If you had to give a description of our education system in business terms it would go something like this: For year after year, the majority of our "products" have been lemons, and the majority of our customers have been dissatisfied. But the response of the people in charge has been to keep the same management strategy and organizational structure and the same old production processes. The major change has been to repackage some sticks or carrots to get the teacher and administrator workers-and, sometimes, the not-soraw materials, the students-to work harder at doing more of what they were doing before. Is it any wonder that the result is more lemons and more dissatisfaction?
Not according to David T. Kearns, Chairman and CEO of Xerox, and Denis P. Doyle, Senior Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute, the authors of a provocative new book, Winning the Brain Race (ICS Press, 1988). In fact, they argue, the public school system of today is remarkably like American business ten or twenty years ago, before the new reality of global competition sank in: mirrored in poor quality and low efficiency, "committed to ossified management structures" and resistant to the idea that their "entire way of thinking needed to be replaced." Those companies that persisted in their habits or merely fine-tuned continued to produce lemons and died. Those that restructured survived and became successful. As the authors argue, the same choice now faces our public school system.
David Kearns learned the necessity of restructuring the hard way: he lived it. Back in the 1960s, Xerox "owned" the copier market. But, within a decade, it had lost half of it to Japanese competition. What happened? The answer is that the company was being strangled by its own organization. Xerox had "built an enormous overhead structure of indirect white collar workers. Its organization became clogged with too many checks and balances. And probably most damaging of all, it became arrogant and complacent."
The solution was not to try to improve by getting better at doing more of the same old thing but to restructure. " ... Xerox had to become a new company. Virtually every facet of Xerox has been changed, from product design to marketing. Everything from development and manufacturing to the scheduling of lunch hours has been rethought and reworked." Restructuring worked, and Xerox was "probably the first company in an industry targeted by the Japanese to regain market share."
To Kearns and Doyle, the parallels between the situations of business and education are striking and alarming. Like our great companies, our public schools were once the envy of the world. We had to figure out how to produce mass education on a low level, and we did it by following the factory-like processes that made American industry the envy of the world. But along the way our schools' bureaucracy grew and the system became "a dinosaur whose head is barely able to communicate with its tail. ... " But then our society and the world changed, and, like failed American businesses, our schools didn't.
Kearns and Doyle don't believe that just because the crisis situations in business and public education are similar their restructuring solutions should be. But American education hasn't even begun to face up to the necessity that business has been struggling with for years. To stimulate that discussion Kearns and Doyle present their key elements of a restructured public school system:
• Parents would be able to chose what public school their children attend. Funding would follow the child, with added allowance for special education needs.
• Schools would be reorganized to allow administrators and teachers to design their own distinctive institution. The best models, according to the authors, are the specialized magnet schools that have been successful in many communities around the country. Central headquarters would shift from a control to a support center, offering services that a school could accept or shop for elsewhere.
• Newly restructured schools would demand an increased professional standard for teachers who would "set their own curriculums, select their own textbooks, and share in the direction of staff development." Standards would be raised for licensing and employment, including a national certification examination designed by teachers similar to other professional tests.
• All our students would be required to take a high-level curriculum. The diploma needs to reflect substantial achievement. A large part of our dropout problem is that the school's student-customers see the emptiness of phony diplomas and watered-down curriculums.
• Our schools would abandon value-neutrality and teach the basic principles and values of participatory democracy.
• The federal government needs to increase its role in promoting equity and encouraging restructuring. It also needs to expand its research function.
Kearns and Doyle have taken a lot of flak for Winning the Brain Race. Kearns especially is in a difficult and courageous position. He's caught between a corporate board that may be uneasy that its CEO is spending so much energy trying to help reform public education and educators who are offended by his devastating indictment of schools. But both business people and educators should celebrate Kearn' s entry into the arena of school reform. Sure there's a lot that's controversial in the analysis and descriptions in Winning the Brain Race. But business needs an informed and seasoned insider to get involved in public education if business is to survive, and educators need an outsider-one with a clear commitment to public schools-to help jar them into new ways of thinking if public education is to survive.
Kearns is putting his neck out because he knows, as we should, that public education is on the chopping block. As Kearns himself said, "We didn't put Xerox through a major restructuring just for the fun of it, or because a friendly critic wrote a book. We did it because we had to. It was change or die."
Xerox restructured and prospered. Will public education?