A new report reveals that nearly half of US teenagers are online "constantly," despite growing concerns about the effects of social media on their mental health. YouTube remains the most popular platform, with 90% of teens using it, although daily visits have slightly decreased to 73%. TikT...
Polling data tells us the election was mostly about the economy, and research shows the best way of stimulating economic growth and economic mobility is education.
No one should be happy with what we're getting for the $800 billion a year we spend on our K-12 schools, including mediocre test scores compared to other rich countries and large disparities in learning outcomes between rich and poor.
The next political fight will be about how much to privatize schools. But that debate is largely a sideshow, distracting from a more fundamental need: to improve learning outcomes through a surprising source far from the world of education: the "Toyota Way."
Henry Ford a century ago revolutionized the economy with the assembly line. This boosted productivity so much that Ford could build a Model T in just 90 minutes, make cars widely affordable and double his workers' wages.
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But the Ford-style assembly line also had an Achilles heel: It required constant forward movement. Workers had no time to make up for errors. A glitch at any step led to disaster, undermining the value of everything that happened after.
Ford's failure to address that Achilles heel eventually led to a second revolution: the "Toyota Way," a set of management principles that include building "a culture of stopping to fix problems." Toyota realized that relentlessly pushing vehicles down the assembly line, even if a key step in the process goes wrong, is ultimately pennywise but pound foolish. And by ingraining a culture that stopped to fix a problem when it was discovered, Toyota became for many years the most valuable car company in the world.
How is this relevant for education?
While electric vehicles have further revolutionized American manufacturing, our country's K-12 system is still organized a lot like an early 20th century Fordist assembly line. It organizes students into grades based on their age. As students move from one grade to the next, teachers are told to focus on what happens at their "station" (grade-level instruction). And like the original assembly line, this process works remarkably well when every student in every grade arrives at the next "station" perfectly at grade level.
But now imagine something goes wrong at some step in the process. Imagine a student shows up to kindergarten lacking key skills to be ready to learn. That makes it hard for them to fully benefit from kindergarten. If they get moved on to first grade, they won't be able to fully benefit from first-grade instruction either, much of which is now more advanced than what they need, and so on for subsequent grades. Educators call this problem "academic mismatch."
Under the Fordist model of education, students who fall behind don't just stay behind. Because they benefit less from future classroom instruction, they fall further behind as they progress through school. No mechanism within the modern K-12 "assembly line" catches a student up once they fall behind.
The pandemic only made this worse. You can see this in data from the Chicago Public Schools. By seventh grade, fully a third of children are effectively fourth graders academically. This isn't just visible in the data -- it's also apparent in abundant TikTok videos from seventh-grade teachers publicly lamenting their students' lack of academic readiness.
A "Toyota Way" for school would fix problems right when they happen, ensuring that any time a student falls behind grade level, something sufficiently corrective and intensive will catch them back up to grade level. That would allow every child to fully benefit from the classroom grade-level instruction they get down the line.
We've learned a lot about how to catch students up. Summer school can help. Even more powerful, as charter schools such as KIPP and Match in Boston have learned, is intensive tutoring. This type of intensive tutoring can be scaled into regular public schools as well, doubling or even tripling what students learn per year.
Of course, this costs money, which few cities and states seem willing or able to spend. But that reluctance is making the same mistake the Fordist model made for years -- until Toyota showed a better way to operate and rocketed past Ford in value.
America's public schools are a slow-moving institution. The county's privatization debate will be important but also slow-moving. Given the critical importance of education for economic growth and mobility, we can't wait to launch a "Toyota Way" revolution in our schools -- regardless of who is running them.
Ludwig is professor at the University of Chicago and co-director of the University of Chicago Education Lab. Stephenson was chairman and CEO of AT&T and president of the Boy Scouts of America. They wrote this for The Chicago Tribune.
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