A Trojan Horse

In an e-mail, US Senator Jeff Merkley shared the frustration that he heard from business owners throughout Oregon who said they were having trouble finding applicants with technical skills.   The Senator responded deftly with an invitation to those constituents, and to anyone casting a critical eye at the state of education, to put their money where their collective mouth is.  Merkley introduced a bill, the  BUILD (Building Understanding, Investment, Learning, and Direction) Career and Technical Education Act of 2013.  It would “provide grants to support state efforts to restart career and technical education programs that have been scaled back or eliminated.”  The grants, of course, would be funded by the US Treasury and the taxpayers.

Any scheme to sneak money back into the public school system should be applauded: even if it has to be disguised, trojan-horse fashion, as a business-friendly measure.  I would suggest that the whole enchilada of public schooling is business friendly:  including art and music to give our potential worker a personally meaningful reason to stick around and complete his/her education; including English so our employees can string properly spelled words together in a complete sentence; including social studies so that our workers value and participate in the whole give-and-take of a social contract.  The social contract – admittedly abstract and not very “hands-on” – encourages certain business-friendly qualities like a work ethic, respect for property and an incentive to do one’s best in order to reap certain promised rewards.

edutopia

A way not to provide applicants with technical skills is to starve the public sector – not only schools but health care and human services as well.   A frustrating lesson for the business community, or anyone being asked to pay the bills, is that the closer you get to the people part of providing a shared basis for prosperity, the less likely a business model is going to solve your problems.  Organization, productivity, innovation and technology will obviously support education. A business model suggests a system of incentives to drive productivity:  Pay teachers for merit instead of experience and hold them accountable.  Common sense can tell you that no matter how much “merit” you want to hold your teacher “accountable” for, funding at a level that requires 35+  students in a high school classroom will not buy you a competent workforce, let alone a globally competitive one.