Despite What Education Leaders Say, U.S. Schools Are NOT Preparing Future Employees and Leaders Well .... That's Bad for ALL Americans

To compete and win championships, coaches and teams need to have highly skilled, trained and motivated players. That's a fact.


And in businesses trying to be best-in-class (which all businesses should strive to become and remain in today's ultra-competitive global marketplaces), employees are often taught two simple rules about customers ----- Rule #1 is the customer is always right, and Rule #2 is that when the customer is wrong, reread Rule #1. It's that simple.


In government in general and in education specifically, those simple customer focused rules aren't in place and apparently don't exist. What "customers" (students, parents, employers and the community as a whole) want is neither known nor even considered to be important by too many U.S. educational leaders.


In other words, and to put it mildly, there is a huge disconnect between what deucational leaders believe is happening with respect to preparing college graduates for the workplace and what those graduates and their employers believe. It Takes a Mentor in relevant part has this to say about that:

" . . . 96 percent of the college provosts Gallup surveyed believed their schools were successfully preparing young people for the workplace. “When you ask recent college grads in the work force whether they felt prepared, only 14 percent say ‘yes,’ ” (Mr. Busteed, the person who conducted the survey) added. And then when you ask business leaders whether they’re getting enough college grads with the skills they need, “only 11 percent strongly agree.” Concluded Busteed: “This is not just a skills gap. It is an understanding gap.”

 

This comes at a time when our country faces creative destruction on steroids thanks to the dynamism of technology and growing evidence that climbing the ladder of job success requires constant learning and relearning. Therefore, the need for schools to have a good grasp of what employers are looking for and for employers to be communicating with schools about those skills is greater than ever."


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And the news is no better when it comes to K-12 education.


U.S. Schools Get Low Marks from Chamber of Commerce has the ugly story about what employers believe about the lack of our graduating students' preparedness for the workplace:

"K-12 education systems are improving nationwide, but states aren't doing enough to keep the U.S. competitive on the global stage, according to a new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

 

The "Leaders & Laggards" report grades each state's education performance and policies based on 11 business-oriented criteria, ranging from the availability of school options, such as charters, to the state's pension-funding situation. . . .

 

"We're making progress but not enough progress…people ought to be outraged," said Cheryl Oldham, vice president of the foundation's Center for Education and Workforce. "Hopefully this is a wake-up call.". . .

 

The report found that the U.S. has a lot of work to do to keep up with the rest of the world's educational gains, an idea supported by other recent findings. The U.S. remains a global leader in the proportion of adults with post-high-school education, but many nations are closing the gap, according to a global education survey released earlier this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. ranked 18 out of 27 countries in its percentage of today's young people expected to finish a university education in their lifetime."

 

Summing Up

 

Our system of education once stood at the very of the world's educational ladder.

 

Sadly, those days are gone.

And to make a bad situation worse, the costs to taxpayers for K-12 schools combined with the cost of attending college and the student debt associated with getting that college degree have exploded to the upside.

But perhaps even more sadly, We the People aren't yet sufficiently outraged to take the necessary steps to assure that our young students  and graduates are provided the very best higher educational experience and later career opportunities on earth.

 

As a result, and while many of our so-called leaders sleep through this growing debacle, our nation's competitiveness, workforce and economic prosperity are all in serious jeopardy.

 

That's my take.

 

Thanks. Bob.