It’s Schools’, Not Business’, Job to Offer Basic Education
The American work force is in grave jeopardy, and so is our economic survival. As a businessman and as a citizen, that scares me. It should scare everybody else in this country, too.
American business will have to hire more than a million new service and production workers a year who can’t read, write or count. Teaching them how, and absorbing the lost productivity while they are learning, will cost industry $25 billion a year, and nobody seems to know how long such remedial training will be necessary.
Three out of four major corporations already are giving new workers basic reading, writing and arithmetic courses, which big business clearly has the resources to do. Corporate training is bigger than our entire elementary, secondary and higher education system put together. Corporations already spend $210 billion a year on training--at Xerox we’ll spend $210 million in 1986 alone.
It is a terrible admission, but $25 billion a year for remedial training has become a necessary added cost of doing business. It is a cost that I resent, because when business does remedial teaching we are doing the schools’ product-recall work for them.
Every year high schools across the country graduate 700,000 functionally illiterate young people--and another 700,000 drop out every year. In 16 states dropout rates range from 26% to 42%, and most big cities are at the high end of that.
Last year the Los Angeles unified school district’s Dropout Prevention/Recovery Task Force did a study on the attrition rate. That’s the difference between the number of 10th-graders in one year and the number of 12th-graders two years later. The study found an attrition rate of more than 60% in schools such as Belmont, Jefferson and Los Angeles High. Ten high schools had attrition rates as high as 50%. All those youngsters don’t drop out, of course. Some move to other schools, some go on to get a high-school-equivalency diploma. But the feeling is that the majority are dropouts.
What’s worse, most of those who do stay in school don’t learn enough to meet even minimum academic standards. A study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only two out of five students across the country could draw correct inferences from a set of facts. Only one out of seven could write a good essay.
The problem cuts across the board from poor, minority kids in inner-city schools to affluent white kids in suburban schools. In 1972, 64,000 young people had SAT scores of 650 or higher. In 1982, that figure dropped by more than half to only 29,000. In math scores, the decline was 23% for the same group. We’ve made some progress in student performance and dropout rates over the last three years, but it’s not enough--not by a long shot.
Even without the high cost of remedial training, industry’s teaching expenses will keep growing, because we are entering an era of lifelong learning that merges work and education. The office, not the factory, is the center of our working lives. Information will provide the competitive edge. The backbone of the new American work force will be people who deal mainly with the formation and refinement of ideas. Most jobs will be restructured at least once every seven years. By 1990 three out of four jobs will require some education or technical training after high school.
The pace of technological change today demands an educated work force. The global economy is a reality. We cannot compete successfully unless we have a competitive work force--certainly not against the Japanese, who have the world’s best-educated work force; 95% graduate from a high-school program that is equal to two years of college in this country.
Clearly, we have to rethink our education system from the ground up. Reform and reorganization are long-term goals that could take an entire generation to achieve. I don’t think that we have that much time. Business has the biggest and most efficient training system in the world already in place, and we can use it to help bridge the gap.
In the long run, however, business cannot--and should not--provide basic education for its employees. That task belongs to the schools, and we’ve got to help make them do it and do it well. We have no choice, because the quality of our work force is a survival issue for America.
