Last year Gary Tooker, president of Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc., announced, ”We are finding it increasingly difficult to find the types of new employees we need in order to continue producing the very best products and services.”
In a letter that went to the home of every Motorola employee in America, Tooker went on, ”This difficulty is due in major part to the failure of the kindergarten-through-12th grade education system in developing America`s young people to meet the needs of the new workplace.”
Test scores are dropping and school budgets are being slashed. The education system is shouldering burdens carried by church and family for most of this century. It`s an Industrial Revolution design trying to serve a high- tech Information Age.
Throughout the country, America`s businesses are stepping in to ease the burden-and what`s taking place in Du Page County`s East-West Corporate Corridor is very dynamic.
Naperville Community Unit School District 203`s partnerships fill 17 pages, from agribusinesses that sponsor summer programs to 10 Chicago Motor Club scholarships worth $7,000 a piece.
Fermilab, often through its distinguished Friends of Fermilab organization, offers about 50 programs at precollege level for both teachers and students in partnerships, from re-creating the prairie for grades 3 through 5 to summer institutes for science and mathematics teachers.
The College of Du Page, Glen Ellyn, has joined with the Association for Women in Science to establish a mentor program as well as speaker programs that bring distinguished women scientists to campus.
Ken Packer, president and CEO of Packer Engineering, Naperville, and president of the East-West Corporate Corridor Association, traces the area`s commitment to education to its failed attempt in 1988 to get the
Supercollider, a state-of-the-art atom smasher.
”We found that we were lacking a major research university, which would raise the level of education throughout the area,” Packer said.
The fallout has been a post-Ph.D. institution without walls and an extremely strong commitment to education among the businesses along Interstate Highway 88.
Packer Engineering, one of the area`s oldest residents, began its engineering apprenticeship program about 20 years ago.
”You learn as much from your fingertips as you do from your brain,”
said Packer.
What separates the East-West Corridor from other places, in addition to the strength of its commitment, is its emphasis on math and science and its use of the school-business partnership as only one tool of many.
Sophisticated associations have sprung up, which get people talking at high levels and can lead to grassroots change.
”For many parts of the country, the interest in school reform spawned by the national studies in the mid-80s was short lived,” writing for a brochure on the corridor partnership, Gary Jewel, chairman of the board of the Corridor Partnership for Excellence in Education (CPEE) and superintendent of West Aurora School District 129.
”Something unique, however, has occurred in our region of Illinois. That something is the emergence of a strong collaborative partnership among the business, education and governmental interests in the region.”
Headquartered in Aurora, the CPEE, whose members represent business, educators and community organizations, focuses on elementary and secondary education. Among its programs is the award-winning ”Interconnections `90s:
Scientific and Applied Technology Literacy and the Corporate Workplace,”
organized in conjunction with Waubonsee Community College, Sugar Grove, and the Valley Industrial Association.
”Interconnections” is an annual six-day summer workshop for teams of educators to meet with executives from such corporations as Amoco, Naperville; Geo. J. Ball Inc., West Chicago; Caterpillar, Peoria; and Furnas Electric Co., Batavia.
At the other end of the spectrum, programs such as ”Afternoon Scholars,” funded by Illinois Bell, give elementary school kids hands-on activities in science, math and technology.
”Our children will do the work of the future,” said Bonnie Wood, executive director of the Lombard-based EWCCA, which counts more than 125 corporations, educators and other organizations in its membership.
Programs such as EWCCA`s Minority Career Awareness Conference ”bring the student together with the corporations that are in the corridor and shows the student that there are opportunities outside the city of Chicago,” said coordinator Jerry Payton of Commonwealth Edison`s management development support services.
Chicago-based Arthur Andersen, which has its worldwide training facility in St. Charles, and Motorola have each partnered with an entire school district to make fundamental changes, from curriculum to teaching to assessment.
In St. Charles, Unit School District 303 and Arthur Andersen are working together to implement the concept of cooperative learning.
”No longer is the teacher the sage on the stage, but working hand-in-hand with the students,” said Kurt Anderson, principal of Thompson Junior High School, the only school implementing the concept building-wide.
St. Charles was a logical choice for Arthur Andersen, which approached the district in 1990; cooperative learning had been the district`s No. 1 staff development goal since 1989. On top of that, says Arthur Andersen`s Mort Egol, ”they were there in the proximity of all the knowledge and skills in our
(worldwide training) center” in St. Charles.
Simply walking down the halls at Thompson is atypical: busy voices pour out open classroom doors.
”I feel like I should apologize. It`s a little bit quiet today, believe it or not,” says Anderson as he leads a visitor on a tour of the building and classrooms.
The familiar rows of desks with teacher at chalkboard are few and far between. Children work together around clusters of desks and the teacher consults with them.
”In real life, talking to your neighbor is problem-solving, but in schools it`s traditionally been viewed as cheating,” said Anderson.
In Kathy Krug`s English class, students got so involved in reading ”The Phantom Toll Booth,” they decided to put it on stage.
”They own it, though I did set some conditions,” said Krug.
During the course of the partnership, which has largely involved providing people rather than direct financial support, ”Arthur Andersen has learned what does and doesn`t work in a school culture and how a school culture is different from a corporate culture,” said Sandra Wright, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for St. Charles Unit School District 303.
By the same token, the impact on the staff and administration has also been profound.
”We`ve done a lot more thinking about `Why are we doing this? On what philosophy are we basing these decisions?` ”It`s soul searching,” Wright said.
”Every company has some section of their organizational chart labeled R& D (research and development). In education it`s looked at as a frill,”
said Anderson. ”When budgets are cut, it`s the first to go. We`ve been able to use Arthur Andersen in an R&D way educators don`t usually get to.”
