Any growing business trying to attract new capital or job candidates will be asked, “How good are your local schools?” A business’s reputation — the No. 1 concern cited by executives in “The State of Our Business” survey — depends, in part, on quality local education.
Surveyed executives said improving public education was the most critical issue for Indiana’s future economic prosperity. So, what can businesses do to make Indiana schools, and their own economic outlook, stronger?
1) Be a partner, not a critic. Visit a local school. Take the time to learn what the school needs and how you can contribute to its students’ success. Could you donate unneeded equipment or supplies, or sponsor events or awards? Could you and your staff mentor, coach, and tutor students; offer guest lectures; lead staff development workshops or factory tours?
Butler University is creating just such a multidimensional partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools to open the Shortridge Magnet Middle School of Law and Public Policy in 2009. The university is not coming in as “the experts” who will dictate solutions. Rather, Butler faculty and students are working with Shortridge to develop a rigorous liberal arts curriculum that connects each subject to public policy and how it shapes the students’ lives.
We envision Shortridge sixth through twelfth graders facilitating “town hall-type” community discussions. There, students will learn to listen, to recognize issues outside their own concerns, and to develop clear opinions and confident voices. In short, they will be equipped to become good citizens and cooperative, productive workers. Some kids will hone leadership skills they’ll use to manage tomorrow’s businesses.
2) Rethink educational testing. Accountability in education is necessary. But businesses are not well served by educational systems that are evaluated by standardized testing alone. Test scores provide just a partial snapshot of what an individual has learned at one point in time.
Testing rewards only one right answer. It takes away children’s natural dispositions to ask questions, be curious, tear apart and reconstruct ideas. I see this in new college students. Challenged to debate an issue or choose among multiple solutions to an assignment, they often say, “Tell me what you want, what’s right.”
Managers shouldn’t be surprised when employees finish a task and then say, “Now, tell me what to do next.” Businesses need employees who can creatively assess situations, solve problems, and design new models. We won’t get these by telling students, “There is only one answer.”
Additionally, testing emphasizes raising reading and math scores to such an extent that teaching science is being slighted. Respondents to “The State of Our Business” strongly supported the state’s initiatives to encourage life sciences, information technology and healthcare -- fields that rely heavily on workers educated in the sciences.
The question is: Who will teach those workers? Currently, few college students interested in science enter teaching. They find more rewarding jobs in research and industry.
To counter this, Butler’s College of Education emphasizes tightly integrated K-12 curricula, in which science lessons incorporate the practice of reading and math skills, and vice versa. One of our professors developed a grant to help science teacher development in the Pike Township school district. The School of Liberal Arts and Sciences is exploring ways to support a graduate’s dreams of scientific research in exchange for the graduate spending one year teaching a science in high school.
3) Encourage a smart start. Education is like building a house. If you don’t use good materials and skills, if you just throw up a structure with a poor foundation, you’ll continually have to patch and repair that house.
Today, educators spend a lot of time in remediation, patch and repair.
Children who enter kindergarten without basic skills that they can build on, such as knowing numbers, letters, shapes, and colors, are already behind in being able to learn. If students are still falling behind their classmates in third grade, they rarely catch up and are more likely to drop out of school.
Why care about dropouts? Businesses, along with the rest of society, pay for this loss of human potential in the costs of public assistance, covering the uninsured, and often crime and corrections.
This is why Indiana needs to fund all-day kindergarten, doubling the traditional time for introducing and overcoming barriers to formal learning. All students need access to informational technology resources, so that, no matter what their school district’s tax base is, they can become adept at using these essential 21st century tools.
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