There is lots of talk about changing education with "break-the-mold" schools or with alternative or restructured schools, but when you look at restructuring in a major company, you're likely to find that business has a much better idea of how to carry out this kind of change. The Saturn project is a case in point.
Several years ago, General Motors and the United Auto Workers agreed to work together on a project that involved rethinking all their preconceived ideas about making a car, including the assembly-line process and the traditional labor-management structure. Now, after six years of work, they have a car that is selling as fast as they can produce it and a new model of automobile production.
What you usually hear about in connection with Saturn is the change in the distribution of power. Labor and management share the responsibility for all decisions and have from the beginning. But altering who makes the decisions is only part of the story. There's nothing that says a labor- management committee couldn't build an Edsel. The real importance of the Saturn experiment lies in the changes that have been made in the production process. At the heart of these changes are Saturn's self-managed teams.
In the old production line, every worker had a single, carefully specified job to perform. The Saturn line, as Beverly Geber describes it in "Saturn's Great Experiment" (Training, June 1992), is made up of work stations, each with a multi-step operation to perform and staffed by a team responsible for "deciding how to set up and work its station most efficiently." This means scheduling, budgeting and monitoring performance:
For instance, one person checks scrap and receives weekly reports on the amount of waste. If the line of the chart is rising, she reminds everyone . . . that they need to be more careful. Since team members know the cost of each part, they know how much money their scrap costs the company. Once a year, the team forecasts the amount of company resources it plans to use in the coming year. Each month team members get a report on what they budgeted and how much they spent .... The teams even get a monthly breakdown on their telephone bills.
But teams do more than keep the line running. If they suspect that there might be a better way to install a door, for instance, it's their job to figure out how to change the existing process, with the help of a department that has a simulated assembly line and a staff of engineers. So the production process is constantly being monitored and improved. How did Saturn find these smart, flexible and disciplined workers? It didn't find them; it used an impressive training program to give workers from 136 other General Motors plants the information and skills and ongoing help they needed to participate in this new way of running an automobile plant.
The original team members received more than 400 hours of training within their first few months at Saturn, and even now, new employees take part in a kind of internship. During the first two or three months, they split their time between classroom and on-the-job training. Furthermore, every employee at Saturn is expected to spend at least 92 hours a year in training--about 5 percent of their total work hours--and 5 percent of their salary depends on their doing so. A central training group offers nearly 600 different courses, and as procedures are changed or new ones developed, new courses are also designed to assist employees in learning them.
Imagine what a training program like this would do for people trying to restructure their schools. Or, put another way, imagine trying to change things as basic as the culture of a school and the way people teach with a couple of days of in service training a year and some hours stolen from class preparation periods. But that's about what most teams that are trying to restructure their schools have in terms of time and resources.
It is ironic that a bunch of people whose business is building cars understand so well the importance of educating their employees whereas people in education seem to assume that teachers and other school staff will be able to step right into a new way of doing things with little or no help. If it takes 600 courses and 92 hours a year per employee to make a better automobile, it will take that and more to make better schools. And if we're not willing to commit ourselves to this kind of effort, we are not going to get what we want.