Soft America versus the Hard World

Recently I did an experiment. The Census Dept of the federal government was looking for people to work on the 2010 census. They encouraged people to apply and take a timed test as part of the process. I was curious about the content of the test and so I participated in the process. I was surprised and pleased to see that the test was fairly rigorous for the pay level they were offering for the jobs ($11/hour). It had sections on math (no calculators allowed), vocabulary, interpreting fairly complex coding systems, following directions, interpreting the meaning of sentences, etc. My overall impression was that the average high school graduate would have some difficulty with the test and the pass rate overall would be low. For example, multiplying three digit numbers by three digit numbers by hand (with pesky imbedded decimal points) would have been virtually impossible for kids who are introduced to calculators very early in elementary school because educators believe that teaching math mastery is a waste of time.

This experience made me wonder how other government civil service tests looked. While I didn’t go take a sample of them myself I did search on-line for the myriad prep services available. That material makes me believe that those tests are longer and more rigorous than the census test even for the lowest level jobs.

This experience reinforces the disconnect between the soft world of K-12 education and the real world of work and competition. The low expectations educators, as the self-ordained education experts, have put in place certainly make life easier during school for both students and educators. However, they set the kids up for a rude shock when they are faced with the real world. This problem is apparent from top to bottom in achievement. At the higher levels it is manifested in the approximately 30% of high school graduates who attend 2 or 4 year colleges needing remediation in at least one subject but often two or more. At the lower levels of achievement, it manifests in ‘graduates’ not being adequately prepared for even the lowest level jobs in our society. While there is some activity ‘talking’ about this problem (CDE meetings with business people around the state over the last two years) expecting truly positive change including the much higher standards required to fix the problem is a pipedream. I hope it happens but even if some tightening of standards is put in place based on past experience they will be of the too little, too late variety.

Below is an editorial describing the problem from the business perspective.

Jan. 29, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Real world ramifications

Local businesses struggle with products of school district
In the third installment of a series reporting results of a poll of nearly 70 Southern Nevada business owners and managers, published in Tuesday's Review-Journal, 43 percent of respondents said local schools and colleges are "not at all effective" in preparing students for the workplace.

A startling 0 percent -- not a one -- found the schools “very effective" at that task.

The largest plurality -- 37 percent -- said the solution is stricter accountability for teachers and administrators. Seventeen percent said the answer is greater focus on teaching hard skills for basic employment. Only a slim 9 percent said the answer was throwing more money at the schools as currently organized.
Dan Connell, chief executive officer of San Jose Test Engineering in Las Vegas, reported in a follow-up interview he's especially noticed an "appalling lack of critical thinking skills among local graduates." This forces executives to recruit outside the valley for talent, running up bigger recruiting and relocation costs, he said. "Our educational system is for the birds," agreed Lincoln Spoor, chief executive officer of Westward Dough Operating Co., which runs 13 Krispy Kreme Doughnut franchises in five states. "We have spent trillions of dollars on education since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program and our schools are worse than ever. The kids graduating today have significantly fewer skills in math and English than they had in the 1960s. The federal government is primarily to blame for this. The system is corrupt and there is no accountability."

"Our public schools are shameful," wrote commercial real estate appraiser Charles Jack. "How do 90 percent of the kids in our high schools fail an algebra-competency exam? What the heck is going on?"

"Most of the resumes we get don't even get candidates to the interview point because they're loaded with typographical errors and grammatical problems," adds Brian Rouff, managing partner of Henderson-based Imagine Marketing of Nevada. "And I'll talk to some applicants on the phone, and most of them are not up to the standards we're looking for."

These comments bear out anecdotal observations of the level of literacy common among local letter-writers of high school and college age. It would be bad enough if the main problem were that these young scholars can't spell simple words, don't know when to capitalize, how to form plurals, or the importance of agreement in number and tense within a sentence -- skills once taught in the primary grades.
What's far worse is that they seem blissfully unaware of what they don't know; they make no apparent effort to proofread job application letters which could be among the most important they ever write; and when their errors are pointed out to them they grow hostile and aggressive, acting as though they're being criticized for some niggling details of no importance.

Yes, there are many district graduates who are fully prepared for college or the work force. But a significant number are obviously not, and that should raise a host of red flags.

Some poll respondents suggested grouping students by mastery level, rather than promoting based on age. Mr. Spoor and others said school choice and voucher programs that could effectively remove students and tax dollars from failing schools might add a necessary element of competition.

"Nothing makes you better than knowing someone is right up your tailpipe," Mr. Spoor observed. "It keeps you sharp, motivated and hungry. If you don't have competition, you're not going to innovate, you're not going to step up, you're not going to push. ... The school system has not really ever had any competition."

“By taking time from their busy schedules to speak frankly of the quality of local graduates they're seeing in the marketplace -- helping explain why many of these young people are not finding their locally generated high school and college degrees the "tickets to good jobs" they imagined them to be -- these business leaders help put a human face on the colorless columns of disappointing test scores to which taxpayers and parents long ago grew inured.”


It is obvious that the kids are being poorly served by our education system. I am reminded of the scene in the church from the movie The Untouchables where Kevin Costner (Ness) tells Sean Connery (Malone) that he wants to get Capone. Malone asks him, “What are you prepared to do?” That is the question isn’t it? It is easier for us to keep deluding ourselves that the schools are doing OK than to face the reality that they are not serving the kids nearly well enough in a time when the global competition is continuing to increase rapidly. We are sending most of our kids into the global competition totally unprepared. So the choice is between the easy, ‘ignore it and maybe it will go away’ current approach or an activist approach that demands better for the kids and takes more of our time. Talking without follow-up action has been tried. It doesn’t work.