reforms are mandated by distant legislatures and school boards without consulting teachers and administrators, those closest to the scene of the action. Not surprisingly, teachers and administrators either ignore the mandates or comply minimally, safe in the knowledge that, in time, the reforms will blow over. The result? Teachers continue to work in isolation from one another, and administrators remain disconnected from what goes on in the classroom. In addition, adversarial relationships between teacher unions and administrators continue to thwart most serious attempts to improve what goes on in schools. What is to be done? A promising strategy that may truly alter how teachers teach and children learn is called lesson study, an idea that has recently migrated to the U.S. from Japan.1 Teachers work collaboratively as they develop lessons. Then they teach the lessons while observing one another to see how well their lessons work. This feedback enables teachers to make a series of refinements. Lesson study is a continuous cycle of classroom problem solving -- a Plan, Do, Check, Act process -- that is carried out by teachers themselves. The approach is routinely used in Japan to make improvements in teaching, and it is growing in popularity in the United States. For instance, the San Mateo/Foster City District in Northern California is experimenting with the concept, as are schools in Connecticut and New Jersey. In Los Angeles, school superintendent Roy Romer, frustrated with the ineffectiveness of past reforms, recently announced plans to implement study in all 125 secondary schools in the district. The implications of using such a process to improve American public schools are profound. As is the case with other reforms, however, the success or failure of study hinges on the details of the way it is implemented. In this article I show how study holds the promise of fundamentally redesigning the process of teaching. But adopting such a change is a Herculean task because it requires replacing an antiquated mass-production system that education inherited from industry a century ago and that today paralyzes the public schools. Some leading companies and their unions have successfully redesigned their production systems to create greater cooperation between employees and management. For instance, Toyota's lean production system, which helped to resuscitate America's automobile industry in the 1980s, is built on the same principles of continuous improvement as is study. Might study in the same way revive public education at the opening of the 21st century? Perhaps. But it will require a fundamental redesign of the public schools. Let me explain why. Background The past quarter century of failed reforms leaves little doubt that public schools are extraordinarily resistant to change. The adversarial relations between labor and management that beleaguer large urban school districts are among the most formidable obstacles. …