#3. The
business of education (is education)
"Lately
we have been told again and again that our educators are not
preparing American youth to be efficient
workers. Workers. That language
is so common
among us now that an extraterrestrial might think we had actually
lost the Cold War.”
Marilynn Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read
Books
Again, something fundamental has changed over the past few years. Business now asserts what it needs—and is
creating relationships with school districts and community colleges, and some
universities as well, that leads educators to respond to those needs. In a way that alters the mission of our
schools.
What I find most surprising, in
studying our current focus, or obsession, to prepare students for the workforce, is how needy business seems to be. Hence the new push on education to get on board.
Yes,
needy.
Jamie
Dimon, chair and CEO of J.P. Morgan, and Freeman Hrabowski, President of the University
of Maryland, advocate for New Skills for Youth and career-pathway programs in a
full-page advertisement. It is titled “Tackling the Youth Unemployment Crisis.” Appealing, yes? But are these passages about
the crisis for youth - or for business? (Bold throughout mine.)
“Educators need to better align what they
teach with the skills employers
desperately need.”
“… we need to make greater investments in
career-focused education program that are aligned with the needs of emerging industries.
Programs focused on jobs like robotics, medical science and coding – the
skills that employers desperately need.”
Who
knew that J.P. Morgan and the business community were so desperate? So needy?
Business
leaders in Colorado make the same point. A booming economy—but “a desperate
need.”
“Colorado
Unveils $9.5M Youth Apprenticeship Program,”[i]
by Jenny Brundin, Colorado Public Radio,
Sept. 14, 2016
A Letter
from Gov. Hickenlooper
“Colorado has the best economy in the
country (U.S. News & World Report) and the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. At the
same time we have thousands of jobs that go unfilled every week…. Colorado employers here identified a lack of
qualified candidates ‘with the right skills’ as the primary reason or not
filling hundreds of middle skill positions.” (Spring, 2017)
|
“A 'Crying Need' In Colorado”
Right
now, Colorado has an estimated 25,000 weekly job vacancies in high-growth
industries that go unfilled because of a lack of skilled workers. Seventy
percent of Colorado adults are not from here – they are transplants from out of
state….
"The
path to economic mobility, the likes of which the world rarely sees, is
not for every student to go to a four-year liberal arts college,"
said Kent Thiry, chairman and CEO of DaVita Healthcare
Partners, Inc., which hosted the event. "In fact, there’s a desperate need, a crying need, on both
the supply side for more focused programs, more applied programs, more
vocational programs."
What
to do? “Train” high school students (just
don’t call it vocational education!)
“A
skills gap is the US manufacturing sector’s Achilles’ heel, with nearly 3.5
million jobs at stake over the next decade. It is no longer a short-term
issue of filling current hard-to-fill open positions, or one that can
reasonably be expected to be solved in time by government policy-makers.”
Deloitte
Review, Jan.
26, 2015
|
That CPR story focused on CareerWise
Colorado, an effort led by Democratic candidate and CEO of Intertech Plastics Noel
Ginsburg, with strong backing from Gov. Hickenlooper. It borrows from the Swiss
model, following a 2016 visit by Hickenlooper and business leaders to
Switzerland.[iv] The
goal for Colorado: “20,000 students will be apprentices by 2027.” (More on CareerWise in AV #175.)
Ginsburg expressed The Need
this way: “Currently Colorado has an estimated 25,000
weekly job vacancies in high-growth industries that go unfilled because of a
lack of skilled workers, costing the state over $300 million in lost GDP.”[v] A key rationale, it appears, for his
initiative, CareerWise.
Chalkbeat Colorado also spoke to The Need.
“A youth apprenticeship program set to launch next fall aims to connect 250 Colorado high school students* with paid job training in its first year, providing students with an immediate path to middle-income jobs and helping businesses cultivate the skilled workers they need.”[vii]
(*In fact, as CareerWise told me in an email this week, it has 103 students in the program this year.)
New law says students must be told
about
skilled labor, military careers
“… a 2015 Deloitte
survey of manufacturing executives found eight in 10 said the expanding
skills gap will affect their ability to keep up with customer demand, and
that it took an average of more than three months to recruit skilled
laborers."[vi] The Denver Post
|
National stories on Colorado have made the same point.
“Can Apprenticeships Pave the Way to a
Better Economic Future?” Education Week, Sept. 26, 2017[viii]
Colorado leaders are
painfully aware that they need to find
skilled workers to fill thousands of jobs. And they're betting big on their
new secret weapon: an apprenticeship program for high school students….
“… put businesses in the driver's seat, using their
needs as a starting point.”
|
"We literally have tens of
thousands of jobs every week that go unfilled," said Ellen Golombek, the
executive director of Colorado's labor and employment department, which helped
shape the apprenticeship program. "We're taking a look at the entire
work-based-learning spectrum to train, retrain, and 'upskill' the workforce to meet our current and projected needs."…
With the Swiss system as a model, Colorado
began planning its program as a way to keep students in the school pipeline, set them up for good jobs, and serve industry's need for a skilled
workforce. It decided to put businesses
in the driver's seat, using their needs as a starting point.
