In 1983, a blue-ribbon panel composed mostly of educators told the United States that its future was at risk. In the eight years since most Americans have come to agree with them. If once the public schools could do no wrong, today it seems they can do little right. Even parents who praise their own children’s classrooms join the rest of the public in giving the schools failing grades.
Business involvement with public schools has been both a cause and a consequence of this change in public opinion. Starting with modest, local initiatives like adopt-a-school programs and teacher-recognition awards, business efforts have widened and deepened. Corporate programs range from leadership training for school superintendents and principals to schools within schools for teenage mothers. Businesspeople are also taking leadership roles in building statewide networks, such as the Texas Business and Education Coalition, to support school restructuring and academic reforms. Overall, the level of business engagement and activity is unprecedented in this century.
Behind these new initiatives lie three separate problems that tend to run together when people talk about the education crisis. One is the social burden placed on schools by poverty, drug abuse, violence, and hopelessness. Troubled children carry the ills of their homes and neighborhoods into their classrooms every day. In too many parts of the United States, teachers must feed their students’ bodies and souls before they can even begin to feed their minds.
Another set of problems is organizational—the catch-22 effects of inflexible bureaucracies, inane regulations, and incompetent administrators and union officials. In too many school districts, excellence survives despite the system, not because of it. In Texas, for instance, math teachers are required to provide records of their classes in ten-minute segments to demonstrate that they are covering the required curriculum. Such working conditions drive good teachers and principals to become renegades—or out of the system altogether.
The last set of problems is educational. Its measures are America’s academic failures: high school dropout rates that average 25% and climb to 40% or 50% in many U.S. cities; students whose performance on international math and science tests puts them at or near the very bottom; the shrinking number of 17-year-olds (now no more than 3% to 5% of U.S. students) who can pursue academic work at the highest level. This is the piece of the education crisis that the United States has heard about longest. It is also the piece that sparked many of the early business-education initiatives.
The materials collected here touch on one or more of these interwoven problems. At the same time, they invite a more fundamental question that educators and executives often asked in the early 1980s but seldom ask now: Does business have any business in education? Back then the question reflected inexperience and wariness on the part of both. Today there is more experience, less wariness, and a good deal more mutual respect. But these books, articles, and reports challenge two often unexamined assumptions in the ongoing debates about the public schools. The first is that schools are the problem and business is the solution. The second is that school is school and work is work.
Changes in the global economy and in U.S. society have made both these assumptions obsolete. Like the public schools, business faces a serious education crisis within its own four walls. With few exceptions, neither institution is successfully preparing people for the demands of the new industrial economy. The irony is that business often sees the schools’ problems far more clearly than it sees its own.
Moreover, in this new economy, school and work are necessarily intertwined. By perpetuating an old “hands off” relationship and failing to create new formal ties, U.S. schools and companies undermine many of their own best efforts to give every student the academic skills and motivation he or she needs to be a productive member of society.
Today more than ever before, school is about working and work is about learning. Put those thoughts together, and they add up to a provocative conclusion. For many executives, the most effective way to change the schools is to change what happens inside their own companies.
The Business of Business Is Education
Ask executives why they are so committed to improving the public schools, and you are likely to hear an explanation that includes a good measure of enlightened self-interest. Their analysis is simple and straightforward. In a demanding competitive environment, U.S. companies cannot prosper unless the schools graduate a continuing stream of well-educated, self-disciplined, motivated young people. Students who finish high school with minimal reading, math, and communications skills will not be able to work effectively as part of a team, operate sophisticated machinery, solve problems, or take initiative in behalf of their customers. In short, they will not be able to do today’s jobs well, let alone tomorrow’s.
The problem with this reasoning is that the chronology is off: the skills crisis it forecasts has already arrived. Nearly three-fourths of the people who will be at work in the first decade of the twenty-first century are already on the job. The economic future of the United States depends more on the men and women in the country’s factories, offices, and shops right now than on the skills and attitudes of future high school graduates. If today’s workers can do today’s jobs—and tomorrow’s—their companies will thrive. If they can only do yesterday’s jobs, sooner or later their companies will fail. Most of the U.S. work force is prepared for yesterday’s work.
