Jack Schneider, historian of education, has written a powerful column about why education is actually harder than rocket science.
He explains that reform after reform has failed because the reformers think that it is easy to change teaching and learning. It is easy (in their eyes) because they went to school, they were students. But they know nothing about how children learn, they know nothing about children with disabilities, they know nothing about child development. So, armed with ignorance, they assume they can “fix” education by eliminating unions or tenure or imposing a new curriculum or creating a computer-driven metric for evaluating teachers.
Thus, elected officials pass law after law, claiming they are “reforming” education, when they are only creating mandates that remove teachers’ professional autonomy.
Would they dare to tell rocket scientists at NASA how to do their work? Of course not. They respect rocket scientists, and the politicians know the limits of their knowledge. But when it comes to education, they feel free to impose mandates and interfere with the work of experienced teachers.
And that is why “reforms” imposed by politicians in DC and state capitols fail again and again and will always fail.
Schneider writes:
Imagine Congress exerting control over NASA through a bill like No Child Left Behind, or coercing policy shifts through a program like Race to the Top. Or well-intended organizations like Teach For America jumping into the fray—recruiting talented college graduates and placing them on the job as rocket scientists. Or philanthropists deciding to apply lessons from their successes in domains like DVD rentals to “disrupt” the NASA “monopoly.”
How long would any of this be taken seriously?
The point here is not that various groups involved in school reform should disengage from the field. Their energy and financial support can play a critical role in supporting communities and their schools. And for all their arrogance and errors, reformers have helped turn the nation’s attention to the importance of public education. NASA should be so lucky.
But the egotism and ignorance of the so-called education reform movement are all too often on display. Because the work of improving schools isn’t as simple as reformers believe.
Reformers would know this if they spent their days in schools. But most do not. Unlike working educators, most leaders in the reform movement have never taught a five-period day, felt the joy of an unquantifiable classroom victory, lost instructional time to a standardized test, or been evaluated by a computer. And unlike the vulnerable students targeted by so much reform, most policy elites have not gone to school hungry, struggled to understand standard English, battled low expectations, or feared for their personal safety on the walk home.
The other day when I was in Connecticut, an experienced teacher told me about his students. He teaches special education. His students are in ninth grade but they read at a third-to-fourth grade level. Reformers think they should be reading at ninth grade level. Arne Duncan wants them all enrolled in Advanced Placement classes. Why not invite legislators and governors and even Arne Duncan to teach that class for a day, even an hour. They are totally out of touch with reality. There are real children with real learning issues. Their teachers are heroic. They should not be evaluated by those who know nothing of teaching and learning.
I do not give “reformers” credit for turning the nation’s attention to “the importance of public education.” The reformers have created world of illusion, in which 100% of children will succeed, regardless of their circumstances. If they don’t, blame their teachers. This is pie in the sky. It is unrealistic. It is a display of staggering and harmful ignorance.
The reformers are hurting children. They are undermining the teaching profession. They are damaging public education. They should be held accountable. And politicians should get out of the way, fund the schools appropriately, and shower respect on those who do the hard work of educating children.
My husband can attest to the fact that teaching is harder than rocket science. He’s done both. My husband worked on such projects as Hubble, Deep Impact, IRAS and many others and knows that teaching is NOT easy. And btw, it takes years from inception of idea to launch and follow up. So, if teaching is harder than rocket science, why are we listening to yahoos who have no clue about educating our young?
It’s very nice and I like this piece he wrote too, but I have to take issue with this:
“Jack Schneider: The first reason that people think schools are in decline is because they hear it all the time. If you hear something often enough, it becomes received wisdom, even if you can’t identify the source. That rhetoric is coming from a policy machine where savvy policy leaders have figured out that the way that you get momentum is to scare the hell out of people. So reformers have gotten really good at this sky is falling rhetoric. ”
If this is true, if “savvy policy leaders” have decided to tell the public things that aren’t true in order to push their preferred agenda, then they are dishonest, patronizing and manipulative people, and the public probably needs new “policy leaders”. Maybe we could have policy leaders who tell the truth? That doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.
I’m not sure how one gets over that and believes anything else they say, about Common Core or anything else. I don’t trust people who “scare the hell” out of other people to get what want. It’s a horrible thing to do.
