Our Education System Needs to Get an MBA : Schools and business must form a real partnership--now.

Why are America’s business leaders taking it upon themselves to advise and sometimes criticize the U.S. educational system? Perhaps because at New York Telephone, 80% of those seeking employment as operators can’t pass the entrance exam. Or because at Campbell-Methun Advertising in Chicago, only one applicant in 10 meets the minimum literacy standard for supply and mail clerks, and one in 20 meets the standard for secretarial positions.

Perhaps Motorola is wondering why only 20% of its applicants pass the entry-level employment exam, which requires seventh-grade English and fifth-grade math skills. Motorola estimates that it spends $24 million a year to teach its employees reading, writing and arithmetic. And in a recent National Alliance of Business study, two-thirds of the businesses contacted said they were not getting the kind of applicants they needed.

Stories such as these don’t make pleasant reading for people in either business or education. It’s no secret that in recent years American business has struggled to match the technological sophistication and efficiency of its foreign competition. But now it appears that the productive capacity of modern technology could go unused because American workers lack the necessary education and skills.

In short, business has learned that it must educate as well as train new workers in skills they should have learned in school.

The millions of high school dropouts in our work force today don’t have these basic skills, and the millions of dropouts who will be coming into the work force in the 1990s won’t have them either. Our national high school dropout rate stands at 25%, and among urban blacks and Latinos, the dropout rate often reaches 40% or 50%. Even more distressing, millions of high school graduates lack these basic skills as well.

And the problem is being compounded by demographic changes in our entry-level labor force. In the immediate future, an increasing percentage of our young people will be coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. More of our youth, both white and minority, will have been reared in poverty. More of them will be immigrants, unfamiliar with our language and our culture.

At the same time, as the “baby bust” generation comes of age, the overall number of youth entering the workplace will be declining, leaving business with fewer applicants to choose from.

For years, this prognosis of our future work force’s capabilities has been denounced as intolerable, yet unless we implement more effective methods of teaching the disadvantaged, we may have to learn how to tolerate the intolerable. And this could include acceptance of a stunted economy weakened by a shortage of skilled workers and acceptance of a permanent underclass, shut out of society through lack of education.

American business already feels the pinch and fears that it will get worse. Despite shortages in certain specific skill areas, today business needs trainable rather than trained workers--workers with solid basic educational skills who can be trained and retrained to keep pace with constantly evolving technology.

For too long, business and education have been relative strangers to one another. Instead, they need to become partners. This partnership must be centered on two principles--increased commitment from our schools to quality education for all our young people and increased support from business for our public schools.

Schools must learn the hard lessons of competitiveness, efficiency and productivity that business has absorbed over the past decade. Just as the mass market has disintegrated for many products in this changing society, mass-produced schooling doesn’t work anymore either. Schools have to fit students, not vice versa.

They also must increase accountability--make principals responsible for their schools and teachers responsible for their students. At the same time, school systems must make greater efforts to recruit and retain quality principals and teachers.

Special efforts will be necessary to ensure that the drive for quality education doesn’t drive out the disadvantaged. Increasingly, our economy will depend on workers coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, and reforms that don’t recognize this basic demographic fact will fail.

Business must realize that supporting the public schools is not a matter of public relations but a necessity. For years businesses have donated time and money to local schools, but at this point something more is needed. Paying for athletic uniforms, speaking in a classroom, offering plant tours or showing up for career days is simply not enough.

For starters, what is needed is a partnership in shaping policy, a collaborative effort at the national, state and local level among business, school and government officials to bring about reforms.

Beyond that, business leaders must provide school officials with management expertise in such areas as accounting, taxes, public relations and organizational development. Business also should become involved in teacher training and development by providing opportunities for school personnel to update and upgrade their skills or learn more about the labor market, businesses in the community, workplace needs and career opportunities.

Business can give the cause of educational reform the support needed to succeed. It has the knowledge of labor force demands, current technologies and modern management techniques required to reshape our schools. And business has the resources to sustain such a massive undertaking.

Bridging the gap between education and business will not be easy. Each will have to learn the other’s language. Businesses will have to realize that “quick-fix, feel-good” partnerships won’t solve fundamental problems. Schools will have to prepare for major restructuring--changes that will reshape education and radically boost its efficiency.

American education needs to be invigorated by American business. The twin forces of universal education and free enterprise have been at the heart of our country’s success as a democratic society. The continued success of our society requires a new level of partnership between these forces.