The academic skills that business finds unacceptable in today’s high school graduates are the same skills employed workers possess. If this statement sounds implausible, given all we have heard about the steadily worsening condition of the schools, consider these findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Since 1969, NAEP has regularly tested the educational achievements of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders in the country’s public and private schools. Its findings, published in Accelerating Academic Achievement: A Summary of Findings From 20 Years of NAEP, contradict the conventional wisdom: academic performance in the United States has not fallen off dramatically. Overall, student achievement levels have changed very little in the past two decades.
In math, reading, and writing, test results have been basically stable since the 1960s. In science and civics, students lost ground in the 1970s but regained it in the 1980s. While gender-related disparities are almost as sharp as ever—girls, on average, write better than boys; boys, on average, outdo girls in science and math—performance gaps among racial and ethnic groups have narrowed perceptibly, mostly through gains in basic skills among black and Hispanic youths. Nevertheless, the remaining gap is huge. On average, the academic skills of black and Hispanic high school students compare with those of white middle school students, not with their white high school peers.
Thus it is not the performance level of students that has declined. Rather, the demands of the external competitive environment have increased. Twenty years ago, U.S. companies could hire graduates who performed at this level without compromising their competitive capabilities. Today they cannot. The degree of competence that the averages reflect is too low to equip students to work successfully in self-managed teams or to use new technology to the fullest possible extent. That is one reason more and more companies are testing applicants’ basic skills and requiring some college or technical training for entry-level jobs. But until competition forces the issue by requiring dramatic changes in the way companies operate, managers often fail to see what this change implies for existing employees. Then skills deficits that have remained well hidden become unmistakable.
Further Reading
The Plumley Companies’ experience, described in Worker Training: Competing in the New International Economy, is a good example. Plumley is an auto-parts supplier in Tennessee. Today it is a high-quality manufacturer: its reject rate is 1 in 10,000 parts, and its customer base has grown to include such demanding buyers as Nissan. In the early 1980s, however, Plumley’s prospects were dark. It was shipping parts with defect rates of 1 in 300, and it had lost Buick, its oldest and one of its best customers. To turn things around, Plumley’s managers invested heavily in new manufacturing equipment and introduced statistical process control to the work force. Only then did they discover that nearly half of the company’s 500 workers had not finished high school and that many employees, including some of the supervisors, could not read.
Plumley’s experience is typical, according to Worker Training, prepared by the Office of Technology Assessment. The study offers a comprehensive look at training practices and policies in the United States, as well as brief overviews of efforts mounted by its chief industrial competitors, particularly Germany and Japan. It leaves little doubt that many if not most U.S. managers face in their own companies an education crisis comparable with the one they now recognize in the schools.
Start with skills. Based on its own findings and those of other researchers, OTA estimates that 20% to 30% of U.S. workers are deficient in the basic skills they need to work effectively in their current jobs, participate fully in training programs, and implement new technology successfully. As Plumley found, until the company developed educational programs to upgrade employees’ reading and math skills, it could not maximize its investment in new machinery or bring standard quality processes into its factory. Ordinary work is often similarly constrained, although the effects may be less visible. A 1986 NAEP survey of adults aged 21 to 25 found that 20% could not read at an eighth-grade level, for example. Yet most job manuals and other work-related documents assume tenth- to twelfth-grade comprehension skills (the ability to understand an editorial in a good daily newspaper).
Changes in the composition of the U.S. work force are also contributing to a rising need for training. The baby boomers are graying, and so are their skills. Fewer young people are entering the work force, and more of those who are come from minority groups who often fare poorly in school. Immigrants accounted for 22% of the growth in the U.S. labor force between 1980 and 1987 (more than double their contribution in the 1970s), and that percentage will rise during the 1990s. Many of these new workers need instruction in English, and about one-third have only elementary educations.
