A few years ago, I participated in a community group that was meeting with a candidate hoping to be the superintendent of a 50,000-student school district. Since most in the community group were business leaders, and since my observation was that the education community and the business community often had too little communication, I asked the candidate how he might work with the business community. Before the candidate could answer, the president of the metro area Chamber of Commerce stated, “It’s more like there is a moat around the district and they won’t let us in.” I was not surprised at the comment. I had heard many similar statements from business leaders at the local and state level for decades. Ironically, I have heard similar statements from educators about not being included or understood by the business community. Whatever the reasons, business and education seem to run on separate tracks, each oblivious of the other. I believe it is time to intelligently join the forces of education and business.
Education has only grudgingly begun to come around to accepting a role in workforce preparation. For educators, the ultimate goal of education seems to have been learning for its own sake, with self-actualization the end-state to be achieved. I have heard countless teachers say, “It isn’t my job to make Company ‘X’ successful. I teach kids!” There are two flaws with education adopting this point of view. First, it is increasingly in the best interest of students that THEY succeed in a company because their family and their community will depend on a certain degree of individual economic success. Second, it is no longer accurate to assume that most businesses want entry level employees that are narrowly educated to suit a particular workplace. It is much more likely that a broadly educated student is exactly what companies need today. My observations lead me to believe that, if every student graduated high school with a strong “liberal arts” background, then both the interests of students and interests of business would be be well served.
The business community is not without fault in letting this chasm of cooperation exist for so many decades. Business leaders, particularly in larger communities, have a mostly superficial relationship with local school districts. Business leaders sometimes view school districts as a kind of “utility” that does not require much engagement as long as things are working. A review of promotional material from metropolitan area Chambers of Commerce finds much more space devoted to universities than to school districts, or even to community colleges, even though new businesses being recruited have employees who might be very interested in the quality of school district educational options for their children. Metro Chambers seldom have local superintendents on their Boards, even though the districts may be some of the largest regional employers. Business leaders are apt to complain about the quality of graduates available to them for entry level work, but they seldom truly engage with educators to genuinely articulate their needs. Educators heard pronouncementslike “more Math and Science” when Sputnik was launched; “more basics” when A Nation at Riskwas published; “more computers” when technology began to dominate; and now “more STEM”. In each case, education reacted in limited ways to these pronouncements, but there has not been enough engagement on either side to create the productive, systemic changes needed – on BOTH sides.
But the answer is not simply better mutual respect between education and business. The right answer is full scale collaboration between both enterprises. There certainly are already examples of great collaboration, often brokered by community colleges. But they are not the norm and not enough young people have access to the opportunities that those relationships provide.
I believe when business and education really talk and really listen to each other, that engagement can produce a more detailed and more productive conversation than the pronouncements and reactions mentioned above. For example, some of the best interpreters between business and education are community college technical faculty. Those instructors know that if their students get hired and succeed in companies, then their programs will thrive and grow. But, if students who complete the technical programs don’t find and keep good jobs, then the community college programs will end or stagnate, limited to only churning students’ tuition. I made a point of speaking with many community college technical faculty and deans over a period of 17 years. I always tried to ask this question, “What skillsets do students entering your program need?” Remarkably, the answer was nearly always some version of the following: “Sure, they need more Math and Science skills than they think, but they really need communication skills – not just reading and writing, but also speaking and listening. They need to know about different kinds of people from places different than their own. They need to know how to work in teams with all sorts of people.” This doesn’t sound like we have to choose between STEM and humanities. It sounds like we need both.
School districts should be able to frame their work as helping students gain proficiency in communications skills, exact sciences, and broad development that includes physical development, working with others, the arts and humanities. Postsecondary education, rather than high school, should be the place for specialization. But, with this demarcation, there certainly must also be abundant ways for high school students to access those specialized postsecondary opportunities while still in high school, as long as they continue to also master the core requirements in the three areas mentioned above.
We could seal collaborative agreements with important feedback loops and accountability. Every school district should commit to a uniform standard for all graduates, with minimal numbers of non-completers. Postsecondary institutions should make the same commitment around the success of students completing programs that will enable student to get and keep good paying jobs. Businesses must complete the feedback and accountability loop by hiring and retaining qualified employees. This means that both education and business need to up their game. Too few students are leaving high school (even those with a diploma) meeting the kinds of standards mentioned above. If the high school completion rate is disturbing, the postsecondary completion rates are abysmal. Then we have the problem of employers typically setting initial compensation rates as low as possible, thus under incentivizing the entire system effort and undermining job retention as well as community stability.
Some critics might say that all this results in too many young people getting more education than they need and too many employees with more pay than the market would demand. However, those same critics have no such objection when considering the future for their own child or grandchild. We need a commitment to a vision of academic and economic success for every young person.
Ted, this brings up a critical issue related to what most districts claim to be about in their mission statements (some variation of “preparing lifelong learners for success in college and careers”) but that few actually deliver on for many of their students. I agree with your assertion that resolving this issue must by definition involve greater discussion, engagement, and collaboration between schools and businesses.
However, while the narrative has changed significantly in recent years, vestiges of the long-held, unwritten rule that discouraged anything more than cursory involvement of the business community in schools clearly remain (hence the “moat around the district and they won’t let us in” sentiment). I suspect that educators’ reluctance in acknowledging their responsibility for workforce preparation has at least something to do with the fact that relatively few of them have worked in other professions and thus lack the context, the experience, or the willingness/ability to effectively make (seemingly) intuitive connections between their content areas and competencies/resources in the workplace.
The “learning for learning’s sake” crowd still tends to hold a great deal of sway over professional discourse and practice. I would challenge that perspective by asking how it’s working out for us, but the answer (in the lack of college matriculation and completion rates—and the debt accrued with nothing to show for it, as well as the endemic need for remediation and the dissatisfaction of employers with their new hires’ readiness) seems self-evident.
In order to get past this intransigence and dysfunction, K-12 educators, institutions of higher education, and employers must indeed begin to engage more substantively and comprehensively in frank, open dialogue (and subsequent action) regarding the outcomes of our current model, a task made more difficult by the perception on the part of most educators that they are, as a profession, under siege, which often leads to defensiveness and hesitance to self-reflect. This is where an understanding of holism becomes important, an awareness that there should be less of a tendency to blame individuals (teachers) and instead seeks systemic solutions to what is obviously a systemic problem.
The anecdote you shared about the community college faculty’s and deans’ response about the skillsets needed by students entering their programs (communication, relationship-building, collaboration, respect for others’ differences, etc.) reminded me of an activity that I witnessed during an early meeting of Iowa’s Competency-Based Collaborative a few years back: a number of discrete stakeholder groups (content area teachers, administrators, counselors, parents, students, etc.) were asked to generate lists of competencies that were most essential to student success after graduation. What virtually every one of the groups arrived at independently was remarkable not only for its similarity across realms, but also for its resemblance to the “Universal Constructs” (creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, complex communication, adaptability, problem solving, etc.). Given this, there seems to be a strong argument for finally restructuring our learning environments to prioritize these high leverage, cross-disciplinary skills, instead of paying them lip service while treating them as an afterthought, something to be kept at the periphery. It would also seem appropriate, if we are to reinforce our newly found value for post-secondary success, to refocus our data collection efforts on longitudinal tracking of student outcomes after graduation and through college and into the workforce. This will certainly take a great deal of effort and collaboration between the respective entities involved, but it would likely provide more meaningful insights into the results of our efforts than the current overemphasis on standardized tests.