Learning From Not Learning From Toyota

James Surowiecki's business column in the The New Yorker this week is about Toyota, which is poised to end General Motors' three-quarters-of-a-century-long reign as the biggest automobile manufacturer in the world. The secret of Toyota's success is no secret: understanding what the customers wants, combined with a constant focus on steady, continuous improvement. Literally thousands of books have been written about the Toyota Production System, and the underlying ideas have long passed into received wisdom bordering on cliche. Yet despite this transparency, Toyota continues to beat the pants of its competitors every year.

There is a lesson for education here. (No, not that schools are like automotive assembly lines). There is a way of thinking about school reform that goes something like this: Lack of success stems from lack of knowledge about how to be successful. So we need to locate the most successful schools, figure out how they work, and then communicate those "best practices" findings far and wide. This theory is appealing on several levels. First, it implicitly supports the work of researchers and analysts. Second, it's non-judgmental: a school's lack of success isn't because anyone purposfully did anything wrong, it's because they simply didn't know how to be right.

I don't think we know all we need to know about good educational practices. As a rule, the more knowledge to use and more models of success to study, the better. At the same time, a lot of the basic elements of successful schools have been understood for a long time, because they're the elements of any successful organization: leadership, resources, human capital, a functional organizational culture, understanding what your customers (students) need, a constant focus on steady, continuous improvement.

In other words, the biggest policy challenges from an information perspective aren't supply-side, but demand-side: not creating more information about success but giving people better reasons to seek out and use the information about success that already exists. That's really the essence of accountability, or should be--not necessarily telling educators how to improve, but giving them more support and incentives to do so, in a way that makes sense for their communities and students.

G.M. could have embraced the Toyota Production Model decades ago, and if it had, it would still be the number one automaker in the world. But it didn't. I hope our schools, colleges, and universities make better choices.