Lastly, worker mobility creates training needs. Americans change both their employers and their occupations more often than workers in other advanced industrial nations do. As a result, OTA estimates that in any given year, at least 15% of the work force needs some new training—which, for the same reason, most employers are reluctant to provide. Ironically, what little evidence there is suggests that workers tend to stay with employers that provide significant training.
Combine these special considerations with the need for new basic skills that restructuring and computer-related technologies create, and the lesson is clear. U.S.-based companies that want to provide high-quality, innovative goods and services to demanding customers have to be in the business of education. The evidence says most are not.
The findings in Worker Training indicate strongly that more companies are talking about workers’ skills than seriously developing them. Overall, U.S. employers spend between $30 billion and $44 billion on formal training programs every year. (To put that figure in perspective, the bill for public schooling comes to more than $300 billion per year.) The lion’s share of this money, some $27 billion, is spent by 15,000 companies, or 0.5% of all U.S. employers. Only 100 to 200 companies spend more than 2% of their payroll on formal programs. Motorola, IBM, Aetna, and Xerox are some of the familiar names. Small companies, whose access to highly skilled workers is limited and who are most likely to employ young adults and minorities, rarely provide formal training for their workers.
About two-thirds of the corporate training dollars spent on formal programs go to college-educated men and women in professional, managerial, professional sales, technical, and supervisory jobs. Frontline workers—machine operators, clerical workers, maintenance and repair people—receive very little formal training. The training they do get is usually tied to some specific occasion or event: instruction when new machinery is installed (often provided by a vendor who is likely to be more interested in highlighting operating features than in discussing potential problems and how to solve them); a short course in team building for long-term employees whose jobs have been restructured; orientation and safety regulations for new hires. On this last point, the contrast with Japan is striking. For example, new auto-assembly workers in Japan typically receive 300 hours of training in their first six months. Their U.S. counterparts receive only 50.
Finally, the employees who are most likely to need training are least likely to receive it: young adults who are just beginning to work and for whom training would be a powerful motivator to continue learning on and off the job; minorities; people over age 45. This disparity is particularly acute when it comes to remedial education. Few companies (probably no more than one in eight) provide in-house basic skills training. And while more companies encourage workers’ efforts to improve their own skills, few companies give them active support, such as providing paid release time. Remedial education spending from all sources (companies, the government, unions, and workers) comes to less than $1 billion per year, a mere one-thirtieth—or less—of all the corporate funds spent on formal programs.
The contradictions reflected in these findings are striking. Managers say that education is vital, but only a few companies invest substantial funds in their workers’ training. The need for basic skills—and for new basics like problem solving and communications—requires general training, but most instruction is job-specific. Frontline and semiskilled workers whose performance more and more directly determines companies’ competitiveness receive the least training. Managers and professionals who are already well educated receive the most.
What explains these contradictions? The Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, cochaired by former secretaries of labor William E. Brock and Ray Marshall with Ira Magaziner, an expert on U.S. competitiveness, studied the skills crisis by talking with employers, human resource managers, production supervisors, and workers throughout the United States. As part of its study, commission researchers asked employers what skills they required of current and prospective employees and how those requirements were likely to change in coming years. Their findings, published in America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, do not support the rhetoric of crisis.
The researchers expected employers to report widespread skills shortages and that new jobs would require higher skills. Instead, they found limited skills shortages and a tiny minority of companies (mainly large manufacturers and financial services and communications companies) that were concerned about their growing need for better educated workers.
