Booming Industry : Workers Get New Look at Three R’s

Ereatha Clayborn, 35, a Blue Cross service representative, a Bible instructor at her church and a former high school biology teacher, just spent a week studying how to write and speak in her native tongue--English.

Glenda Saffold, 41, a cutter-grinder at a Ford Motor Co. plant in Rawsonville, Mich., recently gave up her 30-minute lunch breaks to relearn high school mathematics--something she last studied a quarter of a century ago.

USX Corp. accountant Edward C. Ecker, 23, took a weeklong class in Pittsburgh to learn how to write better reports. He attended, at his employer’s expense--less than two years after his university graduation.

Demanded by Employers

Clayborn, Saffold and Ecker belong to a growing new class of American workers who take part in remedial education classes sponsored by and paid for by their employers, classes that companies increasingly demand that their employees attend.

“Education and training within large, private-sector corporations of the United States has become a booming industry,” educator Nell P. Eurich says in a study of corporate classrooms published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

“Remedial training in the workplace is now part of the cost of doing business in this country,” Xerox Chairman and Chief Executive David T. Kearns says. “It’s a cost I resent, because when business has to teach basic skills, we’re doing the school’s product recall work for them.”

‘Why I’m Successful’

“Big business has to make up for what the public schools don’t give them. That is precisely why I’m successful,” says consultant Zacharias Rosner, founder of The Grammar Group, a Chicago-based firm whose only “product” is teaching the basics of English to corporate employees, many of whom have university degrees.

An estimated 400 of the nation’s 1,000 largest corporations now provide “some kind of formal instruction they feel should have been provided in schools,” says Anthony P. Carnevalli, chief economist and vice president of the Washington-based American Society for Training and Development. The Carnegie Foundation’s Eurich believes the number may be even higher. She estimates that 75% of the country’s big corporations “are offering basic literacy courses.”

These companies spend, depending on who’s estimating, between $300 million and $600 million annually to school workers in the basic three “R’s” of reading, writing and arithmetic. It is a cost that either must be deducted from profits or passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services.

“Before 1980 companies were not even willing to discuss compensatory training. They felt it was the responsibility of the public schools,” says Edward E. Gordon, president of Imperial Corporate Training in Chicago.

But times have changed. Today, “American corporations are finding the need to set up schools within their companies,” says Gordon, whose own firm teaches classes at the workplace of its corporate clients in everything from simple grammar and spelling to writing and foreign languages.

Corporations are also retraining and re-educating older workers who have been caught by changing requirements, who now need basics to learn advanced skills necessary in a more technologically sophisticated workplace.

“There are people who’ve done good work but the rules are changing,” says Linda Stoker, director of technology readiness programs for Polaroid Corp. “Does it make sense to put them out on the streets? No. It makes sense to re-educate them.”

Resentful at First

“At first I was offended when they asked me to go,” says Clayborn, the Illinois Blue Cross service representative who took a company-sponsored English course. “After all I took and passed a test before I was promoted to this position. At first I got the impression that this was something offensive. But I think the course was excellent. I learned concepts I heard before but that didn’t make sense. I learned most of this stuff once but it didn’t stick with me.”

Major unions, particularly the United Auto Workers, are also sponsoring classes for both active and dislocated workers.

Philip O. Mastin, a spokesman for the nonprofit United Auto Workers-General Motors Human Resource Center, explains that not all of the need to learn now can be laid to a failure of the school system.

“It’s not that they never had the skill,” he says. “It’s often that they haven’t used it . . . that they completed high school 10 or more years ago and haven’t used their math or reading for years so they require remediation.”

While the cost of basic education is only a fraction of the $30 billion or more spent on training by the leading companies that make up Fortune magazine’s “Fortune 1,000,” the cost does appear to reflect a weakness in the U.S. work force.

Skills ‘Pretty Bad’

“It’s a common complaint (of employers) that the basic skills of their employees are really pretty bad,” says Carnevalli, who conducts periodic surveys of major corporations to determine their involvement in educational programs.

“Despite the fact that we’re talking about college graduates, a lot of people don’t have the fundamentals,” says Gerry Bushyeager, coordinator for USX Corp.’s audit division, which produces up to 275 reports a year.

“From an auditing point of view, the skill individuals coming out of college need most is writing,” says Bill Roadfeldt, a marketing accountant with Marathon Oil Co. and former college professor. “They are well-grounded in auditing and accounting skills but their writing and verbal skills are very often not up to par.”

“I felt I had a good command of the English language,” says Ecker, the USX auditor who took the report-writing course. “I think I have a better command now. There were things (in class) that I learned in school but forgot. There were other things that I may have never learned at all. Simple things like when to use ‘lie’ and when to use ‘lay.’ ”

An estimated 400 business sites have facilities that range from a single dedicated room to campus-like clusters of buildings set aside for various training and education purposes.

Chevron’s Learning Center

California’s Chevron Corp., for example, operates a learning center for self-directed study in San Francisco. The center, within a building that houses Chevron offices, includes 18 study carrels, a reference library, two rooms for training sessions and another with computer terminals. A more elaborate facility yet is Western Electric’s 300-acre corporate education campus in Princeton, N.J.

Glenda Saffold, who took refresher courses in arithmetic before going on to study more advanced mathematics, used a “learning center”--a factory room dedicated for training--located in the Ford factory where she works on the production line. Her classes were sponsored both by Ford and the United Auto Workers who cooperate in educational programs, something they first incorporated in their 1982 labor contract.

Other settings are even more informal, sometimes a lunchroom or a hotel meeting room, the preference of circuit-riding English teacher Zacharias Rosner, who has built a booming business teaching corporate employees the fundamentals of their native tongue.

“I’ve trained everybody from receptionists to their chief executive officers,” boasts Rosner, who describes himself as a reformed persnickety, insufferable high school English teacher.

Avoids ‘Dirty Words’

Rosner, who counts dozens of major corporations among his clients, teaches weeklong seminars without ever using any of what he calls “the dirty words”--that is, the names of the parts of speech--and without repeating any of the tedious rules one might expect to hear from an English teacher.

“One can teach children grammar by using all the terminology if one is really good at it and really loves it and can make a game of it,” Rosner says. “But one can no longer teach adults who have their own personal prejudice against terminology. Correct usage doesn’t necessarily come from heavy duty grammar. It comes from good example. I only teach grammatical usage. I don’t teach grammatical rules.”

“People absolutely love his course,” says Ina Kleckner, manager of the subscriber services division of Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Illinois and the person responsible for sending 500 employees through his program. “It’s an ideal learning environment for adults. You don’t feel ashamed or stupid. There’s no pressure put on you. He tells silly jokes and entertains. It’s not like sitting in high school English class.”

Although Rosner will not disclose how big his business is, the former schoolteacher now lives in an apartment in a wealthy Chicago neighborhood, wears well-tailored suits and bundles up against the Windy City’s cold in a full-length mink overcoat with earmuffs to match.

The success of remedial training, however, is best seen in those who have already experienced it.

Shows ‘Increased Confidence’

“I talk to doctors and pharmacists and other health providers,” says Clayborn, the Blue Cross service representative, whose recent course was taught by Rosner, “and now I do it with increased confidence.”

Ford Motor Co.’s Saffold says that when she goes home at night now, “I want to work on my math rather than watch television.” She has moved beyond her basic math course and is now taking an advanced class at Washtenaw Community College in suburban Detroit.

“My initial reaction was I had enough of this in high school or even college,” says Ecker of USX. “I was wrong.”