Businesses Get Behind Standards in Schools
At a mall in Yakima, Wash., last spring shoppers were treated to a mock game show pitting Ronald McDonald and Hamburglar against local dignitaries. The contestants had to answer math questions from the state’s public school assessment tests.
The year before, diners at McDonald’s restaurants around the state had the chance to answer test questions printed on place mats as they bit into their burgers and fries. And during this spring’s school “testing season,” TV viewers who watch cable services owned by AT&T; are seeing a pitch from parents and students about the value of the exams.
Behind all three activities is an outfit called the Partnership for Learning, created seven years ago by about 50 Washington state businesses and community foundations, including Boeing, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Bank of America. The goal is to build and sustain support for the academic expectations and accountability tests that are the foundation of the state’s 1993 education reform law.
“We needed to help people understand why standards are so important, why schools needed to change and why these changes were good changes,” said Bill Porter, the Partnership’s executive director.
It’s a role businesses are playing across the country. Every state but one has detailed standards for what children ought to know, varying in degree of difficulty and detail. In recent years, tests based on those standards have begun to come online. As they have, test scores have begun to affect everything from teachers’ bonuses and school rankings to whether students can advance to the next grade or graduate.
Not surprisingly, the consequences are triggering public ambivalence toward the tests and the standards. So, some of the nation’s top business leaders are becoming highly visible in efforts to head off what they fear could become a full-scale retreat.
“The main thing these businesspeople are trying to do is to help the policymakers have some spine on this, and the only way the policymakers are going to have that kind of courage is if the public is supporting them,” said Susan Traiman, an executive with the National Business Roundtable, which is assisting such efforts nationally.
“They’re really trying to have the public see that these tests are challenging and are asking kids to think in new ways,” she said.
To get that message out, business groups are using tried and true methods of shaping government policies, such as lobbying legislators.
In January, Peter Bijur, chairman and CEO of Texaco Inc., wrote to members of the New York state Legislature to urge them not to water down a requirement that students pass Regents exams to get high school diplomas. “The global market is populated with tremendously talented and skilled young people, and we are doing our children a terrible disservice if we do not help them reach their full educational potential,” he wrote.
They’re also going directly to the public. A business coalition in Delaware sponsored clever “Take the Test” events to show people that what children are asked to know is both reasonable and relevant to job success. In Maryland, business leaders have set a goal of visiting every ninth-grade class in the state, to carry the same message directly to students.
In Massachusetts, the Coalition of Higher Standards produced a glossy brochure that showed sample responses to an eighth-grade math problem that required students to answer questions about the arithmetic mean and median using the point totals of two basketball players.
The aim was to “help eliminate the mystery about the tests.” The same group produced a series of television commercials in which real people--such as welders, a longshoreman and a fish processor--showed how their jobs demanded knowledge of algebra, statistics and other disciplines.
Business leaders were involved early in the decade-old movement to use standards, tests and consequences to raise achievement. In 1996, a large contingent of the nation’s governors met with top business executives at IBM headquarters in suburban New York City to invigorate the effort. Last fall, governors and executives met there again, to update their progress.
The consensus was that, amid signs of healthy progress, trouble was brewing because large numbers of students are failing to make the grade. Some point to the high failure rates as evidence the standards are too high.
But business leaders say the fact that many students can’t meet them should spur public schools to do more.
‘The Kids Will Deliver’
In an essay published in USA Today, IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner took note of what he called “backsliding toward the low level of expectation that created the crisis in our schools.” And he urged states and governors not to give in to pressure to lower expectations.
“We don’t have to dumb down our tests,” he said. “The kids will deliver if we adults have the will to see our commitments through with urgency.”
In California, business leaders have been active in education issues for many years, commissioning reports that took note of declining performance but otherwise acting more or less as boosters of public education. In 1998, Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, IBM and Pacific Bell pushed for the creation of an organization called California Business for Educational Excellence to convey strong and unified support for standards and accountability.
Many more companies and the major lobbying groups representing manufacturers, electronics, Realtors and the Chamber of Commerce also were involved. The financial support of the members enabled the organization to hire a full-time staff to work on these issues by lobbying legislators, the state Board of Education and Gov. Gray Davis.
Teresa Cassaza, a vice president of the American Electronics Assn. and treasurer of the California group, said graduates of the state’s public schools must be as well-trained as those anywhere in the world if they’re going to be able to compete for high-paying, high-tech jobs.
But thousands of good jobs go begging because the number of graduates from California colleges in computer- and engineering-related fields is declining.
One reason, Cassaza said, is that students come out of high school lacking the necessary skills. Overall, the association gave the public schools a grade of D+ this year, which is a slight improvement from the year before. “We’re on the right track but we’ve still got a long way to go,” Cassaza said.
The California group recently put out a draft of a report on what it will take to make the state’s ambitious academic standards a reality in the classroom. Suzanne Tacheny, the business group’s policy director, said the report is meant to be a starting point for discussions with educators about what needs to be done.
“This is not an easy thing we’re asking people to do and it won’t be accomplished in a single year,” she said. “There is a great deal of retooling of the system from top to bottom that’s needed.”
The group also wants the state to pay for a major public information campaign to raise awareness of the issues. Gov. Davis has proposed spending $1 million on such a campaign. “You can’t introduce a major shift of agendas without backing it with major resources for communication,” Tacheny said.
Some educators dismiss the involvement of business in public schools as self-serving. To be sure, businesses are trying to make sure they’re able to hire qualified workers.
Stan Litow, IBM’s vice president of corporate community relations, said business involvement in education stems from “enlightened self-interest.”
“We certainly wouldn’t want people to turn education decisions over to business leaders, and business leaders shouldn’t be dictating to schools how they operate,” he said.
On the other hand, he said, “it’s terribly important for companies like IBM that public schools function. We’re dependent on the stability of the communities we are in, and nothing contributes more to the stability of a community than well-functioning public schools.”
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A Little Help From Business
Business groups across the country have launched public information campaigns to bolster support for standards and accountability testing of public schools.