To be more specific: despite universal complaints about the quality of current job applicants, only 5% of employers saw education and skills requirements rising. The skills more than 80% of employers worried about were not academic but social—a good work ethic, a pleasant demeanor, reliability. Employers who did focus on the education of recent high school graduates worried about the wrong things: whether applicants could read and solve simple math problems, skills that virtually every graduate has. Only 15% of employers (chiefly in craft-apprentice trades and traditionally female, low-wage occupations like secretarial work and nursing) said they had trouble finding workers with appropriate skills. Like the great majority of parents who say that the schools are a problem but give their own children’s schools an “A,” a large majority of managers deplore the skills problem generally but do not relate it to their own company, division, or plant.
For their part, U.S. workers are just as complacent in their approach to education and just as inconsistent in their attitudes toward training and skills. Although the United States has an extensive adult education system, it is relatively underused. Worker Training reports that only about 15% of all Americans take courses in any given year. (More than two-thirds of the courses are job-related, and employers typically pay for about half the cost.) By comparison, roughly one-quarter of the Canadian work force enrolls in adult education courses every year, while in Japan, adults study almost constantly in night school or through correspondence courses.
The findings of surveys conducted in 1989 and 1990 by Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit organization that focuses on ways to improve the quality of the work force, reveal some of the attitudes that hold the figure to 15%. The Jobs for the Future researchers talked with hundreds of workers in Missouri and Colorado, two states that together provide a good cross-section of the U.S. economy (everything from farms and Rust Belt factories to high-tech computer plants and the headquarters of some of the largest service companies). Nearly two-thirds of the workers interviewed said technology had greatly affected their jobs in the past few years. More than one-third believed they would need more training to keep their jobs, and one-quarter talked about a need for training in basic skills. More than two-thirds said they would need additional education and training to get the jobs they really wanted.
At the same time, workers were ambivalent about getting more training and reluctant to pursue it very seriously. Majorities in both states thought their current employers provided enough training for them to do their jobs well. More than half of the Missourians and more than one-third of the Coloradoans said they would attend training classes only if required to do so by their employers. More than 40% in both states said they would happily attend training—if it took place on company time, not their own.
When the interviewers asked these workers what obstacles kept them from taking advantage of external training opportunities, the replies varied. The majority said courses were not available at convenient places or times. Half said training was too expensive. About 40% said good programs were unavailable. And roughly 35% said they had neither the time nor the energy.
All of these answers are reasonable. So are the answers employers typically give when asked why they do not provide more training for their workers. Training is expensive, both in out-of-pocket costs and in the time that is lost at work. Because of work force mobility, employees can leave any time, taking their newfound skills with them. For smaller companies particularly, the difficulty of finding and delivering good training is great.
The problem with all this reasonableness is that it creates a contract of complacency between workers and employers. Slowly but surely, that contract is destroying the effectiveness of U.S. companies, the standard of living of U.S. workers, and U.S. competitiveness.
Consider these figures from America’s Choice. Since 1973, it has taken the United States three years to achieve the productivity gains it used to achieve in one pre-1973 year. The economy has grown because more people are at work, not because workers are more productive. America’s real average weekly earnings have fallen more than 12% since 1969, with the bottom 70% of the population bearing all the pain. Moreover, the economic gulf between those who are educated and those who are not is widening rapidly. During the 1980s, earnings of college-educated men aged 24 to 34 rose 10%. Earnings of young men with only a high school diploma fell 9%. Earnings of those without a diploma dropped 12%. One in five children is now born into poverty, and these children will constitute one-third of the country’s future workers.
For more than 100 years, U.S. economic success reflected the fact that the country educated more of its population than any other industrial nation. That is no longer true. Other countries—Japan, South Korea, France among them—also have universal secondary schooling. But education can still lead to economic renewal if managers pursue it as vigorously in their own companies as they are calling on educators to do in the schools. The turnaround of an IBM circuit-board factory in Austin, Texas, described in America’s Choice, shows what that involves.
In the mid-1980s, managers in IBM’s personal computer division began complaining that they could save $60 million by buying boards of equal quality from external suppliers. Because IBM has a full employment policy, top management gave the Austin managers a chance to save the plant—if they cut $60 million from their costs.
