The polling data tell us that the election was mostly about the economy. Now that we’re through election season, more attention will surely be devoted to what research shows is the best way of stimulating both economic growth and economic mobility: 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 implement a transformative idea to improve learning outcomes. That transformative idea comes from a surprising source far from the world of education: the “Toyota Way.”
A hundred years ago, Henry Ford revolutionized the economy with the assembly line, which boosted productivity so much that Ford could build a Model T in just 90 minutes, make cars widely affordable for the first time, and simultaneously double his workers’ wages.
But the Ford-style assembly line also had an Achilles heel: it required constant forward movement. There was no time to make up for errors. A mistake or 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 now further revolutionized American manufacturing, our country’s K-12 system is for better or worse 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, for example, a student shows up to kindergarten lacking key school readiness skills. 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 second grade, etc. 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 and further behind as they progress through school. The fundamental problem is there is no mechanism within the modern K-12 “assembly line” to catch a student up once they fall behind.
The pandemic only made this problem worse. You can see this for example in data from the Chicago Public Schools, as shown in Figure 1. The graph shows what the grade level children are testing at (vertical axis) compared to the grade they’re enrolled in (horizontal axis). By seventh grade, fully a third of children are effectively fourth graders academically. This isn’t just visible in the data — its also apparent in abundant TikTok videos from seventh grade teachers publicly lamenting their students’ lack of academic readiness.
So if the “Fordist” model is driving academic mismatch, what would a “Toyota Way” for school look like? It 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.
The good news is we don’t have to guess what that solution might look like. We’ve learned a lot about how to catch students up. Summer school can help. Even more powerful, as charter schools like KIPP and Match in Boston have learned, is intensive tutoring. One of us leads a research team (the University of Chicago Education Lab) whose research finds 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 — money that very few cities and states currently seem willing or able to spend. But that reluctance is in some sense making the same mistake the Fordist model made for years — until Toyota showed there’s a better way to operate and rocketed past Ford in value.
America’s public schools are a slow-moving institution, basically doing the same thing since Henry Ford’s time. The county’s privatization debate will be important but also slow-moving. Given the critical importance of education for both economic growth and economic mobility, we can’t wait to launch a “Toyota Way” revolution in our schools — regardless of who is running them.
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and co-director of the University of Chicago Education Lab; Randall Stephenson was chairman and CEO of AT&T, as well as president of the Boy Scouts of America and chairman of the Business Roundtable.
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