Lean Production: Inside the war on public education

[Smarmie Doofus]

76. Sounds Like "The Last Picture Show". Meaning....

... the whole culture is so different here (NYC) that point-by-point comparisons are probably not worth making.

That said, one of my basic points of contention in the last year or two before I retired was that admins were working 1. LESS than they were contractually required to work,( I believe that's only 7 and 1/2 hrs per day; they have a union and a union contract.) and 2. MUCH LESS than teachers were working.

The author of the article in the OP ( he works in NYC) makes the point that one of the goals of Lean Production is to intentionally exhaust the workforce by burdening it with a lot of superfluous, essentially ADMINISTRATIVE work. When I first read that it seemed to jump off the page and I felt like I got hit on the head w. a 2x4.

YES. EXACTLY. That explains a lot of what's going on right now in this system. There are more things wrong with this than I can list here but one of the most corrosive is that it sets up... or exacerbates a (pre-existing).... gulf between teacher and administrator, and between teaching and administration.

IMO, the ideal ( and not so coincidentally, the *traditional*) admin is admin that TEACHES part time and also takes responsibility for the functioning of the school as a whole. (As in "Principal Teacher"; the original terminology). Lean Production... or whatever you want to call ...it fixes teachers and admins in irreconcilably hostile camps. What is good for "them" ( admins; i.e. less work, less responsibility) is bad for "us".

It's a hop, skip, and a jump from that point to an entire assortment of objective evils: hostile work environment, admins ripping-off the system ( and the kids, and the parents and the teachers and the taxpayers), etc.

Most of all... it ( i.e. the widened gap between teaching and admin) attracts into administration exactly the kind of people that you DON'T want running schools: power-hungry, money-hungry, manipulative, self-aggrandizing and temperamentally non-pedagogic.

But this is not Texas. Less "Picture Show" than..... I dunno.... "Nightmare on Elm Street?