The managers began by reorganizing line workers into multifunctional teams. They folded indirect workers into the teams and gave them direct production tasks. And they redefined the factory’s job classifications so that every manufacturing worker had much broader responsibilities as well as a career-track job with a 15- to 20-year horizon.
By 1990, the cost gap had been closed, productivity had improved more than 200%, quality was five times better, and inventories were 40% lower. The factory had also expanded its production, introduced a new product, and expanded its work force. What supported all this was IBM’s investment in upgrading its workers’ skills: 5% of the plant’s payroll (not including lost wages) went into education. Some workers had to learn to read and do basic math before they could even begin their work-related training. All the workers learned how to maintain machinery, use computers, troubleshoot electronic circuitry, and plan production. Training is ongoing.
Listening to the rhetoric of the schools crisis, you might think that U.S. business has no choice but the one IBM made and that every company is making it. Worker Training and America’s Choice refute that idea. Business has an education problem as corrosive as the schools’. Unlike the problem in the schools, however, it is a problem managers can get their hands on quickly, directly, and with unambiguous results.
The Business of Education Is Work
Just as business has an education problem, schools have a work problem. In most U.S. public schools, students do not work hard. Evidence of that comes from Accelerating Academic Achievement. In 1988, more than two-thirds of U.S. high school seniors said they did one hour or less of homework each day. More than half read ten or fewer pages a day for homework and in school. One-quarter of the eleventh graders were not taking any math classes. Another quarter were enrolled in lower level courses such as general math and pre-algebra. Only 17% of the graduating seniors in 1987 had taken physics. The effects are visible in the tests that compare the achievements of U.S. students with their peers in other industrial countries and in NAEP’s own findings. In every subject, U.S. students show that they are able to memorize facts but that they cannot apply, extend, or interpret them. They do not have the capability to convert data into information.
Almost universally, the response to this problem is to get tough: to raise standards and to require more. And there is no question that higher standards will improve performance if they are raised in the right way. (As many managers learned during the 1980s, how you go after quality is just as important as whether you pursue it.) But unless students also have a reason to work harder, tougher standards will simply drive even more of them out of the system than the 25% that are dropping out right now. New business-education relationships that give individual students incentives to achieve—such as mentoring programs and scholarship awards—have already proven successful. Can incentives be applied more broadly by creating new links among companies, students, and schools? The experience of other industrial countries indicates strongly that they can.
Both Germany and Japan have well-established ties between their public high schools and employing companies. And in both countries, students’ efforts in their own behalf are clearly and concretely tied to their futures. If young Japanese do not do well in school, they will not find work with companies that offer secure jobs, good wages, and continuous training to upgrade their skills. If young Germans opt for the gratification of temporarily higher wages instead of taking positions as apprentices, they know that they are putting the rest of their working lives at risk.
In the United States, the only young people who have this kind of cause-and-effect incentive to work hard are the elite few who want to go to Princeton, Stanford, or Yale. For the rest, particularly the 50% of high school graduates who do not go on to college, getting by is good enough. But getting by is not good enough in either Germany or Japan. And while neither country’s system (particularly Japan’s) is a perfect model for the United States, both demonstrate the value of breaking down the invisible wall that separates most U.S. high schools from the world of adult work.
James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University has studied how Japanese and U.S high school students move from school to work. He and Takehiko Kariya of the Japanese Institute of Multimedia Education explain Japan’s system in “From High School to Work: Market and Institutional Mechanisms in Japan.” The formally informal links that they describe between high schools and employers resemble the supplier chains that characterize Japan’s industrial keiretsu. Companies allocate a specific number of jobs to each of their “contract” schools on the basis of the school’s academic rank and its past performance in recommending exemplary employees. The school staff then nominates and ranks students for the available jobs on the basis of their grades alone. Students cannot apply to a contract employer unless they have been nominated by their school, and they can apply for only one job at a time. Most students are hired months before they graduate from high school.