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6967743/public-schools-crisis-jack-schneider
“He explains that reform after reform has failed because the reformers think that it is easy to change teaching and learning. It is easy (in their eyes) because they went to school, they were students. But they know nothing about how children learn, they know nothing about children with disabilities, they know nothing about child development. So, armed with ignorance, they assume they can “fix” education by eliminating unions or tenure or imposing a new curriculum or creating a computer-driven metric for evaluating teachers.”
There is a line in Jamie Vollmer’s The Blueberry Story: The teacher gives the businessman a lesson that resonates for me whenever I read of the reformers ignorant attempts to change teaching and learning, for there is another quality not mentioned that accompanies that ignorance.
Vollmer the businessman wrote:
I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging “knowledge society.” Second, educators were a major part of the problem: they resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure, and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly. They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! TQM! Continuous improvement!
In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced — equal parts ignorance and arrogance.
It is that ignorance coupled with an unstated arrogance that makes their efforts at reform, at best worthless, and at worst, dangerous, that we as educators need to continue to be aware of in our efforts to protect public education and the children we are responsible for.
http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueberries.html
“The Dunning-Kruger Effect”
The Dunning-Kruger effect
Is rampant with reform
Where education’s wrecked
And arrogance the norm
Thanks for mentioning “The Dunning-Kruger Effect” I was unfamiliar with it so I had to look it up. It is certainly an appropriate way of describing the actions of so many of the current crop of corporate and political deformers.
David Macaray described it as:
“There is a phenomenon in psychology called the “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” It’s a theory that was developed, in 1999, by Dr. David Dunning and Dr. Justin Kruger, two Cornell University psychology professors.”
“Broadly speaking, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is defined as “a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize their [own] ineptitude.”
It helps to explain Vollmer’s epiphany:
“In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced — equal parts ignorance and arrogance.”
All children can learn, but they don’t learn the same way or at the same pace. The deformers have created charters with the “no excuses” mantra. Without really understanding how children learn, these schools offer a “one size fits all” curriculum. Children that can’t or won’t fit the mold are excluded or dropped. With such a great rate of attrition they are not offering a viable alternative to public education. All of disruption is harmful to the very children that would benefit from stability. Poor students deserve the benefit of a free, public education with a teacher that is certified and qualified. It is shameful that the education of our poorest children is put up for sale by our cities. Real teachers know that one of the biggest challenges is to figure out ways to reach diverse learners. Real reform must come from public schools, the cornerstone of democracy, with professional educators using their expertise to guide them. To do this they need resources, support, and, yes, a little respect would be helpful.
Breaking news in Dallas: Dallas’ Broad superintendent Mike Miles kicks a board member out of a school meeting by using http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2014/10/trustee-bernadette-nutall-mike-miles-accused-her-of-trespassing-removed-from-dade-middle-school.html/
If you are interested, David Berliner a distiquished educational researcher made the same points more than a decade ago.
You can download the whole paper here
Laura, thank you for this and so many of your other contributions! You never stop teaching!
Many, many good points in this article, and one of my main worries is that the reformers will not give their changes enough time and credit to their teachers, either, before they move on to some other practice. Unfortunately, in SOME schools and districts, teachers are not acting heroically on any level and its the parents who have waited patiently for, in some cases, an entire elementary career for their kid to learn how to read or get services. This is why the Parent Trigger took over at a school in program improvement for 7 years. Those parents were patient until finally they couldn’t take it any more and neither could some of the administrators hired to make a difference but who asked too many questions. I say, let those achieving schools alone, but let the reformers have a go at those that are so terrible we educators would not put our own children in them. By the way, as a teacher in both low and high performing districts, I did feel respected by parents. They were always welcome in my classroom, and I spent a lot of time communicating with them.
What if the high performing schools are in wealthy areas and have few ESL learners? What if the lower achieving are in poor areas where there are lots of ESL learners?
What about equalizing the playing field and funding poor schools more so they can have smaller class sizes, rather than giving that money to reformers who make disparity worse by cherry picking the at level kids from poor schools and kicking the ones out who don’t perform back to those “low achievement” schools?
Parent Trigger was created by charter operators, not parents.
What about identifying trolls.
The funding formulas need to change because the current system is unfair. It costs more, not less, to teach poor children, ELLs and classified students. It is also unfair for charter schools to take the top performers of urban students, and leave the more complex and expensive children behind. Charter schools don’t seem to solve the problem; in fact, they just seem to create more problems of inequity, even if they can crow about the faux results they have achieved. Real solutions need to come from real educators using real research in public schools where where all children are accepted.
