The Nation’s Educational Crisis Is Also a Business Crisis

Is a dumb American work force one of the causes of the trade deficit?

U.S. business and political leaders suggest that it is. “In many of our American primary and secondary schools the students just aren’t keeping up with their counterparts abroad,” said Allen Jacobson, chairman of 3M Co., in a recent speech. “We can’t have a world-class economy with second-class schools,” President Bush told the Business Roundtable, a conference of the nation’s largest firms.

And foreigners don’t mince words. A senior director of Matsushita recently said he could make better-quality, lower-cost television sets in Japan than at Matsushita’s plant in Illinois because “the high school graduates I hire in Japan are better prepared than the high school graduates I can hire in the United States.”

But whatever business people say today has all been said before--memorably in the 1983 report of the National Commission on Education titled “A Nation at Risk,” which said U.S. education was sinking in a “tide of mediocrity.” The report prompted calls for educational reform in all the 50 states.

But almost seven years later, “there has been little progress,” said Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos two weeks ago. “The reading and writing skills of American students remain dreadfully inadequate.”

Since 1980, reading proficiency for 17-year-olds is up slightly but reading ability of 9- and 13-year-olds is down. One-third or more of all students in California, New York, Texas and Florida fail to finish high school.

Graduation rates are somewhat better in the Midwest--75% graduate in Illinois, 83% in Ohio, 85% in Wisconsin and a national high of 91% in Minnesota. But it all seems a low return on the massive $310 billion of federal, state and local expenditure on education--$185 billion of it on primary and secondary schooling.

The education problem is not new, of course. But it has become acute today because changes in the workplace have increased job requirements.

Technology in the 1980s automated away the lower-skilled jobs, says Thomas Bailey of Columbia University, who has written a study of changing work. Jobs such as basic teller functions in banks, order taking and bookkeeping (replaced by phone recording systems and accounting software) and even loading and unloading of goods at textile factories have been eliminated. That’s why there are fewer and fewer jobs these days for high school dropouts.

But, conversely, there are more and more jobs for educated people. Work today demands higher skills, although not especially technical skills--word processors and computers make tasks easier not harder. The great demand is that workers be articulate, capable of interacting with customers and each other. “Many middle-level jobs that once demanded only order taking and filling out forms now call for someone to serve the customers and solve problems,” says Bailey.

It’s the same in the factory as in the office. The old factory assembly line was forgiving of inarticulate workers--Henry Ford designed it so that unskilled immigrants could make cars, after all.

But today’s manufacturing environment is “very competitive and demanding,” says Russell Rumberger of UC Santa Barbara, who with Henry Levin of Stanford has studied production at four Silicon Valley firms. They found that what was needed was not so much traditional reading and arithmetic, says Rumberger, “but oral literacy--the ability to communicate, to work in teams and to shift rapidly as the work changed.”

Everything seems to ensure frustration. Employers demand more articulate workers; the schools deliver fewer. Even the best American schools may not be preparing students to “work in teams.” And what is now a problem will become a crisis in the 1990s when there will be fewer young people entering the labor force. Employers will scramble for good workers, and schools that leave 30% of their students unfit to graduate will be even less tolerable.

What will happen? Change will happen, probably involving competition for the public school system. The 50 state governors are already discussing education vouchers that would allow parents to choose their children’s schools. And business people in major cities are contributing to parochial and other alternative schools, trying to ensure a future supply of employees.

Yes, but who says that competition will work in education? Japan and Minnesota say so. “In Japan, schools are graded by the performance of their students on university entrance exams,” writes management expert Peter F. Drucker in “The New Realities,” his latest book. “The teachers of high-ranking schools are recognized, promoted and paid accordingly.”

In Minnesota--which has the nation’s highest graduation rate--parents can now place their children in any school in the state--with state funds reimbursing school districts for admitting outsiders.

A point to keep in mind: It was global competition that forced U.S. business to change the workplace in the 1980s. And it will be competition that changes the schoolroom in the 1990s.