Wednesday, January 10, 2018

AV#172 - Business takes control of the agenda


#2.  The business of education (is education)


“…it is not going to happen unless business accepts it has to be the catalyst. It has to lead.”
Harvard business professor Joe Fuller, “Middle skills gap,” The Denver Post, Nov. 14, 2014[i]

Policy efforts right and left advance the cause of workforce development in public education, as I showed in AV#171.  When and why did this happen?  If you look back over several decades, isn’t it true that business has largely stayed on the sideline with our schools and community colleges?  Hasn’t it been, for the most part, if somewhat ineffectual, a benign influence?

It is not ineffectual today.  Business pushes an agenda.  In 2018, educators must be clear-eyed about the role some business leaders wish to play in advancing career education.  Something fundamental has changed these past few years. 

I ask you to look back at a series of articles from one year—2014.  It reveals the evolution of a new relationship between business and education.  Not an in-depth study as to why this has happened, but evidence of this change … which brings us to 2018, where business is boss. Or just damn bossy.


Three articles – 2014 – February, July, November

Not long ago most business involvement seemed constructive.  We used terms like collaboration, partnership, and cooperation. One might have even thought that educators had the upper hand.

“Business Leaders Lack Knowledge About K-12, Superintendents Say,”[ii]
by Michele Molnar, Education Week, February 18, 2014

Most school superintendents in the United States say businesses are positively influencing their districts, but it's usually in a fragmented, "checkbook philanthropy" way, rather than a transformative, systemic approach, concludes a study and a white paper released this month by Harvard Business School, The Boston Consulting Group, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Last fall, Harvard Business School and the Boston Consulting Group surveyed superintendents from the 10,000 largest districts in the United States, and 1,118 responded. The researchers found that just 3 percent of school superintendents rate business leaders as "well-informed" about public education, and 14 percent of the survey respondents say corporate leaders are actually misinformed.
Superintendents are "very reasonably demanding that business leaders learn about education, respect what educators are capable of doing, be a partner, and not be imperial, if you will," Jan W. Rivkin, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School…

Some impatience from business, to be sure.

Missed Opportunity - On the other side, business leaders are often frustrated, wishing for "more progress in our education system, but also kind of scared; they don't know what to do, so they give generously, but in a way that is fragmented and not necessarily sustained," he said.

“Frustrated.” “Scared.”  Even puzzled.

"There's a need for an alignment  between the two sectors; what we found in our work is a fundamental missed opportunity," observed Rivkin.

“Alignment.” A neutral word, or it was then.  And recommendations that sounded modest.

The findings, detailed in "Partial Credit: How America's School Superintendents See Business as a Partner," show that most administrators (81 percent) want to see even more business participation at their schools. Of those, about one-quarter would like businesses to get involved in new ways, while 74 percent are looking to sustain the same kinds of engagement.
Business Leaders' 'Playbook' - To address that wish, the three collaborators on the research concurrently released "Lasting Impact: A Business Leader's Playbook for Supporting America's Schools," which provides ideas for bridging the divide between "what educators need" and "what businesses are providing."

That winter, though, no sense that business had clarified “what schools should do.” No agenda, yet.

Winter 2014 – Colorado legislation
HB14-1013 “The use of interns”
   “Reps. Pete Lee (D-Colorado Springs) and Mike Foote (D-Lafayette) are the sponsors of HB14-1013, which passed the Business, Labor, Economic & Workforce Development Committee this afternoon on a 6-5 vote. The bill augments the Advanced Industries Accelerator Program …  by creating incentives for private companies to offer paid internships and apprenticeships to get more Colorado high school and college graduates into the highly skilled jobs that the state’s emerging high-tech economy is producing.
   “The governor has stated that he wants to make Colorado the most business-friendly state in the nation,” Rep. Lee told the committee “Part of doing that is developing and training a qualified workforce, and one of the ways to develop and train a qualified workforce — and it’s been accepted in business and industry for decades — is the idea of the use of interns.”[iii]













July – an agenda emerging

A story in July intimated that business was still on hold.  It was up to employers to adapt—not the other way around—or that’s how I read the headline. 

           “Business must align with schools to close the skills gap,”[iv] The Denver Post, July 14, 2014

Poor alignment of American businesses with the schools that train their workers is creating a “skills gap” that may make it hard to fill as many as 650,000 technical- and science-based jobs by 2018.  The country needs a shift in how industry and educational institutions relate to each other, economists and business executives say.

Nevertheless, an agenda was emerging. As were key terms: training, skills, workforce. We began to hear more clarity, more conviction – and less fear of disrupting education, if necessary.  No hesitation about referring to students as “commodities,” or of business as “a legitimate customer.”

