Breaking Down the Manufacturing Analogy in Improvement Science to Construct a Critical, Justice-Centered Improvement

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session Seven
  In Roundtable Session: Toward a Critical, Social Justice–Focused Improvement Science (Table 3)

Abstract

The turn to improvement science (IS) as a methodology for addressing pressing problems of practice in education has been, at least in part, inspired by advances in manufacturing, namely in the automobile industry and primarily Toyota. IS scholars argue that the field of education can learn from these achievements in quality accomplished by Toyota and other global automobile companies, such as their reduction of material waste, innovations in standard processes, and increased value to customers while using the fewest possible resources (e.g., Bryk et al., 2015; LeMahieu et al., 2017). I argue that taking up IS in education without interrogating who the “customer” is and what (or who) the “products'' are in this analogy reinforces neoliberal ideologies around schooling, where schooling is centered around its production of economic value rather than around developing engaged citizens or, more pressingly, critically conscious citizens who push back on existing power structures (Friere, 1974; Hursh & Martina, 2003; Saltman, 2010; Sims, 2017). The purpose of this paper is to: a) break down this analogy, and b) advance a critical, justice-focused improvement science that seeks to upend neoliberalism in education and systems of oppression and marginalization that commit daily violence on Black, Brown, disabled, and LGBTQ+ students, as well as students of other marginalized identities. In this submission, I offer one lesson IS scholars seek to take from car manufacturing and interrogate its application to education. In the full paper, I will engage in this exercise for each of the lessons IS scholars take from manufacturing.
IS scholars argue that the utility of taking lessons from the manufacturing industry is that corporations like Toyota excel at providing value to customers (LeMahieu et al., 2017). Translating this to the field of education and the work of schooling as they exist now highlights the problematic nature of identifying who the “customer” is as it pertains to the service of educating children, a problem that LeMahieu and colleagues acknowledge, but avoids engaging substantively (p. 75). Critical scholars in education have made visible that the “customers” of schooling are not children, but instead labor markets seeking control over a well-assimilated, so-called “highly-skilled workforce” devoid of critical consciousness (Kovacs & Christie, 2008, p. 9; Friere, 1974). Neoliberal school reform models, concerned with competition and privatization, maintain this dynamic through hyper-accountability and hyper-standardization structures and practices (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Royal & Gibson, 2017). In this frame, “the needs of children” are dictated by their capacity to contribute to the labor market rather than their health, well-being, and development of their identities. For IS to become justice-focused, it must interrogate the existing outcomes it has historically helped schools improve towards and reorient itself to outcomes centered on humanizing students.
The field is in desperate need of critical lenses to interrogating the work of IS to generate new and better arrangements in IS that foreground social justice. Developing principles for a principled, justice-focused improvement science can spark methodological innovations to our work as improvement science scholars, enabling us to work towards more just schooling.

Author

• Carlos Sandoval, WestEd
  Presenting Author