Drive Afoot to Ensure Students Are Prepared to Enter Work Force
The world of business need look no further than the U.S. Army to understand that the better employees can read, the more productive their work will be.
“The Army took 400 mechanics and asked them to fix X number of cars,” Thomas Sticht, a national expert on adult literacy from El Cajon, told a group of 100 San Diego business leaders Wednesday at a seminar to explore ways that schools and industry can improve academic preparation for employment.
“Some used the manuals that were available--manuals written for the 12th-grade to 16th-grade literacy levels--and they were routinely 10%-15% more productive, they did the job correctly,” contrasted with those who made repairs only on the basis of experience or self-taught methods, Sticht said. The data comes from research provided by the Department of Defense as part of a statewide report on literacy in the workplace that Sticht helped prepare.
The conclusion is that “the more literate a person, the better (he or she will perform) in all jobs” from military police to cook to positions throughout civilian business and industry, Sticht said. He is pushing for a nationwide effort to set uniform academic standards for students to meet before being placed in the world of work.
The push began in a major way last year with publication of a national report, “America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!” which argued that the nation’s future economic competitiveness requires schools to prepare students not bound for college much better than they do now.
Businesses increasingly complain that graduates have poor academic and work-ethic preparation, because, in the view of Marc Tucker, who wrote the report, “students who are not planning to attend college have no incentive today to study hard.”
Tucker, spoke to an afternoon session of San Diego Unified School District teachers and administrators Wednesday on how to plan curricula and teaching methods to begin putting flesh on the report’s recommendations.
The report strongly suggests that all students achieve a Certificate of Initial Mastery by age 16 or as soon as possible thereafter that would be based on meeting common academic standards, to be measured through hands-on exams and not through multiple-choice pen-and-paper tests. It also says that businesses should recognize the certificate and encourage workers, through higher salaries or other incentives, to pursue additional training.
Tucker, in his remarks to San Diego teachers, emphasized that such a certificate should not be used to “sift and sort” students into college-preparatory or non-college tracks similar to the way European countries direct students during their junior-high years into academic or vocational education schools.
That tracking bothers people like San Diego city Schools Supt. Tom Payzant and South Bay Union District Supt. Phil Grignon, who caution that there cannot be one level of literacy for students going to college and a second, lower level for those who enter the work force immediately after high-school graduation.
“Business cannot look for the quick fix, the quarterly report, but rather must plan long-term in investing in schools,” said Grignon, arguing that schools must train students to think creatively, to learn how to work with people and to solve problems, rather than learn specific short-term skills applicable only to a particular job or type of employment.
Payzant defended his district’s new common-core curriculum, which requires all students to master math, science, English and other academic courses in order to graduate.
“I don’t think we dilute (requirements) for students not considering college,” he said, although the material might need to be taught a different way.
Payzant wants his teachers to draw up pilot projects to mesh traditional vocational education teaching with core academic subjects. For example, science could be taught simultaneously with courses on electricity or computers.
