Business Has a Place in Reforming Public Education

Yes, we all know how lousy California schools are. Each day seems to bring new evidence of failure--poor reading scores, administrative incompetence, political infighting that is totally irrelevant to the central issue of how to improve learning by students.

The business community complains--lately even more pointedly--about the need for better education, yet is in a quandary about how to achieve it.

But then there is a victory such as Venice High School’s triumph in the National Science Bowl competition Monday that gives hope and a vision of how things should be done.

“It was people from the business world giving students a connection beyond the school system that helped us,” says Venice Principal Bud Jacobs.

Venice High is one of 298 schools in the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, or LEARN, the reform program begun in 1993 to decentralize decision making in the school system and to foster collaboration with business.

The school has partnerships for counseling and workplace training with the Department of Water and Power and with Creative Artists Agency. It was chosen by Sun Microsystems for help in going on the Internet.

But more important for Venice students than donations of computers and software, Jacobs says, was learning by example. “Students came in contact with officials from DWP and worked with people from Sun and CAA. It broke down the school’s isolation.”

Isolation--the sense, in Jacobs’ words, of “people driving by the school and seeing it as something closed and different”--is at the heart of the education problem in California and throughout the nation.

Education is left to specialists and experts--boards of education locally and at the state level, the teachers unions. School budgets are no longer local but funded through the state government and federal grants.

California’s education budget for the new fiscal year will be $24.3 billion--including $17.8 billion for kindergarten through high school. That’s where the work force of Southern California’s future is being trained. Yet local mayors and city councils have no real authority over schools. And teachers are frustrated.

This has led school systems to behave like bloated corporations did before restructuring: The California Board of Education, confronted six months ago by dismal reading scores, is still waiting for experts to advise it on how to teach reading.

But the time for complacent regret is passing; the problems are becoming critical and urgent. Businesses are beginning to complain about an uneducated work force limiting their prospects in Southern California, “especially the multimedia industry that we think of as our future,” says Barry Sedlik, who heads business development for Southern California Edison.

Professor Edward Leamer of UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management says improving education is the No. 1 imperative if the United States is to operate in the global economy.

His point is that the low-skill jobs that school dropouts used to take are no longer available because they’ve gone to the cheap labor countries.

But there is abundant demand for skilled workers to fill the knowledge-intensive jobs that supply products and services to the world economy. Factory jobs demand algebra and trigonometry.

The sad irony is that young people seem to understand this; more students are staying in school longer than they did historically. But that’s to little avail if they aren’t learning the basic skills that will serve them in the world of work.

Frustrations are giving rise to breakup movements. More than half a dozen petitions to break away from the 650,000-pupil Los Angeles Unified School District are seeking a place on the November ballot--by groups in South-Central and Southeast Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, Gardena, Carson, Lomita and Eastview--an appendage of Rancho Palos Verdes.

The thinking behind the petitions is that smaller school districts can be more responsive to parents and students.

Others think breakup by itself won’t solve the problem. “Competition works in business. And vouchers for parents to choose the school for their children is the best way to ensure better education,” says Joseph Alibrandi, chairman of Whittaker Corp. and a longtime worker for school reform.

But those are longer-term debating points, while cooperation between business and the schools is the immediate response to needs in all the counties of Southern California, from a Workforce LA initiative by the county’s Economic Development Corp. to an Enterprise for Excellence at the San Bernardino School District to several fresh efforts in Orange County.

The Orange County Business Council is working with a $1.5-million federal grant to determine the skills business needs and to help with programs in which students work part time at local companies.

“We need to have business leaders articulate the skills they need so we can cooperate on developing the curriculum,” says Julie Puentes of the Business Council.

What business wants is no mystery. At last weekend’s Milken Foundation Conference in Los Angeles, which honored 150 teachers from all over the country, business participants were specific.

Kirby Dyess, head of human resources for Intel, said the company wants prospective employees to have a good grounding in math and science and the ability to go on learning throughout life.

Kevin Kelly of Ernst & Young said the accounting firm wants applicants to have good basic education, the ability to communicate with clients and “technical capabilities,” meaning a facility with computer networking.

U.S Education Secretary Richard W. Riley declared: “The era of dumbing down is over. All students can learn to higher standards.” He should visit Venice High.