As a former somewhat rocket scientist with two math degree’s (Atlas, Atlas/Centaur, Space Shuttle, various cruise missiles) he’s absolutely correct. At least in rocket science, material lights and flies the same each time. And when it doesn’t the causes can be known.
Not so the human animal – where an amazing complexity makes education so difficult. And I’ve come to see it’s compounded by trying to educate children who are, at the same time, growing physically, fighting hormones, and trying to make sense of the fundamental world around them.
Which leads the question I’ve wondered: The best human minds have search for ways to make education more effective for thousands of years. From where does Arne Duncan’s hubris emerge to lead him to conclude he knows more than, say, Socrates?
Makes him look a pitiful man – must be tormented by horrendous demons he fights hard to keep at bay.
“Makes him look a pitiful man – must be tormented by horrendous demons he fights hard to keep at bay.”
Actually, there’s a line in “Annie Hall” which I think describes Arne a bit better. Alvie Singer, distraught over breaking up with Annie, stops an *attractive* couple on a Manhattan street and says:
-You seem so happy – are you happy? you seem so happy!
-Yes, I guess we’re happy.
-But why, why are you so happy?
-Well, he’s shallow and superficial, and I never have any thoughts either.
I think Arne’s happy.
That describes Arne much better… 🙂
“Which leads the question I’ve wondered: The best human minds have search for ways to make education more effective for thousands of years. From where does Arne Duncan’s hubris emerge to lead him to conclude he knows more than, say, Socrates?”
Good point, Doug. Maybe the truth, I think, is that people such as Duncan don’t approach it the way a sensible person would. They’re not wondering if they know better than Socrates; it’s more like, “I’m doing this because I know, and so I’m gonna do it.” It looks insane to a reasonable person, so we try to rationalize it, but it’s not rational in the first place.
The people seemingly “in charge” of education policy know nothing about education, but that doesn’t bother them, because they don’t know that they don’t know — Ignorance at its finest. They think they DO know, so people like Socrates or Dewey wouldn’t even enter their thinking in the first place.
This is pretty funny. It’s an editorial written by people paid to promote the Common Core. It was placed in Arizona news outlets, but they placed the same editorial in North Carolina and Michigan news outlets.
The exact same piece. They just switch out the state.
http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2014/10/10/pro-arizona-students-need-common-core/17039687/
Here’s the “Michigan” Common Core piece, which is identical to the Arizona and the NC piece:
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/10/09/common-core-michigan-education-standards-conservatives/16922881/
close to st. Louis, in the Normandy school district, (murder victim Michael brown graduated from what was left of the school last June), the rocket scientists from Missouri’s state department of education are experts in playing dominoes. 1.2010, force a merger to with Wellston, the lowest performing district in the State. 2. With a destructive transfer law looming to be decided by the courts, likely to bankrupt districts which lose state accreditation, the state takes away Normandy’s accreditation a year earlier than they had promised when they forced them to merge with Wellston. 3. Spring of 2013, the court upholds the law. Normandy must make financial arrangements to pay other, wealthier districts tuition and in some cases transportation to educate those who opt to transfer out. By Christmas, the district is close to bankruptcy. 4. in 2014, the state takes control of finances, and then the entire district. During the summer, the state makes up a phony accreditation status of their own invention to avoid the transfer costs which bankrupt the district. The courts rule the invention unconstitutional. The school year blunders on, with confusion and court challenges of who is able to transfer, and who is not. There was a story in this morning’s post dispatch, about a girl who was able to transfer, thanks to perseverance from her mother. The teacher bashing state commissioner, who will be leaving sort of mysteriously, without the fbi investigation she deserves, had replaced 45 percent of Normandy’s staff with the intent of getting more dynamic teachers. Perhaps the teacher from this morning’s story was one of the dynamic replacements:.”one teacher sat in front of class and cried as kids acted out. Others left and didn’t return. During lunch, the cafeteria was chaotic with food fights……the dominoes continue to fall…….http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/after-troubles-at-normandy-middle-a-return-to-francis-howell/article_df835999-23ab-587a-a0ca-b62a0498326f.html
And when these reforms that always come from the top fail, who is blamed and punished?
