Today’s Agenda

Fact: Unemployment rates for job-seekers in their teens and early 20s are formidable--for some sectors of this group, reaching nearly 50%. Fact: Entry-level jobs that carry promise of advancement increasingly require more brainpower than brawn. Better education would appear to be the answer, but public schools often seem able to tread water at best. In some cases, business is trying to fill the gap. Home Savings of America’s jobs and education program, profiled in Making a Difference, is one laudable response. But is this something business ought to be doing, educating its own work force?

“At one time education was almost entirely a state function, but that’s changed,” says William S. Comanor, professor of economics at UC Santa Barbara and UCLA. “The state isn’t doing its job, so businesses have to go in and make the investment.”

In Japan, for instance, businesses-as-educators are the rule, not the exception, despite the vaunted reputation of Japanese schools. There, “college is less important,” says Comanor. “Businesses hire from college and train their people themselves. It’s ‘firm-specific’ training, which makes it a lot harder for people to move, for instance if they’re laid off. That’s often the problem when individual businesses get involved in educating their work force.”

A strong public education system is the ideal, but when the schools need help, he says, “it’s good for business in general to be involved.”

But Sonja Lynn Jacobs complains in Community Essay that the public school system, at least her local system, is far from ideal. “When you’re a bright child in a public school, you learn early that school is a place where you draw pictures on your desk and watch the clock,” Jacobs says. She took her 5-year-old daughter out of public school because the teacher not only wouldn’t teach the children to read, she wouldn’t even teach all the letters of the alphabet, she says. “It was a pinch for us financially, and I’m irritated at having to pay twice--once through taxes, once through tuition--for Suellen’s school.”

Supporters of a state voucher plan on the November ballot say it would extend school choice to the poor and provide competition, thus improving public schools.

Steve Swatt of Sacramento, a spokesman for the Committee to Educate Against the Voucher, a coalition opposed to the initiative, counters that public schools are dedicated to all of the state’s children. “If Ms. Jacobs wants to send her daughter to private school, that’s fine. But she should pay for that privilege. She shouldn’t ask all of the taxpayers to pay for it.”

Swatt believes that the voucher initiative “turns its back on public schools,” at a time when people should be working to improve them. “It will make our neighborhood schools worse by cutting 10% of their budget to pay for children in private, virtually unregulated schools,” he says. His groups says it would mean fewer textbooks, teachers and security people, and more crowded classrooms. “In essence, the voucher plan robs from the very students who need help the most,” Swatt says.