HELP WANTED–Millions of young people, equipped with problem-solving skills and the ability to learn, needed for entry-level jobs in the American economy. Others need not apply.
THE PROBLEM is, the companies that place the want ads say they are having a hard time finding enough workers with the type of skills needed for today`s highly automated offices and factories.
Few problems have the potential of being more damaging to the nation`s prosperity. Without the workers to remain technologically competitive, businesses can wither in the marketplace and erode job opportunities. Without the skills to remain competitive as jobs require ever more skills, workers can wither in the work place and watch their incomes and job security erode.
In the worst case, the overall American economy will wither in the face of global competition and lose out to countries whose young people come equipped with problem-solving skills and the ability to learn.
As the problem has come into clearer focus in recent years, public schools have taken on an importance far beyond their already fundamental role as producers of the informed electorate that makes our democracy possible and as the equalizer that, at least in theory, gives everybody a shot at the American dream.
In short, the schools have come to be seen as a crucial, and weak, link in the economy, much as they were seen as a weak link in our national defense after the Soviet Union put the first Sputnik in orbit in 1957.
”This time, it was the Japanese, and they put a Toyota in orbit,” said Steven Leinwand, a mathematics consultant to the Connecticut Department of Education.
However much truth there is in this comparison, there was no single event like Sputnik that mesmerized the nation this time. But an examination of public opinion data and dozens of interviews with business, government and political leaders shows that the perception of schools` importance has been growing since well before the federal report ”A Nation at Risk” focused interest two years ago by asserting that the nation was endangered by ”a rising tide of mediocrity” washing over public schools.
The combined concerns of business interests and the voting public, especially parents of children who will be the workers of the future, have grown to become a political force of such sweeping power that it has legislatures throughout the country, including Illinois`, rushing to enact programs aimed at ensuring that students learn more–even at the cost of raising taxes.
But will all this activity result in schools that teach children better, or reduce the perceived risk to the economy by turning out the kind of employees that business needs? Will ”the school reform movement,” as education professionals call it, be more than a passing fancy of a fickle electorate?
California is in the forefront of states that have raised taxes for school improvements. It seems incongruous that this could be the same state that only seven years ago gave birth to the great taxpayer revolt by passing Proposition 13, which limited the property taxes that are so important to the financial health of schools.
That`s how quickly the public can change its mind, and many sophisticated observers think that the public`s interest in reforming schools could peak as quickly as the taxpayer revolt did.
Michael Kirst, professor of education at Stanford University, wonders whether the education reform movement might parallel the trajectory of the environmental movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
If so, he said, we now are in a stage comparable to the period after Earth Day riveted the public`s attention: Government is taking quick action to respond to the new and heartfelt interest of voters.
But still to come is the crucial phase in which people realize how difficult it is to make significant changes in a big institution, and then they lose interest and go on to another issue.
”Will it last?” Kirst asked rhetorically. ”It`s too soon to say. If the public sees progress, real progress in the classroom, it has a chance.”
Willis Hawley, dean of Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: ”A lot of what we are doing is what the political scientists call symbolic politics. There is a lot of talk, but if you look at the legislation, with a few exceptions you`re getting regulatory laws rather than developmental laws.
”The question is whether the country understands the problems in the schools well enough to formulate a comprehensive response, or whether we will come up with a halfway response that will fail in light of the expectations built up by the school reform movement, and the public will then blame the schools.”
But it is not only public sentiment that determines political trends.
Business interests have the economic and political clout to exert power over government that is way out of proportion to the number of business people who vote. Otherwise, there would be no campaign to simplify the federal tax code and make it fairer by ridding it of the loopholes that favor various businesses.
Now national, state and local business groups seem to have embraced improving the schools as crucial to the supply of the kind of workers needed to make profits.
Historically, government policies have tended to reflect business` labor needs, starting with slavery in the plantation South. Starting before the Civil War, a seemingly endless supply of European immigrants was welcomed as inexpensive labor to fuel American industrial expansion. In the 1920s, when there was an adequate supply of labor, immigration quotas were imposed; in World War II, with so many men in the Army, Congress approved the importation of farm laborers from Mexico.
As the economy`s labor needs continue their inexorable evolution, some experts think that business will use its political might to make sure that the schools will turn out enough workers with the right skills, even if public support for improving schools falters.
If schools fail to improve to produce the kind of work force that business needs, business will train employees themselves, said Robert Ady of Fantus Co., a Chicago consulting firm that helps companies choose the best community for a new plant or office.
”One way or another, it will get done,” Ady said. ”It has to.”
Others are less sure about business` resolve in the face of other lures. In Illinois, Michael Thom of the Civic Federation of Chicago, a nonpartisan tax research organization, pointed out that Gov. James Thompson`s ”Build Illinois” construction program and the proposed 1992 World`s Fair could compete with education improvement for new state revenue in coming years.
”Business may just turn out to be more interested in the fair,” Thom said.