Teachers who had no say in the reforms they were forced to implement or else they would be punished.
For teachers, reform is a lose, lose issue. No matter what happens, teachers will lose, and if one of these reforms ever works, the top will take all the credit and punish the teachers anyway by taking away their retirement plans, due process rights, and cut their pay while increasing class size.
“VAMs are (early) Rocket Science”
Early rocket science
Was blowing rockets up
Like current VAM reliance
The firing was enough
‘Would they dare to tell rocket scientists at NASA how to do their work? Of course not. They respect rocket scientists, and the politicians know the limits of their knowledge. But when it comes to education, they feel free to impose mandates and interfere with the work of experienced teachers.’
Well, but the MEN who are rocket scientists are all STEM-trained professionals, so they deserve R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Teachers are just ladies – girls, really – earning pin money until they can marry rocket scientists and stay home pregnant and barefoot, having babies.
Analogies like this aren’t very informative. For example, Jack Schneider writes, “Or well-intended organizations like Teach For America jumping into the fray—recruiting talented college graduates and placing them on the job as rocket scientists.”
That does seem silly when we’re talking about rocket scientists. But the evidence shows that TFA teachers are at least as good as regularly-trained teachers, and sometimes better. Quibble all you want with the evidence, but the one thing that you absolutely will NOT find is a study saying that TFA teachers are dramatically worse.
Now what could explain this? Maybe 5 weeks of training really is enough to be a passably competent teacher. This is not the case with rocket science, so the analogy falls apart. Alternatively, maybe it’s the case that 5 weeks isn’t enough, but traditional teacher training is so bad that it isn’t any better than TFA training. Again, the analogy to rocket science falls apart — it’s hard to imagine rocket science training being as bad as education schools, or else we would never have been able to get to the moon.
Either way, it’s a silly argument.
WT, before you make comments about TFA, you should read the latest study by Heilig and Jez: http://cloakinginequity.com/2014/01/07/teach-for-america-a-return-to-the-evidence-the-sequel/
A quote from the summary:
“Teach For America and other organizations have produced studies asserting benefits provided by TFA teachers. Those studies, however, have only rarely undergone peer review – the standard benchmark for quality research, Heilig and Jez observe. In contrast, the available peer reviewed research has produced a decidedly mixed picture. For example, the results attributed to TFA teachers varies both by their experience and certification level. The results also fluctuate depending on the types of teachers to whom the TFA teachers are compared; TFA teachers look relatively good when compared to other inexperienced, poorly trained teachers, but the results are more problematic when they are compared to fully prepared and experienced teachers, Heilig and Jez report.
Because of these differences, the question most frequently asked—Are TFA teachers “as good as” teachers who enter the profession through other routes?—is not the question we should be asking, Heilig and Jez contend. Whether one or the other group is better is “a question that cannot be answered unless we first identify which TFA and non-TFA teachers we’re asking about,” they write.
Even more important, “The lack of a statistically and practically significant impact should indicate to policymakers that TFA is likely not providing a meaningful reduction in disparities in educational outcomes, notwithstanding its explosive growth and popularity in the media,” according to Heilig and Jez. Moreover, despite its rapid growth, TFA remains a tiny fraction of the nation’s teaching corps; for every TFA teacher, there are 50,000 other teachers in the U.S., Heilig and Jez note, and the small numbers and small impact of TFA point to a needed “shift in thinking.”
“We should be trying to dramatically improve the quality of teaching,” write Heilig and Jez. “It is time to shift our focus from a program of mixed impact that, even if the benefits actually matched the rhetoric, would not move the needle on America’s educational quality due to the fact that only 0.002% of all teachers in the United States are Teach For America placements.”
What TFA produces most often is churn: in the classroom this year, gone in 2-3 years. That does not produce a long term solution for teaching. In fact, it undermines it.
Like I said, no one, not even the agenda driven Heilig, can find any evidence that TFa teachers are much worse. All he can do is quibble with the studies showing that TFA is better. So we are left with the point that teaching is indisputably much different from rocket science in terms of how useful the training is.
WT,
TFA teachers are gone in 2-3 years. What problem do they solve? They are idealistic 21-year-old kids who are being used as scabs. That’s pathetic.
None of that addresses my point at all.