Harvard business school professor Joe Fuller spoke of the strained communication “between employers and educational institutions that are going to impart skills and background to potential employees…. This is why we have 12 million to 13 million unemployed people and 650,000 job openings in manufacturing right now.” 
  
Recent college graduates typically have only about half the skills they need in the workplace, according to John Miller, chief operating officer for Denver-based consulting firm Hands-On Learning. This forces businesses struggling to find qualified employees — in areas such as computers, mathematics, architecture, engineering, management and health care — to educate workers in-house, which is costly.

  “We really need to have universities run as businesses,” said Miller, whose company helps universities develop workforce programs. “It begins with the understanding that what they deliver to the market is a commodity: that’s a graduate.”

I will not play the innocent and say such language offends my delicate ears. But it is revealing, true?

Fuller has studied how western European countries fill jobs. Some of those countries track and test children from their early years to their teenage years, steering them into lifetime occupations for which they are deemed suited.  Fuller and Miller say such tracking would be alien to U.S. culture.

(Two years later Colorado business leaders joined Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on a visit to study the Swiss apprenticeship model, a first step toward CareerWise Colorado—a focus in AV#175. “Alien to U.S. culture” – really?  A key question is whether we are now creating a new form of “tracking.”)   

But Fuller says the educators must start talking to kids and their parents at a young age about what the children would like to do and coordinate that with business. “What we can draw (from the European experience) is to have that dialogue early to allow families to think about what their kids are actually interested in doing and having an aptitude for,” Fuller said.

Reasonable, yes?  But educators must ask if efforts like CareerWise Colorado reflect anything so simple and unassuming.  Business today is not content promoting good conversations over the family dinner.

Hands-On’s Miller said the fortunes of business and universities might also be linked by developing programs for mid-career workers. Rising costs are keeping many out of college, Miller said, and dwindling enrollment threatens the economic viability of some universities. To survive, he said, universities have to change how they operate…

“At the end of the day, industry is going to win, and it is going to lower the cost of operation if they do it effectively,” Miller said. “The schools will then migrate to a new revenue model by working with industry.”

Summer 2014 – federal legislation
  “President Barack Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) into law on July 22, 2014. WIOA is designed to help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support services to succeed in the labor market and to match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy. Congress passed the Act by a wide bipartisan majority; it is the first legislative reform in 15 years of the public workforce system.
  Requires States to Strategically Align Workforce Development Programs: WIOA ensures that employment and training services provided by the core programs are coordinated and complementary so that job seekers acquire skills and credentials that meet employers' needs.
·         Every state will develop and submit a four-year strategy - in the form of a single unified strategic plan for core programs - for preparing an educated and skilled workforce and meeting the workforce needs of employers.
·         State and local boards will promote the use of industry and sector partnerships to address the workforce needs of multiple employers within an industry.”
“Workforce Innovation & Opportunity-Overview”[v]

  















November – Business must take the lead

Later that year The Denver Post’s Howard Pankratz again spoke with Harvard’s Fuller, perhaps more alarmist by then—and more direct about who should seize the initiative:

Middle-Skills Gap[vi] - Subtitled - “Report: Business must take lead
in filling thousands of middle skill jobs.” (The Denver Post, Nov. 14, 2014)

“Basically we’ve got a wasting disease in this country,” Fuller said, explaining in an interview that the disorder manifests itself in stagnant wages for middle-skill workers and workforce participation levels that haven’t been so low since the late 1970s. “If we don’t start fighting this battle, what we are going to get is further polarization of the income spectrum, we are going to get more people out of the workforce,” Fuller said. …
“It’s not that it is hopelessly broken and we can’t hire anybody,” he added. “It can be fixed. But it is not going to happen unless business accepts it has to be the catalyst. It has to lead.”

At that, educators might have raised an eyebrow.  Was it our role, then, to follow? Fuller tried to offer this reassurance: “That doesn’t mean (businesses) should have dictatorial power, or that they should be telling educators what to do, or that governors or mayors should kowtow to business leaders.”  The Post’s summary of the report continued.

But (businesses) can bring the same rigor and discipline to sourcing middle-skills talent they historically applied to their materials supply chain. This means cultivating talent by telling educators what they need—and asking for quality control on the classes that are taught and giving the educators a lot of feedback.
Educators, on the other hand, have to accept the notion that business is a legitimate customer and must be attentive to the evolving needs of the market.

AV #171 and #172 show that in 2018 we as educators are lying to ourselves if we accept that blather about business merely being a “legitimate customer.” Next week, #173: how business is “telling educators what they need” and taking a lead role in determining what schools should “produce.”

Of course 2014 was not the turning point.  It has happened over several years.  It began with hope for stronger engagement from the business community.  But today, in these “relationships” with school districts and community colleges, and some universities as well, the balance has tipped.

As a result, educators sense their mission shifting.  Which is why we must speak up.




















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