The Saturn plant: The words send shivers down spines at chambers of commerce from coast to coast.
It is the economic development plum of the `80s. General Motors Corp. is going to start making a new kind of car called the Saturn, and it will be assembled in an new plant that will cost $3.5 billion to build and employ 6,000 people and pump hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the economy of the lucky community that the company picks as its site.
Illinois and more than 30 other states have romanced GM in efforts to get the plant. On the fateful day the decision is announced in a few weeks, the winning community will have won in large measure because of its schools, according to Stan Hall, a GM spokesman.
First, he said, the community GM selects must have primary and secondary schools capable of providing a good education for GM employees who would be transferred to the new plant, which will make extensive use of robots, and good enough to provide workers ”with an inquiring mind and an ability to learn.”
Second, he said, is the availability of good training programs for new employees; GM is expecting more than 2 million hours of employee training before the highly automated plant opens.
Third, there should be a university or universities nearby with strong graduate schools in engineering, electronics and robotics.
The Saturn plant represents the decade`s most dramatic possibility for economic development so far, but the hope of attracting new jobs even in much smaller quantities is enough to inspire local business people to thump the tub and twist arms to get better schools. Communities that improve them enough will be competitive, the thinking goes, and those that don`t will lose out on providing good new jobs for their children and growing prosperity for their businesses.
”The communities that respond to this force will be the success stories of the future,” Ady said.
”Without a good delivery system for education, we`re up the creek,”
said Bob Beckwith, manager of the education department of the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce.
Education`s importance in selecting sites has been growing for five to seven years, Ady said, and he predicted it will continue. He said this was partly explained by the declining importance of transportation, utility and labor costs as regional differences narrow. But the growth of automation is at least as powerful a factor.
”Equipment in the new plants is very valuable,” he said, ”and it has to be monitored by people with secure thought processes.”
Comparing the work places of today with those of five to seven years ago brings into focus the need for workers with secure thought processes.
Then, the typical new light-manufacturing plant had 400 to 500 workers and represented an investment of $10 million to $20 million, according to Ady. Today, the newer version of that plant has only 100 to 200 workers and represents an investment of $20 million to $40 million. The price tag difference largely represents the cost of automation, which reduces the number of workers, particularly unskilled workers.
In the new plant of five to seven years ago, 60 percent of the workers were unskilled, 30 percent were semi-skilled and 10 percent were skilled, Ady estimated. In today`s new plant, the mix has shifted to only 20 percent unskilled and 50 percent semi-skilled and 30 percent skilled. The new plants are not typical of manufacturing as a whole, Ady said, but are a harbinger of the work place to come.
But look to the larger scale. Sandra Kessler of the Committee for Economic Development, a nonprofit group of 225 leaders from education and major corporations, tells about the experience of a huge consumer products company.
”It used to be that a guy would come in, learn a set of skills and use it all his life,” she said. ”But now, as production techniques get more sophisticated, the company spends $3,000 to $5,000 a year per production employee for continuous retraining.
”This has very much changed the kind of people they hire,” Kessler said. ”They have to be very adaptable.”
Kessler`s organization recently surveyed Fortune 500 companies and 650 small businesses in a study on business and the public schools.
”The essence is that specific skills are not nearly as important as general literacy and math skills and good work attitudes,” Kessler said of the study, which is to be released in the fall.
”This is the case at the entry levels. To progress, the most important skills are problem solving and the ability to learn how to learn.
”The companies surveyed find these in very short supply.”
As an early high-tech company, IBM has had decades of the kind of experience that other companies are just encountering. ”Flexible and eager to learn” is the way a spokesman characterizes the kind of employee IBM is looking for. It is looking for a new generation of Wayne Hazelwoods.
Hazelwood, of Lexington, Ky., knows from his long experience with IBM what new workers of all kinds can look forward to in their careers.
In recent weeks, Hazelwood`s smiling face has peered out from under his full head of curls at millions of readers of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and even the Economist. What got him there is under his curls: the kind of mind that has demonstrated an ability to keep learning new jobs as the work place evolves.
Three times since he joined the company as a typewriter assembler 21 years ago, Hazelwood`s job has been made obsolete by the march of technology, and three times he has successfully undergone retraining for new ones. IBM paid tens of thousands of dollars to buy four-page image-building ads to tell about him, and to let the public know about its experience with retraining.
Did it ever occur to Hazelwood when he began putting typewriters together that he would come to exemplify the trend in dealing with career dislocations and become a celebrity of sorts because of it?
”It never crossed my mind,” he said with a chuckle.
Secretary of Education William Bennett, 41, a former professor of law and philosophy, became a parent for the first time only a year ago. Though he`ll have to wait to get first-hand experience as the parent of a school-aged child, he already understands why parents care about education.
”When people talk about the improvement of their schools,” he said,
”they are talking about things other than, and more than, and deeper than, improving one`s economic standards.