Rocket science is very different from teaching — either teaching is much easier and doesn’t really need much training at all, or else the existing training at ed schools is so terrible that it is no better than TFA training. Have it either way you like, but there’s no way to claim that traditional teacher training is as useful as rocket science training.
WT, the schools don’t need a steady supply of temps and scabs. Period.
“…either teaching is much easier and doesn’t really need much training at all, or else the existing training at ed schools is so terrible that it is no better than TFA training. Have it either way you like…”
False dichotomy. Any way you want to put it, claiming that 5 weeks of training is comparable to several years of training is ridiculously ignorant. Of course, this is what TFA proponents will claim — but to real teachers and people who know about education, this is a joke and a scam. Really TFA is all about the money. It’s not about producing quality teachers. It’s not about quality education at all, it’s an economic agenda. Very easy to see if you look.
http://www.teachforamerica.org/why-teach-for-america/who-we-look-for
This is for WT,
About one-third of TFA recruits stay in teaching beyond the initial two years in an at risk school where there are high rates of children living in poverty. Of that one-third who stay in education past the initial two years, about 85% transfer to schools in affluent communities with little or no poverty. That leaves less than 3% of the TFA recruits who started in the schools that needed them most.
There is another teacher training program called Urban Residencies but only a few hundred graduate from that program annually. Residencies require teachers in training to spend an entire school year, full time, in a master teacher’s classroom and those new teachers have at least one full year of follow up support after they start teaching in a classroom of their own.
Four years later, 86% of those urban residency teachers are still teaching in schools with high rates of at-risk children who live in poverty, and when principals evaluate their teachers, these urban residency trained teachers earn the highest evaluations on average compared to all other teachers while the average TFA recruit—with 5 weeks of summer workshop training and no actual classroom training with real students—usually rank poorly on those evaluation for those first two years. The few TFA recruits who stay eventually pick up the skills to be successful teachers but that wasn’t because of the TFA training program. It was because they stuck it out and learned on the job over time.
TFA recruits students who have high college GPAs and usualy come from affluent homes.
Urban Residency programs recruits mostly minorities, and/or college students who grew up in poverty and they are average students without high GPAs. When I entered a teacher training program at Cal Poly, Pomona, I qualified for an urban residency program even though I’m white, but I was born into poverty and both of my parents never graduated from high school. I also came with severe dyslexia that as a child I had to overcome just to learn how to read. I stayed in teaching for 30 years and taught in schools with high rates of childhood poverty and at risk kids.
Dr. Ravitch, you are still changing the subject completely.
I also don’t see why it’s necessary to keep insulting TFA teachers — even if they leave after 2 or 3 years, they will still have spent more time in troubled urban schools than you.
SK: ” Any way you want to put it, claiming that 5 weeks of training is comparable to several years of training is ridiculously ignorant.”
What’s ridiculously ignorant is to ignore all of the rigorous studies showing that TFA teachers are, at worst, about on par with traditionally trained teachers. That’s at worst, taking every skeptical and cynical criticism at face value. If you believe the research findings themselves over the agenda-driven skeptics like Heilig, then TFA teachers are often better than traditionally trained teachers.
So take your pick. Either 5 weeks of training is good enough, or traditional teacher training really stinks, so much that it is as worthless as 5 weeks of TFA training. Either way, doesn’t look good.
“I also don’t see why it’s necessary to keep insulting TFA teachers — even if they leave after 2 or 3 years, they will still have spent more time in troubled urban schools than you.”
Is it an insult to TFA teachers, or is it a condemning of the whole enterprise of TFA? I believe it is the latter.
Saying that TFA is a flawed concept of teacher training is not meant as an “insult” so much as it is meant to clarify better and worse methods of teacher training. Ultimately, the goal being better teachers and schools.
And even if a TFA teacher teaches in urban schools for 2-3 years (although most? don’t make it that long), that doesn’t mean we just dismiss every challenge to TFA, and then call out other people for what they have or haven’t done. That would be you changing the subject. In fact, it’s a classic ad hominem.
WT: Anyone can begin an argument with “studies say…” and then post their opinion, which may be supported by other opinions, or even other studies. Anyone who believes 5 weeks of teacher training is enough, especially for low socioeconomic schools, is simply out of the loop. No teacher with experience would EVER make that argument. Period.