If apprenticeships represent how
K-12 education is expected to respond to the needs of business, colleges, too,
face similar pressures. “A Gallup poll
conducted for the Lumina Foundation, which promotes increased access to higher
education, found that just 11 percent of business leaders said they were
getting the skills they needed from the
college graduates they hire overall.”[ix] We
now read of “how colleges can modify their curricula and industry
certifications to better meet
manufacturers' hiring needs.”[x] Gary Burtless, an economist with the
Brookings Institution, states: “Colleges … have their ear to the ground,
they’re listening to local employers and paying
attention to what they need.”[xi]
“Despite doom-and-gloom pronouncements on
the decline of U.S. manufacturing, the sector is actually experiencing
a shortage of
qualified knowledge workers—to the tune of 2 million advanced manufacturing
jobs expected to go unfilled in the next decade. Machines may have replaced
the routine tasks once accomplished by the hands of men, but competent
workers are needed to run the machines. And
there simply aren’t enough laborers today, creating a yawning skills gap.”
David
Bass, Philanthropy Magazine, Review of Men Without Work, Winter
2017
|
A bipartisan push – both parties
nudge education to help business in its hour of “need”
“It’s not a
Republican or Democratic issue to say we want better jobs for our kids, or we
want to make sure they’re trained for
the new generation of jobs that are coming or beginning to appear…. We need to look at apprenticeships. We need to look at
all kinds of internships.”[xii]
Gov. John Hickenlooper, Face the Nation, August 8, 2017.
Our needy business community has
convinced both parties, a remarkable feat these days! Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, Republican, recently
set a goal to increase the internships and apprenticeships in Oklahoma to “to help address the state's workforce
shortage. The Earn & Learn Oklahoma
initiative will benefit both workers and employers who
cannot find the skilled people they
need, Fallin said.”[xiii]
In
Texas, a Democrat leads a similar effort for (not my term!) that “license-certificate-tradesman
space.”
“Growing
number of states embrace career education,” Education Week, Oct. 4, 2017[xiv]
In Texas, a
new law requires education officials to
collaborate with the state's higher education and workforce departments to
develop and post on their websites an "inventory" of certifications
and credentials students can earn that reflect workforce needs and offer routes to middle- and high-skill jobs.
State Rep. Eddie Lucio (Dem), who
co-sponsored the Texas legislation, said he hopes schools will use the
inventory to develop coursework for in-demand careers and to advise students
about opportunities. Most good jobs in Texas demand postsecondary certificates,
licenses, or degrees, but only 20 percent of high school graduates in the state
have them, he said.
"We are providing
20th-century education in a 21st-century market," said Lucio. "The
biggest opportunity we see in Texas is that technical space, that
license-certificate-tradesman space. … We
want to be able to tell employers we have the skilled workers they need.”
CEOs See Apprenticeships as Wave of Future
“‘We need to truly
remove the unnecessary firewall between government and schools, and
government and business,’ said Wes Bush, chairman, CEO and president of
Northrop Grumman Corp. and chair of the Business Roundtable’s education and
workforce committee.” EdWeek Market Brief, June 7, 2017
|
That
article gave similar examples from Arizona, Colorado,
Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Oregon, Tennessee,
and Virginia. Last year, 46 states and the District of Columbia took
action to boost career technical education
with nearly 150 new policies to provide
more funding, expand innovative employer partnerships, and strengthen programs
that provide college-level credit in high school.”[xvi]
(For more examples of the shortage of skilled workers and of 'schools not delivering what is needed,' see the Addendum.)
Advocates
must rejoice to hear this same bipartisan message from Washington. Near the end of his seven years as the U.S. Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan seemed ready to embrace this new purpose for
education.
“The departing secretary
of education says students
aren’t getting the
education the U.S. economy needs them to have”
Before the interview, the WSJ opened with this background:
…. Duncan has been pushing the cause of education all his career.
And as he prepares to step down as education secretary after seven years, he is
asking CEOs to join him in the fight.
In today’s global
marketplace, it’s critical for the U.S. to develop in young people the skills
that will keep America competitive. But across the nation, says Mr. Duncan,
businesses continue having trouble finding enough college graduates with those
skills.
WSJ asked: “What
is the biggest undone item to better align the education system with the needs
of the labor market?” Duncan might have challenged the assumption
in that question—as Another View aims
to do in this series. His response
was more thoughtful than this excerpt suggests, but Duncan did say:
“… we
need folks at every level who are willing to fight not on small-ball stuff, not
on sound bites, but on, ‘Are we
educating our way to a better economy?’”
Given the diminished prestige
of our current Secretary of Education, and her lack of credibility when she speaks
about the future of work in America[xviii], instead we look to the Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, to gauge this administration’s view of how schools can serve
the marketplace.
“Labor
secretary Acosta: Trump still loves apprenticeships,”[xix] The Washington Examiner, Nov.
