Copyright 2008, PAWLEY Learning Institute

WHITE PAPER


Is Lean Appropriate for Schools?
Shannon Flumerfelt, Ph.D.




PAWLEY Learning Institute











Oakland University | www.oakland.edu/leanschools
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White Paper Schoollean #5
Is Lean Appropriate for Schools?
Shannon Flumerfelt, Ph.D.
flumerfe@oakland.edu
Pawley Lean Institute
www.oakland.edu/leanschools

As the historical roots of lean are from the manufacturing sector, the concern that lean
might not be appropriate for schools is worthwhile to explore. Is it possible that an idea for
organizational development, engineering processes and manufacturing operations that came from
the automobile industry may have value for educational institutions? Is it possible to use lean
thinking and applications successfully in schools? An unequivocal but couched Yes! is the
answer put forth in this White Paper.
Actually, educational institutions and factories have a lot in common. Public schools
have traditions, routines and ways of thinking grounded in the factory model. Certainly,
current reform and improvement efforts are designed to steer schools into cultures, structures,
instructional delivery models and pedagogy distinctively different from the factory floor. The
common voice of educational thought leaders today would say that lean as a manufacturing
application is not appropriate for schools. And, they would be right. Schools are not
manufacturing facilities. Educators do not consider students, their graduates, as products.
Students do not enter the educational system as raw materials and end up as finished goods. So,
while schools engage in efforts to shed the thinking of the traditional manufacturing sector, the
last thing that educational leaders want to do is to embrace the thinking and habits of such an
environment.
As far back as the days of the American Industrial Revolution, manufacturing and
education developed commonly accepted ideas regarding organizational efficiency. These ideas
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were used in factory settings and applied to schools. Frederick Taylor (1911) promoted
efficiency in organizational structures as a way to obtain optimal production levels. This
structural approach has been widely used in public school design. Sarason (1997), the noted
educational reformer, states,
The ideal that you taught individual children, that you took
individuality seriously, simply wasn't in the picture [of the
structure of schools]. In fact, in terms of the organization of our
schools, they were very deliberately, explicitly, modeled after what
they thought were efficient factories of the time. (p. 106)
The presence of scientific management is found everywhere in schools. For example,
schools are structured around the amount of time spent on the task of learning, students are
required to attend a given number of days of school per year, the amount of time teachers instruct
per day is exactly specified in most labor agreements across the country and funding is awarded
based on the number of students served. Sizer (1984), a leading educational reformer in the
United States, studied the educational system for several years and twenty years ago openly
criticized the comprehensive, yet irrelevant, nature of curriculum and the efficient, yet
impersonal, structures that deliver educational services. So, while schools and factories have a
lot in common, much work has been done over the past decades to reform schools and move
away from this shared mindset.
In considering lean in the manufacturing sector, there are also some problems that need to
be addressed. In fact, lean as an application only in a factory setting is entirely inappropriate.
That is, because lean is not a set of tools, a management method, a set of strategies, or a series of
improvement processes; it is also not an application only. Lean, instead, is a system for an
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organizational learning journey, whereby both collective inquiry and practice, shared thinking
and doing, common perspectives, and practices are placed in a culture where leaders are focused
on three main ideas:
1. Engaging stakeholders in a continuous organizational learning cycle
focused on improvement to perfection through value creation and
systematic elimination of process waste and its root causes.
2. Enjoining stakeholders in a journey to maximize organizational
relevance, create efficient work, and produce effective results.
3. Authentically displaying a deep respect for people based on what they are
capable of knowing and doing as empowered and competent
stakeholders, leaders and teachers of lean in an organization.
Lean is easily misunderstood, hence it is misused in many sectors, including
manufacturing, largely by leaving out the hard part of lean when applying itdeveloping the
shared thinking required for lean success. So, there are many poor examples of lean
organizations; those who just want to use lean tools without doing the work of creating a culture
that can employ lean ways. And there are those few organizations who truly understand it as an
organizational and leadership system, Toyota and Danaher, to name a few; those organizations
committed to deliberately and faithfully taking a long-term view of success and sustainability. If
an organization in any sector, whether a school or factory, could start with a blank slate, a clean
sheet of paper, and build itself from there, then lean is not difficult to do. But to overlay lean
into a present culture, the efficiency model of Taylor, requires more planning, thinking and
developing of organizational intelligence than most organizations are used to engaging in. So,
while lean has been used in the manufacturing sector for well over 50 years and produced