As for the studies comparing TFA and traditional teachers, just because a few “studies” exist, that does not mean they are The Truth. It is often an easy task to pick apart poor methodology or conclusions by reviewing “studies,” especially when these “studies” are backed by the very parties they affirm. I believe you are “ignoring” where people have posted that these studies are shallow and have not been open to peer-review.
WT
Let me start by accepting your main ppoint – that a 5 week training program is equal to a four year prep program for teacher development. Now watch the rest of your argument fall apart.
Teaching is developed best through practice. Years and years, even decades of practice. When a system churn through teachers every year, or two, or three, that system will NEVER develop great teachers.
There isn’t a veteran teacher on this blog that wouldn’t agrre they are a significantly better teacher after ten yers and even better after 20. When your most experienced veteran teacher has three years of experience, your schoolc will be mired in sub-standard teaching. Ask any veteran public school pricincipal if they’d would like to churn through staff every two or three years. They would laugh you right out of your cubicle.
Teaching isn’t really harder than rocket science – just very different. It would only seem that way if you are a rocket scientist who tries to improve student outcomes (learning) with a mathematical formula (VAM?). Public schools aren’t automobile manufacturing plants either. And schools are definitely not the pristine, controlled, lab-like environments that the current, test-and-punish reformers seem to think they are. Change only one variable (like adding new, “rigorous” national standards) – and you test for its effect (improved PISA scores). Changing only one variable in a school setting is impossible, which is one of the main reasons that education research always starts off on shaky, un-scientific ground. In fact, public schools are often more like a busy ER in a city hospital or the opening of a Hill Street Blues episode. Schools are often messy, chaotic, disjointed, and haphazard places for teachers and students alike. Public education is not at all like a manufacturing organization (e.g. Ford) – school districts are coping organizations, complete with uncertain inputs, random interruptions, and uncertain outputs. There is no changing the fundamental nature of the system. However all this talk of data driven reform and the pressures of a “test-scores-or-else” environment had me wondering what it would be like if we put our shoe on their foot. Let’s take a look at some examples as Ford tries to manufacture automobiles efficiently – and stay in the black – as a coping organization. In this analogy, the workers are the students, engineering plans are the learning standards, the supervisors are the teachers, and the cars the workers manufacture represent the facts and skills that are learned at the minimum “proficiency” level, using the plans provided and supervisor support. Ford, of course, represents the US public education system. Here goes . . .
Ford – The Coping Organization
No need for human resources – Ford has to hire everybody, even if they really don’t want to work building cars. Ford must hire some workers who lack the physical or intellectual capacity to complete the required work. They even have to hire workers who don’t speak, read, or write English. However, cognitively impaired workers do get to build their own car with some extra supports. Most dyslexic workers have no such luck. Ford must hire workers who can’t read calipers used to design engines and those who don’t know how to operate an impact wrench.
Each Ford worker (student) must build their own car (mastery of standards) using the same engineering plans (standards). The manufacturing process is directed by the supervisors (teachers).
Ford must defer payment to their workers for 13 years (HS diploma)
Ford can select and retain their supervisors (teachers)
Ford cannot fire any of their workers (students). Not even the workers who refuse to work, workers who disrupt others who are trying to work, or workers who rarely even show up for work.
Supervisors (teachers) have limited incentives in their managerial “tool-box” for motivating tired, distracted, incorrigible, or lazy workers. They can never get rid of them.
Twenty five percent of Ford workers suffer the debilitating effects of childhood poverty.
Ford’s engineering plans (standards) are subjective and abstract and they were developed by non-engineers. Created by people that never even drove a car!
Every Ford worker must have a severely under-developed prefrontal cortex which governs executive functions.
On any given day, 5% to 10% (or more) of your workforce is absent and cannot be replaced.
Ford requires that all workers spend hours of their own free time (weeknights and weekends) preparing for success on the job. The majority lack the home supports/environments necessary.
Ford is funded, in part by taxpayers who get to vote on how much of their money that Ford gets.
Ford is required to purchase the least expensive parts and materials available. Delivery of manufacturing supplies is often delayed, orders are often shipped incomplete or with mistakes.
The assembly line will get interrupted (stopped) frequently, but on a random basis.
Supervisors/managers are threatened by their stockholders if 100% of the Ford cars aren’t manufactured in a timely manner with zero defects (mastered learning standards).
And the headlines will read: What is Wrong with Ford’s Supervisors?