Contract employers are mostly larger companies that can offer the most desirable jobs. They tend to hire almost half of each school’s work-bound students, even though they account for only 10% of the companies that are likely to hire at the school. Both factors reinforce their weight with the schools and the students. While the companies monitor the quality of the schools’ referrals through entrance exams that measure students’ academic knowledge and interviews to assess their personal qualities, in general they respect and accept the schools’ rankings. They will hire students they would not otherwise choose and hire in downturns to keep their institutional relationships intact.
The contract system was devised during the 1920s, when despite the existence of a large pool of unemployed workers, Japanese companies had trouble recruiting and retaining stable work forces. Today it not only reinforces stable recruitment patterns but also ensures that schools will send their most qualified students to the best employers. For students the result is a system that is doubly stratified: their future depends both on how well they do in their course work and on how well they did in the competition to gain admission to one of the more highly ranked secondary schools.
The prospect of creating a system this closed in the United States is abhorrent. The prospect of employers signaling to students and to schools that grades matter is not. In “What If Good Jobs Depended on Good Grades?” published in the winter, 1989 issue of American Educator, Rosenbaum suggests three ways in which U.S. employers could motivate work-bound students: show students that they can get desirable jobs if they work hard in school; collaborate with schools to hire students before they graduate; and base hiring on grades. All three suggestions could be implemented easily if employers were willing to change their existing employment practices.
Currently, many of the best U.S. employers will not hire people fresh out of high school. Either they require some college or postsecondary technical training, or they ask for three to five years of experience with another company. (For example, Worker Training reports that Texas Instruments now requires the clean-room operators in some of its U.S. semiconductor plants to have two-year technical degrees, although a high school diploma still suffices at its Japanese facility.) Prospective employers who do take on recent graduates may ask to see an applicant’s diploma. But they almost never ask applicants what courses they have taken, how well they did, what their discipline and attendance records were, or whether there are teachers who can recommend them—a step that in and of itself would do more to reinforce teachers’ authority in the classroom than all the homilies on respect ever preached.
Ironically, the high school graduates who have the easiest time finding work tend to be those who invest the least in their education. Given the lack of established networks for connecting graduates with available jobs, students who work part-time while they are in school have a decided advantage as job hunters, if only because they can usually stay on with their current employers. In contrast, students who take more courses, study harder, and generally devote more time to their education end up in exactly the same sort of non-career-track jobs (fast-food counter help, retail sales, stock clerks) as their less academically diligent peers—but after a more protracted search. For their employers, the greater skills and motivation these students bring are a windfall. But the students themselves may wonder why they bothered. And if they do not ask that question, other students and their own younger siblings surely will.
Evidence that employers are starting to make the connection between good grades and more productive employees comes from recent changes in the informal ground rules of the Boston Compact. Developed in 1982 by the city’s largest employers, the compact guaranteed a job for every high school graduate in exchange for the school board’s commitment to raise student performance levels (a goal the schools have had great difficulty achieving). As Rosenbaum observes, the guarantee had one shortcoming: while there may have been a connection between the grades students earned and the jobs they ended up with (which varied greatly in their desirability and long-term prospects), no one knew about it. Now, however, a number of companies and schools have agreed informally to use grades, teacher evaluations, and attendance to match students with white-collar jobs.
The school-to-work system that has attracted the most serious attention from U.S. educators and policymakers is Germany’s. It is one of several approaches William Nothdurft discusses in School Works: Reinventing Public Schools to Create the Workforce of the Future. The book grew out of tours undertaken by educators, administrators, and policymakers from the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps, with the support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. It describes WEPIC’s own innovative programs in education, youth employment, and community revitalization as well as programs the tour members observed in Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, and France.
