"What can we in business do to help turn the schools around?" That's the question I'm asked most often as I meet with individual businessmen or address groups of corporate leaders. Most of them are deeply concerned about the low achievement levels of American students. They know that "adopt a school" and similar programs do some good but not enough to take us from large-scale failure to success.
One answer to the question appears in the January-February 1989 issue of Educational Researcher in an article entitled "Why the Apathy in American High Schools?" by John H. Bishop of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, New York State School oflndustrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University.
No matter how good the teaching, students will not learn unless they work at it, unless they're engaged. Learning does not result from passively sitting in the presence of a teacher who's talking. The student must listen, write, question, discuss, imagine, experiment, construct. Yet almost all who have recently looked at large numbers of high schools across the country describe students as docile, bored, passive, lacking interest. While some policy makers have been pushing for a longer school day and year, recent studies estimate that almost half the time now available for learning is lost because of absence, lateness and students not paying attention. Bishop cites reports showing that, "When homework is added to engage time at school, the total time devoted to study, instruction and practice is only 18 to 22 hours per week. .. [whereas] the typical senior spent 10 hours per week in a part-time job and about 24 hours per week watching television."
Students, Bishop says, aren't the only problem. Their parents are, too. Even though American students were learning the least in school, American parents were the most satisfied with the performance of their local schools when compared with parents in Japan and Taiwan.
"The fundamental cause of the problem is our uncritical acceptance of institutional arrangements that do not adequately recognize and reinforce student effort and achievement," asserts Bishop. He analyzed the lack of incentives to do well in school for both college-bound and non-college-bound students. In this column, I'll deal only with the non-college-bound.
According to Bishop, students know that "there are benefits to staying in school. .. [but] most students realize few benefits from working hard while in school. .. [because] the labor market fails to reward effort and achievement in high school." High school students first learn this when they get part-time jobs while still in school. Neither their grades nor their test scores have any effect on their ability to get a job or on what they are paid. The same is true after graduation. Students who earn excellent grades and take tough subject have no better chance of getting a job - and get paid no more - than those who take easy subjects and barely graduate. The business world seems to be telling students that a diploma is a diploma is a diploma and all diplomas are equal.
After four or five years, students who do well in high school earn a little more, but "most teenagers are shortsighted, so benefits possible 10 years in the future may have little influence on their decisions," The fact that high school performance is ignored is surprising. Bishop cites research conducted over the last 80 years and involving hundreds of thousands of workers that shows that "scores on tests measuring competence in reading, mathematics, science and problem solving are strongly related to productivity on the job."
So why don't employers compete for the better graduates and pay them higher wages? Bishop cites a number ofreasons. The use of tests by employers dropped dramatically after the issuance of EEOC guidelines in 1971. A 1987 sample of small- and medium-sized businesses showed that "aptitude test scores had been obtained in only 3.15 percent of the hiring decisions studied."
Businesses also have trouble getting information from high schools. The same survey showed that only 13. 7 percent of the hiring selection were made after looking at high school transcripts. Many high schools are geared to supply transcripts to colleges but not to prospective employers. One company "sent over 1,200 signed requests to high schools in 1982 and received only 93 responses." And, "when high schools do respond, it takes a great deal of time," usually more that two weeks, preventing the employer from hiring within the usual time frame.
So, while employers know that how well a student did in high school is important, most failed to act on this basis because of"the low reliability of self-reported data, the difficulties of verifying it and the fear of EEO challenges to such questions." Also, very few hirings were based on teacher recommendations. So "despite their higher productivity ... students who work hard must wait many years to reap rewards, and even then the magnitude of the wage-and-earnings effect is hardly much of an incentive."
Bishop says that this "tendency not to reward effort and learning in high school appears to be a peculiarly American phenomenon. Marks in school are the major determinant of who gets the most preferred apprenticeships in Germany. In Canada, Australia, Japan and Europe, the educational systems administer achievement exams that are closely tied to the curriculum ... Job applications, at all levels, require information about exam grades. Good grades on the toughest exams, those in physics, chemistry and advanced mathematics, carry particular weight with employers and universities. Parents in these countries know that a child's future depends critically on how much is learned in secondary school.
" ... The key to motivation," says Bishop, "is recognizing and rewarding learning effort and achievement. Employers should start demanding high school transcripts and give academic achievement (particularly achievement in math and science) much greater weight when hiring. Business and industry should communicate this policy to schools, parents and students. High school graduates should not be relegated to sales clerk jobs simply because of their age. Like their peers in Europe, Canada and Japan, they should be allowed to compete for really attractive jobs on the basis of knowledge and skills they have gained in high school.
So when American businessmen ask me what they can do to help turn American education around, I will tell them that one important part of the answer is this: Provide clear and early rewards for those students who work hard and learn the most.