By Stephen Philip Johnson
Reforming the nation's schools was the topic of the Public Leadership Forum for academics and industry representatives held April 15 at Baruch College in New York City.
David B. Lipsky, dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, contributed to the forum, which included representatives from AT&T, American Express, Document Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, Syracuse University, the New York City Partnership and Erie County BOCES.
The session's sponsor was U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who hosted the event with Rudolph Crew, chancellor of the New York City schools, and Ann Reynolds, chancellor of the City University of New York.
In his opening comments, Schumer said creative approaches to problems of public education will have to involve representatives of industry and government working with teachers and administrators to design new models which better match the nation's employment needs.
Lipsky reported there were some signs of success in the nation's schools:
·Overall math and science achievement scores are at a 20-year high.
·The number of high school students taking core academic courses has tripled since 1983.
·The drop-out rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has declined by 21 percent in the past decade.
However, Lipsky said, although we may have "turned the corner," more attention needs to be focused by industry on school problems.
·He quoted a study by John Bishop, associate professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, that showed high school graduates in 1980 were about 1-1/4 grade level equivalents behind high school graduates in 1967 in math, science, history and English. This decline in academic achievement, according to Bishop, lowered the nation's productivity by $86 billion in 1987 and will lower it by $200 billion in the year 2010.
·Vocational education is in poor shape -- secondary vocational education enrollments are dropping.
·"Special needs" students are an increasing proportion of the vocational student population.
·Less than 50 percent of those graduating from vocational programs find jobs that use the occupational skills they have been taught.
Lipsky said that students who do not plan to go to college -- 20 million 16- to 24-year-olds -- are of great concern. The major problem is that the United States is the only industrial country that doesn't have a system of externally graded competency exams geared to the secondary school curriculum, he said. In other countries, students' performances on standard competency exams are signals used by employers and colleges.
This Public Leadership Forum was the second in a series of discussions designed to share ideas on future directions for issues facing the nation.