
The Role of the Business Community
Q. I
wish more business people would get involved in the schools. Is that happening?
Yes, and it's exciting and encouraging. There are many ways
that private-sector business professionals can help schools, and not just in
influencing what goes on in the classroom or giving them carte-blanche funding.
School budgets have increased exponentially over the past
few decades, and part of the reason is the marketing effectiveness of the
countless companies that sell products to schools, from books to toilet paper
to training programs to software. Now schools are seeking help from business
for cost containment and cost-effectiveness consulting. So there's a strong
business-school connection there.
Above that money-making connection, though, are billions of
dollars of business charitable contributions each year to all sorts of
educational organizations, school systems and other pro-education causes. They
are creating learning initiatives, challenge grants, demonstration projects,
contests and other tangible ways to attempting to help shape improvements and
support more effective school programming. They see schools as an extremely
worthwhile investment, since their future employees and customers both will
pass through school doors. Helping schools also increases employee morale and
is good PR. So it's good business to support schools and try to make them
better.
Even those businesses that have nothing to gain by
supporting school reform - no money-making opportunities, that is -- are giving
their political support to candidates who pledge to reform schools and,
hopefully, turn out a better "product" in the form of more employable
graduates.
This is quite a change from previous decades. You would
frequently see businesses in an adversarial position to the schools in terms of
tax policies and usage, and hear business leaders complaining that new high
school grads can't read, write or figure, forcing them to outsource jobs to
Third World countries or immigrants.
How did we get this big "disconnection" between the people
who educate the future generation and the people who control the jobs they'll
take? It's possible that business leaders
"disconnected" from schools at the same time parents did, which, ironically, is
where the spending spikes began. That's in the late 1960s and '70s, when so
many women starting working and the pool of school volunteers started
dwindling. Community involvement in schools in any meaningful way took a
nosedive.
But these days, business realizes
that the solid business practices that got them through the 1980s and '90s, such
as goal-setting and data-driven decision-making, were not spread into the
school systems, and educators did not know how to employ those management tools
very well. Now the schools are demanding huge inputs in the form of tax dollars
for declining outputs in the form of student achievement, as measured by
standardized tests and statistics such as dropout rates and the need for
college remediation of high school graduates. More money for less quality?
That's not a good business model.
In a highly positive and hopeful development,
organizations like the Business/Education Partnership Forum are helping
businesses form effective partnerships with schools to try to turn that model
around. Take a look at the resources this one organization offers on its
website:
· Association and conference
reports
· Case studies
· Corporate/community
involvement and cause marketing
· Evaluation
· Foundations
· Fundraising
· Leadership
· Outreach
· Parent and community
engagement
· Partnership
practices
· Policy
· Program design and
development
· Program models
· Reports and studies
· Role of business in the
community
· STEM education
· Surveys
· Toolkits and guides
· Websites and blogs
· Workforce
development
Homework: See the Business/Education Partnership Forum, www.biz4ed.org