”When people think about their schools, they think about their kids getting better–getting better speaking and writing and expressing themselves in all those ways, and getting better as young human beings, behaving better toward their brothers and sisters, acting like they`re growing up
intellectually and morally.”
Public opinion about the need to improve education reached its low point in 1977. Since then, the proportion of people who say too little is being spent on improving the nation`s educational system has increased to 64.6 percent from 49.5 percent. Not surprisingly, parents led the way.
These findings are from the General Social Surveys of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which also reports that respondents to its annual polls have moved education up to their No. 3 concern after crime and drugs. Before 1983, health was ahead of education in the rankings, and in parts of the 1960s and 70s, so was the environment.
This surge in public sentiment seems all the more dramatic against the backdrop of demographic changes.
”The number of all kinds of households with no children went from 34.6 million in 1970 to 53.2 million in 1983, or from 55 percent to 63 percent,”
said C. Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Education Information in Washington. ”In other words, only 27 percent of the households in the nation now have their own children.”
The children of the postwar baby boom generation are becoming of school age now, however, and the number of parents with children in school should increase for several years. These new parents could be a force to strengthen public opinion in favor of the schools, or at least temper a decline.
Even as a waning part of the population, parents have led the wave of public support for the schools. In a special analysis of its polling data done for this article, the opinion research center found a much greater increase in support for education spending among parents of school-aged children than among nonparents and people whose children were out of school.
Feistritzer identified three causes.
”First is guilt,” she said. ”We have a lot more working parents than we did before. Two-thirds of children going to school today live in households with one parent who works or two parents who both work. People are willing to spend some more money on the schools to offset this (absence of parents from the home).”
Also, parents are better educated than ever before and want more from the schools for their children. Further, she said, interest is fueled by publicity about students who graduate from high school as functional illiterates, about the government`s ”A Nation at Risk” report and concerns about the economy.
Interest appears to be strong among parents across the socioeconomic spectrum.
Parents who said they had not voted in the previous presidential election supported education spending even more than parents who said they had voted. Tom Smith, a senior study director at the opinion research center, interpreted that finding by pointing out that many nonvoters are poor and that the children of the poor tend to go to the worst schools, so their parents see greater need for school improvement.
The schools represent the only hope that many poor people have for getting their children on a path out of poverty, but the statistics on dropouts, illiteracy, minority youth unemployment and delinquency are a sad litany on how hollow their hopes often are.
As industry provides fewer jobs for unskilled people and challenges the schools to provide an adaptable work force, the poor and minority children who already supply such a large part of the unemployed are making up an ever larger percentage of students.
For many of the experts interviewed, this trend raises troubling questions.
”Forty-five percent of black kids are born into poverty,” said Hawley, the Vanderbilt education dean, ”and the schools are becoming blacker every year. To what extent are we going to address the needs of children in poverty situations?”
To ignore that question, Feistritzer said, ”is to reject the harsh reality and to distort the conditions under which a solution for the ills of the nation`s public schools can be found.”
Several experts interviewed pointed out that there is no guarantee that the economy`s demands for adaptable workers will bring improvement to all schools equally, much less make up for the existing poor quality of so many schools that serve the children of the poor.
”Though we might wish it otherwise and might pledge to alter it,”
Feistritzer said in a report her organization issued in February, ”in our society success begets success and failure is usually the parent to failure.” But Bennett is more sanguine. The poor, the education secretary said, have the most to gain from improvements in the schools.
Here, drawn from surveys by several education groups, is the school improvement score card so far:
— More than 40 states have increased the number of academic courses required for high school graduation. About half that number have increased the amount of time students spend in classes.
— Twenty states require seniors to pass exit tests before they graduate. — At least a dozen states have adopted merit pay or career ladder plans for teachers.
— More than half the states have increased teacher pay or are considering it.
— More than 35 states have adopted or are considering financial aid plans to attract bright students to the teaching profession. More than half the states have toughened the requirements for certifying teachers.
— Last year, the median increase in education spending in the 50 states and the District of Columbia was about 10 percent, far above the inflation rate.
— Several states, most notably Texas and California, have approved new taxes or tax increases and earmarked the revenue for schools.
In Illinois, the House and Senate are debating packages of bills that would provide all-day kindergarten, prekindergarten classes for children considered educationally at risk, competency testing for beginning teachers and proficiency exams for students in reading, writing and math.
How much the state will pay for all this, plus a raise in the minimum pay for teachers, has not been decided, but estimates start at $200 million. An unknown in the equation is what impact, if any, President Reagan`s proposed overhaul of the federal tax code will have on finances in Illinois.
Many education experts interviewed say that as much as has happened already, significant and enduring school improvement will require a lot more. There is a lot to overcome. Curriculums must be improved, and that takes time. For new curriculums to be effective, teachers must be retrained to use them, and that takes money. A looming shortage of teachers threatens to undermine the whole effort.
”Who will teach?” Hawley asked.
”It remains to be seen how all this will be worked out.”
