After almost three decades of school reform, student achievement nationally is about where it was when it started, and student behavior has declined dramatically. Numbers of dropouts, especially in cities and among the poor and minorities, have gotten much higher. Yet many billions of dollars have been spent; countless professionals have carried out extensive amounts of work; public officials have spawned endless legislation, regulations, and mandates; and everyone has exhibited no end of good intentions. W. Edwards Deming pointed out years ago that persistent problems in organizations stem not from workers but from the system: the structure of the work; systemic practices, policies, and methods; and conventional thinking. Where systemic change is concerned, the schools are at the stage of bridges and tunnels before exact-change lanes were instituted. In this article, the author suggests that school leaders can learn from what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey did--follow Deming's principle of continuous improvement. The problem in school reform is not a lack of concern or a lack of good intentions. The problem is at the policy level, and it is there school leaders must start to seek solutions. Constructive policies that empower teachers to teach and students to learn and that restructure the system to remove obstacles to improvement must be enacted and implemented. Present policies that defeat their own purpose and become obstacles to improvement, while constantly driving up costs, must be abandoned and replaced with the proven systems ideas of Deming. When these principles are applied to education, school systems will experience a renaissance in learning and a simultaneous decrease in per-student cost. (Contains 1 endnote.)