Ideas to improve schools are coming from moderates in the center and on the right
February 6, 2013
Peter Callaghan has an insightful article in the Tacoma News Tribune on the state of education reform today. Interestingly, Callaghan notes that at first Democratic governors led efforts to challenge the status quo of mediocre public schools back in the 1980s. Yet today, as reactionary unions remain the primary obstacle to reform, the most exciting education ideas are now coming from coalitions of concerned people from the center and the center right.
Callaghan’s thoughtful article is well worth reading. Check it out.
Comments
I read this comment on
I read this comment on improving schools, follow the model of the Japanese auto industry. Food for thought.
And, if these idiot technocrats wanted to apply real learning from business measurement to education, they would do well to scrap VAM and think, instead, in terms of worker-directed continuous quality control of the kind implemented, famously, in the Japanese auto industry, in which the workers on the line did their own evaluations, in concert, and were rewarded for their successful innovations (rather than having their autonomy removed and being themselves robotized). The great pioneers of quality control–William Edwards Deming and Joseph Moses Juran, were first and foremost humanists. They understood that work is done by humans and that humans require autonomy and intrinsic motivation. Key principles of Deming’s Total Quality Management movement included “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively,” “Eliminate slogans, exhortations,and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity” for “such exhortations only create adversarial relationships,” “Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factor floor,” “Eliminate management by objective,” “Remove barriers that rob the worker of his [or her] right ot pride of workmanship.”
People who know nothing of the history of industrial quality control and of its astonishing successes will be surprised to learn that such learnings as these are what the engineering types who studied quality improvement in the workplace and turned it into a true science came to. Exactly the opposite of what these idiot technocrats are now doing in our schools. Amusingly, the technocrats aren’t even familiar with the basic principles of modern industrial management, which run precisely counter to all that they are doing.