Two Business Plans for U.S. Education

Most public schools in this country stink. Just about everyone says so.

And neither the California budget or the national economy suggest better times to come.

It seems that everyone is chiming in now with a possible solution to the crisis. Lately, the most vocal critics of education come from the business community, which is nervous about the declining quality of the U.S. work force.

Two articles in the current issues of The American Enterprise and the Harvard Business Review, dovetail to reveal a clear slice of business-oriented thinking on the subject.

Both articles acknowledge that severe societal problems--poverty, drug abuse, violence, hopelessness--have undermined education. But both also identify other villains within the system.

Because of “inflexible bureaucracies, inane regulations, and incompetent administrators and union officials” the Harvard Business Review argues, “in too many school districts, excellence survives despite the system, not because of it.” Excellence can be restored, the magazines agree, but that will require a radical rethinking of how we educate ourselves.

The American Enterprise discusses an “unfinished agenda” of educational reform that includes such innovations as a “teacher brigade” to attract and train a new generation of instructors and cooperative college/high school programs designed to expand available resources.

The Enterprise writers’ enthusiasm shines through most brightly, however, when discussion turns to a free-market approach to pedagogy--what the review calls “the most widely talked-about silver bullet in current education debates.”

Entrenched power brokers in public education greedily guard their monopoly, the Enterprise argues. “School systems still cling to their bureaucracies and their regulations, and parents are still excluded from making real decisions about the schools and teachers to which their children are assigned.”

Educational administrators are defensive because they know, “That given half a chance, children will leave the public schools; that once the figurative Berlin Wall between public and private comes down, the prisoners will escape to the other side.”

Rich folks already have educational options, so policies that limit choice compel only the poor to remain in the deteriorating public schools.

A voucher system, where government funding goes to parents rather than to the school system, would give poor children access to private schools, the Enterprise asserts. Public schools would, of necessity, decentralize; teachers would be freed from the niggling constraints of a top-heavy system to compete for the funds of increasingly demanding education consumers.

And a free educational marketplace would produce a better product (better students) for society’s end consumers: American business.

The relationship between education and business is the focus of the Harvard Business Review essay by managing editor Nan Stone. Drawing from numerous recent books and surveys on the subject, she turns up some fresh perspectives.

For one thing, it is already too late to avoid the “skills crisis,” she says. Merely rushing about trying to fix America’s schools won’t solve our inability to compete with other nations.

Rather, she argues, “For many executives, the most effective way to change the schools is to change what happens inside their own companies.” Companies must, she says, become less miserly about in-house worker training.

At the same time, schools and business should consider working together to instill a work ethic and a study ethic in students.

In Japan, she writes, many companies allocate a number of jobs to students at a specific school who demonstrate the best academic performance. Students are nominated for the jobs by their teachers.

In the United States, the few employers who hire applicants directly out of high school, “almost never ask applicants what courses they have taken, how well they did, what their discipline and attendance records were, or whether there are teachers who can recommend them--a step that in and of itself would do more to reinforce teachers’ authority in the classroom than all the homilies on respect ever preached.”

Ultimately, though, schooling is a circular process, the review points out. Students who got a lousy education and then got a lousy job at a company where education is not valued are not likely to inspire their kids to scholarship.

Schools can help break that “contract of complacency.” Though business might lend a hand, Stone asserts, the ultimate responsibility is the parents’.

“Parents who believe that learning matters will send that message loud and clear. If their company’s personnel policies also allow them to send it regularly--by attending several teacher conferences a year or by spending a few hours each week in the classroom as a volunteer--the contract of complacency could quickly become a compact for competitiveness.”

REQUIRED READING

* Fifteen years ago, a new magazine called New West arrived on newsstands, its cover decorated with a caricature of a young politician named Jerry Brown. Since then, the magazine has endured continual editorial contortions, rising to excellence one year, slipping into mediocrity the next, transforming itself into California along the way.

Andy Meisler’s brief retrospective in the current issue will remind readers that all in all, the magazine has been a regional treasure, a showcase for some of the best magazine journalism done anywhere, by such masters of the craft as Barry Farrell, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Rian Milan and Randy Shilts.

Judging from the last few issues, California is rebounding again, rediscovering its identity as a place where real writers can explore serious subjects in honest and interesting ways.

* It’s the sort of project Life magazine does best: A yearlong series of photo-essays on “The American Family.” The first feature, in the April issue, is extremely well-done, if rather predictable.

A more unsettling look at the American family, however, appears in the same issue. Tom Junod’s profile of Faye Yager, a woman who runs an “underground” for allegedly molested children, is a rich and peculiar tale, as darkly stylish a piece of work as has appeared anywhere lately.