Can Business Save Schools? : Palisades High Is Learning

Promising apples for teachers in more ways than one, business people spoke glowingly of technology’s future in the classroom at the Milken Foundation’s Education Conference last weekend.

Yet technology’s role at present is minimal--the computer game “Mortal Kombat” outsells all the educational software on the market--and the schools remain in crisis. In California, a majority of elementary and high school students recently failed for the second year in a row to demonstrate minimal reading, writing and math skills in objective tests.

The state’s response was to scrap the tests as too difficult and convene a task force. State education officials--like failing business executives blaming their customers--cited the fact that many students are poor and from immigrant families, and that class sizes are large.

Business is frustrated at the schools’ failure but is at a loss for solutions. Corporations donate computers through adopt-a-school programs. The Milken Foundation gives about $4 million in cash awards to 150 teachers from 30 states; Walt Disney Co. also gives awards to teachers.

“It’s to help build respect for the profession,” says Michael Milken, a man with a past and a lot of ideas. Milken sees opportunity in education, a vast endeavor that employs more than 3 million teachers and spends about $300 billion at elementary and high school levels. But he knows reforms won’t come quickly.

In fact, change could come one school at a time and business’s real contribution may be by example: As countless companies have restructured their operations, now educators are introducing business techniques to bring greater productivity to the schools.

Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades is now a charter school, under a 1993 state law that allowed schools to free themselves from the state’s fearsome Education Code, a floor-to-ceiling compilation of rules and regulations that would do the Pentagon proud.

Palisades High, in a neighborhood of affluent and highly educated residents, was a standout school right through the 1970s, when students from poor neighborhoods were bused into its classes.

But things went downhill in the 1980s, as more local residents opted for private schools for their children. Palisades High was shrinking when Principal Merle Price, a 23-year veteran teacher and administrator, and a council of teachers and parents decided to apply for charter status, under which a school must maintain higher-than-average standards and recruit students on its ability to offer a better education.

Now the school is growing, to 1,900 students this year, 2,400 next year, as parents from many parts of the city enroll their youngsters; its student body is 70% minority.

In a charter school--one of 100 in the state--Price and his faculty colleagues can revise instruction methods and curricula to teach more effectively--the proof being in higher test scores achieved by Palisades High students in the first two years of the program.

Most critically, charter gives Price a lot of control over the school’s $6.5-million annual budget, in which state payments are based on student attendance. Price can increase revenue by reducing absenteeism.

And he can reduce class sizes--now 35 to 38 students per teacher--by hiring paraprofessionals, the equivalent of a college using teaching assistants. He can contract some work out and use people where they are needed, not according to the dictates of regulations that narrowly specify staffing rules.

If Palisades High were a business, Price would be “changing work rules” or “re-engineering.” But he is not “downsizing.”

“We would jeopardize the collaboration we have among faculty and staff if people thought we were deliberating about their jobs,” Price says. So he sees staff levels changing over time through growth in the pupil count and retirement of personnel.

Change will come slowly but steadily to Palisades High, and to the other charter schools in Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange counties.

If Price could call on assistance from business, he says, it would be for expertise in accounting and systems planning. As to technology, he shrugs. “We don’t have telephones for our teachers, much less computers.” The school’s only modern computers came to it through a National Guard program of the Los Angeles Unified School District--a small item in the defense budget’s aid to this city.

Yet Milken sees the day coming when the falling price of technology will enable each student to have a computer. In the two years since he completed a prison term for securities violations, Milken has been investing in education and telecommunications companies, as well as funding cancer research and scholarship on economics.

He looks ahead to a time when lifelong learning will become commonplace in all walks of life, and private training, now a fragmented industry of $200 million in total revenue, will grow into the billions.

What can business do to improve U.S. education? “That’s a big and complex question,” Milken says. It can work for change at governmental levels and work to bring know-how to the schools.

Milton Goldberg of the National Alliance of Business, a longtime expert in education, says business’s role can be to “insist on standards. Firmly tell schools and students just what requirements must be met for jobs and success.”

In 1983, Goldberg headed the commission that produced “A Nation at Risk,” the report that warned of falling standards and started the school reform movement.

But a dozen years later, the nation is still at risk--and nowhere more than California, where students fail and authorities blame the examinations.

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Businesslike Donations

Corporations contribute far more to college and universities than to elementary and secondary schools. Still, business giving to kindergarten-through-12th-grade education, which totaled $400 million in 1993, is growing. Some facts and figures:

Businesses donated about 90% of the 13,000 computers that the San Diego-based Detwiler Foundation gave to schools.

Hundreds of small businesses and about 30 major corporations are participating in the Vital Link program in Orange County, which seeks to shore up the job skills of often-overlooked C students.

Vons’ Apples for the Student program--in which schools receive equipment worth the dollar value of Vons grocery store receipts collected by students and parents--has donated more than $11 million in computer equipment.

In the largest effort of its kind, more than 1,000 businesses and foundations have helped 650 schools in the Los Angeles’ Adopt-a-School program designed to motivate students to develop career goals.

The Milken Foundation has given almost $18.3 million in cash awards to 732 teachers from 30 states.

Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times