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consistent and excellent results, the factory mentality is so engrained in the culture and climate
of many corporations and schools, that it is a foreign concept for these organizations to initiate
legitimate lean systems. The Lean Learning Center, the Lean Enterprise Institute and many other
organizations are devoted to assisting largely the manufacturing sectors and do so very
effectively. It looks like they will enjoy some longevity in their engagements due to the
pervasiveness of traditional mindsets.
There are all kinds of stories about lean applications in the manufacturing sector and,
many of them may not be positive because lean is inappropriately or inadequately used.
However, when lean is a part of the thinking and doing of an organization, even with a small
project, the results are favorable. There are many stories that confirm this. It is understandable,
then that there are concerns that lean in education means that schools will be standardized, or
that jobs will be cut to become more efficient, or that schools should operate like factories.
However, those ideas do not match best practice in the field of lean. Rather, they represent
random applications of non-lean thinking mislabeled as lean initiatives.
In contrast, there is a more accurate view of lean that presents endless possibilities for
improvement in education. Limited and inaccurate understandings of lean are not endorsed by
any organization that fosters lean ideas. In fact, good thinking and applications of lean from
manufacturing have some learnings that can be used in education. In addition, lean has been
used successfully in service-based organizations. Hospitals, financial enterprises, insurance
companies and non-profit institutions have benefited from the transactional analysis tools of lean
when applied to cultural change and processes improvement initiatives. The conceptualization of
lean is inaccurate if it includes batch approaches, top-down mandates and standardization.
Rather, lean encumbers learning organization dynamics and collaborative work, quality solutions
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contextualized for specific stakeholders, and best use of scarce resources. Pascal Dennis' (2002)
"House of Lean" provides a clear picture of the critical tenets of this philosophy.
Lean is not the "one" system by any means that will solve education's problems, but, the
philosophy and tools of lean systems approaches are useful in education. The private sector has
been able to devote substantial resources to lean organizational development initiatives and can
now share best practice. What is useful for schools from other sectors is now available for
schools to sort through and contextualize. In short, it is a mistake for educators to dismiss lean
without understanding it. In fact, lean may be the basis for mutually beneficial school-business
partnerships, rather than the one-way dictates from the business community that schools have
suffered through in past.
In terms of specific uses of lean in schools, problems such as inadequate funding,
ineffective remediation, lack of developmental learning opportunities for students all provide
excellent opportunities for lean thinking and applications. Consider, for example, the concerns
expressed over standardized testing and what this means for culturally diverse populations. In
terms of lean thinking, the basis for a successful lean enterprise is, in fact, founded on the utmost
respect for all stakeholders, especially the employees and the customers, per Taiichi Ohno as
described by Liker (2008). This means that lean organizations devote time and resources to
understanding what is of value to those various stakeholders and then improving their systems to
better meet those needs. For culturally diverse students, especially those at risk, our response in
education has largely been of the mindset of remediation of studentslets fix these students!
Lean thinking is in opposition to remediation and supports in its place intervention of processes.
What is proposed in lean approaches is to fix the root cause of the problem, not fix the people.
Lean problem solving focuses on process improvements and engages people to create those
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improvementslets fix the processes that do not work for these students! Lean does not use a
one-way standardized formula derived from the top-down. So then, for students who suffer at the
hands of the shortcomings of our current educational system, lean could be extremely helpful.
The tools of lean allow stakeholders to examine the system closely, develop collaborative
solutions and participate in continuous improvement processes. For the inequities in education
that plague some of our students, lean is a viable process improvement approach.
So, there is an answer to the question, Is lean appropriate for schools? The answer is
Yes, but lean has to be understood as a system and implemented with clarity!

To cite this article
Flumerfelt, S. F. (2008, April). Is lean appropriate for schools? [Electronic version]. In S.
Flumerfelt (Ed.), White papers. The Pawley Lean Institute. Available:
http://www4.oakland.edu/?id=4709&sid=12


References
Dennis, P. (2002). Lean production simplified. New York: Productivity Press.
Liker, J. K. (2008). Toyota culture: The heart and soul of the Toyota way. New York:
McGraw Hill.
Sarason, S. (1997). NASP distinguished lecture series: What should we do about school reform?
[Electronic version]. The School Psychology Review, 26(1), 104-110.
Sizer, T. (1984). Horaces Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Taylor, F. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper Bros.