Germany’s “dual system,” which combines formal apprenticeships with vocational education, is extraordinarily successful. The country has the lowest rate of youth unemployment in Europe and the highest reputation for quality work. Apprenticeship is the country’s largest form of upper-secondary education. Jointly operated and financed by private industry and the government, it enrolls more than 60% of Germany’s 16-to 18-year-olds. In comparison, only about 250,000 people (or 0.3% of the work force) apprentice in the United States each year. Most are white males over age 25, and more than half are in the skilled construction trades.
German apprentices spend one day a week in school and four days on the job. In school, they take German, social studies, and specialized science and math courses related to their prospective trades. On the job, they receive minimal, “learner’s” wages. In large companies, the day’s work is apt to include specialized classes. In smaller companies and shops, which do most of the training, the apprentice is usually assigned to follow one master craftsman, and instruction is informal. To ensure that every apprentice gets the same high-quality theoretical training, the schools use uniform curricula developed jointly with industry representatives. The government also maintains technical centers to supplement the training smaller employers can provide. After three years of training, and after passing both a written and a practical exam, apprentices become journeymen with credentials that are recognized and accepted throughout the country.
Although the dual system has its roots in the apprenticeships sponsored by medieval crafts guilds, there is nothing medieval about it. Apprentices prepare for more than 480 occupations, ranging from cabinet making to robotics, retailing to personnel. Moreover, the system is adapting to reflect the growing need for workers who have the broad academic and technical skills needed to respond quickly to new technology and to changes in the nature of their jobs.
For example, the authorities have recently added a basic vocational year designed to expose students to many specific trades within one broad field, and they are redefining some trades to create job categories with broader sets of skills. (Ironically, while the rest of the industrial world envies German workers’ exacting standards and precision, many Germans fear that their work force is so precise—and narrow—that it lacks the flexibility global competition demands.) There is also talk about adding a second day of school each week to improve apprentices’ basic education, a move industry by and large resists because it would reduce the value of apprentices’ work.
As this last suggests, there is friction as well as cooperation among the players. Consider Bernd Klingsohr, the owner of one of Munich’s largest BMW dealerships. On one hand, he takes great pride in the quality of the mechanics he has trained and the reputation this has brought his company. On the other, he is dismayed that the auto manufacturers (including BMW) often lure his apprentices away as soon as they become productive journeymen and that business must bear most of the cost of apprenticeships while the government pays enormous sums to educate university students. Still, he sees no other option. His company, like his country, depends too much on its reputation for quality to sacrifice the system that maintains it.
Stephen Hamilton of Cornell University is one of the most thoughtful students of the German system. In his book Apprenticeship for Adulthood, he discusses how it could be adapted to fit America’s needs and values, including the high priority Americans of all ages place on mobility and keeping their options open. His recommendations include: exploratory apprenticeships that would center on unpaid community service work for middle school youngsters; school-based apprenticeships that would give students some practical work experience while continuing to emphasize academic learning; and “2 plus 2” apprenticeships that would combine two years of high school with two years of technical college.
Programs like these could make the connection between learning and working tangible. Students would see how solving algebra problems relates to operating numerically controlled machine tools, for instance, or why analyzing historical documents is preparation for selling services to bank customers. But such programs will also be impossible without important changes in the relationships among schools, employers, and young people.
To integrate school and work, schools have to become far more flexible in defining what constitutes education, who can provide it, and how to assess it. (For example, performance-based exams, or demonstrations, would almost certainly have to be part of the school’s evaluation system.) Both public and private employers would have to be willing to provide substantial resources in the form of money and mentors and to trust “irresponsible” teenagers with responsible work—as Germany and Japan routinely do.
As Hamilton points out, German employers prefer 15- or 16-year-olds to older, experienced workers who are more likely to be set in their ways. And the same is true in Japan. The result is that at an age when large numbers of U.S youths are floundering in low-skill, low-wage jobs that do nothing to increase their competence or self-confidence, their German and Japanese peers are embarking on responsible careers under the guidance of deeply committed adults.
