Upgrading Public Schools: It Gets Down to Business

The plant foreman sent a young worker to get a 2 1/2-foot copper tube from the supply room just around the corner. Fifteen minutes later, there was no sign of the worker.

Finally, he returned empty-handed and explained to his exasperated boss that he had found plenty of 30-inch copper tubes, but no 2 1/2-footers.

For Rutgers University sociologist Louis Ferman, who witnessed that scene, it dramatized a grim reality that employers face today: Many of the products of the public schools are ill-trained in even the basic skills and ill-equipped to function in a technologically demanding workplace.

Increasingly in recent months, corporate leaders have been trying to do something about it. Not only are they stepping up efforts to improve their local schools, they are also making it their business to lobby the federal government for a greater commitment to education, particularly of the poor, who are considered most likely to fail in school.

Owen Butler, former chairman of Procter & Gamble, said Washington has an obligation both to increase its financial support of public education and to provide national direction for local communities. The federal government, he said, must serve as both “example-setter and cheerleader.”

Butler and other corporate leaders are pressing Congress to double--to $10 billion a year--federal support of two programs for underprivileged children--Head Start for preschoolers and Chapter 1 for elementary and secondary levels. The government now spends about $1.1 billion a year on Head Start and $3.9 billion on Chapter 1.

Butler’s goal will be hard to reach at a time when Congress and the Reagan Administration have just negotiated a $30-billion deficit reduction package for the current fiscal year.

Yet even in this atmosphere of austerity, Congress is in the process of increasing the federal education budget. Rep. Bill Goodling of Pennsylvania, a Republican member of the House Education and Labor Committee, said the lobbying effort of business has made him more receptive to the idea of added spending on education.

The business community’s endorsement “has made it much easier, more (politically) acceptable for us to seek more funding,” Goodling said. “It’ll have a tremendous effect, particularly on my side of the aisle.”

Business’s widespread involvement at the national level is new. In the early 1980s, Bill Woodside, executive committee chairman of Primerica Inc. (formerly American Can Co.), looked for other New York businessmen who would join him in appealing for expanded governmental involvement in education programs for the children of the poor.

Early Lack of Interest

The phone was silent. Other business leaders told him that education was “someone else’s problem,” he recalled, and he finally “gave up in disgust.”

This year, by contrast, for the first time in the 22-year history of the Chapter 1 program, a group of businessmen organized by Woodside asked the House and Senate Education committees to commit more money to that program.

As business leaders such as Charles Marshall, vice chairman of the board of AT&T;, wryly admit, corporate America is not suddenly talking about education “simply for altruistic reasons.” Woodside described the growing interest in school problems as “enlightened self-interest.” Another corporate advocate of increased federal aid to education, who asked not to be identified, labeled the effort “damned selfishness.”

Cost Put at Billions

Business leaders are coming to view poorly educated graduates as not merely a social problem but an economic one that is chipping away at American competitiveness and costing the nation’s economy billions of dollars a year.

Dropouts are worse yet. The Committee for Economic Development, a group of nationally prominent businessmen, recently estimated that each year’s crop of high school dropouts costs the nation’s economy more than $240 billion over a lifetime in lost earnings and forgone taxes--and more still in welfare expenses and crime-control costs.

Many of today’s high school graduates are unemployable, the CED said, at the very time when an increasingly technological economy more than ever before demands workers with skills. The committee predicted “a severe employment crisis,” a shortage of as many as 23 million workers by 1990.

Business leaders, slowly realizing the costs of poorly educated workers in their own profit margins, in the last several years have stepped up education and training efforts at the local level.

‘Adopt a Class’

Programs organized by business groups, including New York City Partnership and the Boston Compact, give employers the chance to “adopt a class” of local inner-city students, provide them with incentives to do well in school and, in general, try to link the workplace and the classroom. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Adopt-a-School program has brought many local businesses to the aid of city schools.

And businesses such as New York’s Consolidated Edison and Chicago’s Motorola have taken matters into their own hands by establishing elaborate education and training programs for their workers.

What is newer is business leaders’ willingness to come to Washington to lobby for better education for all children, not just those they might one day want to hire. Businessmen are just now realizing, Butler said, that by high school, it is too late to compensate for years of inadequate education.

“These children who are dropping out of high school, they really dropped out when they were in first grade, or before they even got there,” he said.

Can’t Write a Letter

Increasingly, employers say their young job applicants cannot write a coherent letter, fill out a job application form properly or follow a blueprint or job instructions. According to a recent study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 80% of everyone ages 21 to 25 could not follow a bus schedule.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 21 million to 23 million Americans are illiterate--unable to pass a simple test of proficiency in the language. Recent studies and the observations of employers suggest that so-called functional illiteracy is even more widespread.

That the public schools are not adequately serving their students--particularly those from poor families--is in little doubt. It has been four years since the National Commission on Excellence in Education reported that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.”

John Cole of the American Federation of Teachers told a House subcommittee last month that the public schools’ approach to poor children “sets them up for failure” and ensures that many of those who finish high school will be prepared only “to sign their unemployment checks.”

‘It’s Out of Character’

No wonder that government officials are pleased with business’s unprecedented interest in federal aid to education. “It’s completely out of character,” marveled House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles), who has watched trends in federal education policy for a quarter of a century.

“What’s happening now with the business community is a growing awareness of the problems . . .” said Clennie Murphy, who directs the national Head Start program. “The potential for that to have some real effect on public policy is there now as it never has been in the past.”

Congress is already treating education more kindly than in recent years.

Although Chapter 1, for the schools of disadvantaged children, now serves about 9% fewer students than in 1980, the House has voted a 16% increase in the program’s authorization for next year, and the Senate has approved a 15% boost. Likewise, Head Start would receive an increase of more than 11% from both bills.

Outcome Uncertain

Congress ultimately could decide to appropriate substantially less than the authorized amounts, especially if the programs become caught up in the drive to slash the deficit. But congressional aides predict that Chapter 1 will emerge with at least a 10% increase and Head Start with at least 5%.

Despite this year’s progress, Woodside--mindful of his own struggle to bring the issue home to his fellow businessmen--remains “a bit cynical” about the long-term prospects.

“Sure, the noise level has risen so much now the crisis is apparent for everyone to see,” Woodside said. “But I’m worried about what happens when the next hot issue comes up and this one starts to fade. What’s going to happen to the kids tomorrow?”