29, 2017
“Trump’s Non-Celebrity Apprentices,” WSJ, 6/18/17(xx)
“One restraint on economic
growth is the increasing U.S. labor shortage, especially for jobs that
require technical skills. Meanwhile, many college grads are underemployed and
burdened by student debt. The Trump Administration is trying to address both
problems by rethinking the government’s educational
priorities. …
“Another problem is that few colleges and high schools teach
vocational skills. The Labor Department Jolts survey of national job
openings found more than six million in April—the most since Jolts began
tracking in 2000. The vacancies include 203,000 in construction, 359,000 in
manufacturing and 1.1 million in health care.”
Rep.
Glenn Grothman, R-Wisconsin
|
"Apprenticeships are a major
priority for President Trump and the Department of Labor. We have made a strong commitment to increasing the number of quality apprenticeships, including expansion into high-growth,
emerging sectors where apprentice-ships have historically been rare,"
Acosta said in a speech at the G-20 Labor and Employment Ministers'
Meeting. “… In the last several months,
CEO after CEO has told me that they are eager to fill their vacancies, but they
cannot find workers with the right skills.”
In short, the labor market and the economy are needy, and
education must respond. Educators have
no illusions as to who has greater clout in America. I just had not realized,
until doing this study, that it had become the duty of public education to help
our troubled business community.
Troubled, impatient, and needy. And yes, bossy enough to decide it can no
longer be just a partner and adopt a school, donate computers, or volunteer
with Junior Achievement for an hour a week for five weeks[xxi]
to help our young entrepreneurs. No
reason to wait around; the business community will change education.
Next week:
how it is changing the mission of community colleges in Colorado.
Addendum
More on the shortage of skilled workers and of 'schools not delivering what is needed'
More on the shortage of skilled workers and of 'schools not delivering what is needed'
Aurora Sentinel – “National small
business chief says Trump government big on training”[xxii] -
2017
After her stop at Stanley Marketplace, (US Small Business Administration chief)
Linda McMahon was slated for a roundtable meeting with other
business owners. “In that setting I hear more about tax reform, regulatory
reform, high costs of health care and the labor shortage, which is becoming
more and more of a thing,” she said.
That labor shortage goes beyond the “skilled labor” shortage that
many sectors have long complained about, she said. Today, business owners are often worried about finding a workforce in general,
regardless of their specific skill set.
EdWeek Market
Brief – “CEOs See
Apprenticeships as Wave of Future for Workforce Skills”[xxiii] – 2017
“Adding an apprenticeship approach to
K-12 and higher education can help close the massive skills gap in the U.S., according to a panel of CEOs,
two U.S. senators and a Trump administration official, in a discussion
sponsored by the Business Roundtable here today.
“Companies in a
survey by the organization are spending $4.5 billion annually to tackle the
skills gap, according to a report released today by the group. A companion publication released by the roundtable detailed
specific approaches and projects undertaken by 64 major corporations to
address the shortage of workers with
skills to fill jobs in different industries.”
The Global Achievement Gap - Tony Wagner - 2008
“… under the auspices of the Economic Development Corporation and the
Business Roundtable, a nonpartisan organization of area CEOs that provide
leadership on a range of public policy issues related to business development,
a group of about forty businesses, community, and education leaders began to
meet … According
to Gary Jacobs, the managing director of a national real estate development firm,
they had a very clear idea of the skills
that mattered most and knew that public schools weren’t delivering what was
needed.”
The New York Times - Op-Ed,
“From High School Straight to a Career,”[xxiv] 2016
“This
country has good blue-collar jobs. It needs skilled workers.”
“Candidates from both
parties have been talking a lot about the loss of American jobs, declining
wages and the skyrocketing costs of college. But missing from the debate is the
fact that there are hundreds of thousands of ‘middle skill’ jobs in the United
States—or soon will be—going unfilled because of a dearth of qualified workers.”
(Katherine S. Newman and Hella Winston)
Education Week, “Employers
are integral to career tech programs,”[xxv] 2015
“Every January, employers in Vermilion
County in eastern Illinois are
asked to complete a jobs-projection survey, administered by Vermilion
Advantage, a member-based
organization that focuses on workforce-development needs. Core employers identify their needs two years out for
both new and replacement positions. Using
the data, skills training in the schools
can be adapted to plug the gaps …
As a result, the organization has
pushed for more training and career-awareness activities in the schools related to science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics.
“And in North Carolina, workforce teams last
fall went on a listening tour to gather information about the
job needs of 1,000 employers in
100 days. The "1,000 in 100" initiative
was spearheaded by the governor's office in an effort to make sure that the training in high schools,
community colleges, and universities is meeting the needs of local business.”
[iii]Deloitte Review Issue 16, by Craig A. Giffi, Ben Dollar, Bharath Gangula, Michelle Drew Rodriguez,
[xxi] https://www.juniorachievement.org/web/ja-usa/volunteers
- “What is the investment in time for a JA volunteer? Typically, a JA program
is taught for one hour a day for a total of five days.”
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