The Business of Everyone Is Change
Reports like The Business Role in State Education Reform, prepared by R. Scott Fosler for the Business Roundtable, rightly argue that most U.S. school systems will need strong and persistent incentives to change. The best-led systems will make progress on their own, just as the best teachers can make even the poorest classrooms places where learning and real change occur. But most schools and systems will need external help, if only because years of isolation have allowed them to become self-contained and self-absorbed.
One common prescription is restructuring, giving teachers and principals clear goals for their students and the freedom to achieve those goals in the ways they think best. It makes sense in theory and in practice. Look at truly effective schools, and you invariably see principals who have been able, somehow, to keep bureaucratic regulations at bay. For schools that are not blessed with effective leaders, pressure and support from business people can be a powerful force for change. But as activist organizations like the Roundtable recognize, interested outsiders have to be prepared to get involved in politics and for the long term. Nothing is more political than education, and restructuring a school system is an intensely political task.
A faster acting lever of change could come from parents. This is the avenue championed by the proponents of choice, the most widely talked-about silver bullet in current education debates. While their financing and administrative plans vary, advocates of choice agree that the best way to improve the public schools is to introduce competition into the system. Instead of supporting schools, governments would use their education dollars to support students, whose parents could then choose the best school for their child from all the available options. Schools that do well and offer courses in subjects that parents value would thrive. Inadequate schools would close their doors, and presumably reopen under “new and better management” in the educational version of a hostile takeover.
But this is a rather one-dimensional application of business thinking and marketplace economics to a complicated, nonmarket transaction. Another, more powerful solution would link parents’ expectations for their children and their own experiences in the workplace.
Schools supply what parents want. Most parents expect their children’s lives to replicate their own. What they experience in their own jobs determines what they value in their children’s schools. An example from Apprenticeship for Adulthood makes the point. Hamilton describes a study comparing a first-grade classroom in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with one in a lower-middle-class school. Both teachers and both schools had excellent reputations. The first teacher stressed academic achievement and encouraged her students to express their ideas and think about the future. She taught them self-discipline by explaining why they all benefited from the rules. The second teacher stressed following rules, getting work done, and memorization. She told students what to do, and they did it.
The differences reflected the parents’ expectations of and for their children, expectations based on their own lives. In one case, that led to compliant students who did what was asked of them. In the other, it led to children prepared to become lifelong learners on their own.
Set this research against the contract of complacency that exists in so many U.S. workplaces and an intriguing possibility opens up: business leaders can affect what happens in the schools by changing what happens in their own companies. If this seems a stretch, think back to IBM’s circuit-board factory in Austin.
Vera Sharbonez (not her real name) has worked at IBM since she graduated from high school in 1969. Before the reorganization, Vera fed circuit boards one by one—about 1,200 each day—into a machine that automatically inserted transistors and capacitors. When the machine had finished its work, she removed each board, inspected it, and put it into one of two bins—pass” or “reject.” Today Vera still loads circuit boards into the machine, but the task is only one of many and occupies only about one-quarter of her time. The team to which she belongs meets every morning to discuss its work plan, orders materials, deals with internal suppliers, keeps quality records, talks to customers, and helps determine equipment purchases for the plant. How does Vera feel? “I’ve been working a lot harder…but it’s worth it… I can make decisions. I am also learning things that will be useful to me in all kinds of jobs.”
Now reflect on the kind of messages and motivation that workers like Vera Sharbonez take home at the end of the day. Their jobs reinforce the value of learning, the fact that everyone can learn, and the ways in which academic skills relate to what happens in adult life. Without question, jobs like these raise parents’ expectations for their children and for the kind of instruction and values they want schools to provide. Children learn those lessons too and will likely incorporate them into their expectations for themselves.
Parents who believe that learning matters will send that message loud and clear. If their company’s personnel policies also allow them to send it regularly—by attending several teacher conferences a year or by spending a few hours each week in the classroom as a volunteer—the contract of complacency could quickly become a compact for competitiveness.
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