Efficiency-Minded Reformers Today Draw from Efficiency-Minded Reformers of a Century Ago
The crusade among reformers for data-driven decision-making in schools and evangelizing new technologies didn’t just begin in the past decade. Its roots go back to Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s application of scientific methods a century ago to what workers do each day to increase their efficiency and productivity. In the decade before World War I and through the 1930s, borrowing from the business sector particularly manufacturing where Taylorism reigned, institutions as varied as farming, medical practice, municipal government, justice, and schools adopted Taylor’s techniques of time-and-motion studies to increase employee efficiency and find the “one best way.”
Consider Louis Brandeis, a lawyer who fought for unions, the 10-hour work day for women, and similar causes in the first decade of the 20th century. He believed in the superiority of science in gathering facts to make an argument rather than one’s opinions. Brandeis coined the phrase “scientific management, according to his biographer, and in 1914 wrote the foreword for a book written by one of Taylor’s followers called Primer of Scientific Management. Like Taylor, he saw the merits of applying scientific processes to labor and management. As a lawyer who presented briefs before state and federal courts, his biographer wrote, Brandeis brought together “the need for facts … the need to mitigate some of the harsher aspects of industrialization and the use of law as a social instrument of social policy” (p. 217). Eventually, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court justice; he served between 1916 and1939.
Like lawyer Brandeis and business and civic leaders who enlisted in the movement to use “scientific management” in every day tasks, educators Efficiency-Minded Reformers Today Draw from Efficiency-Minded Reformers of a Century Ago | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: