The following is a guest editorial By Ken Woody For The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR – April 20, 2015)
Mr. Woody’s comments put a fine point on the problem. End of grade tests do not measure the things that are critically important to employers. Over 30% of the questions on those tests measure a student’s prowess at memorizing useless information. Those questions are only useful in identifying the students who have the highest tolerance for remembering useless information that Google could have provided in a matter of seconds. Teaching to the test wastes valuable classroom time for both students and teachers that could have been used to teach things that will be useful.
“In the past two years, with 12 other educators, I have visited more than 25 Eugene businesses such as Symantec, Seneca, the Eugene Water & Electric Board, Bulk Handling Systems, Northwest Stamping, Oregon Community Credit Union and Glory Bee Foods. The message of every owner-employer is the same: “Send young workers who show up on time, work hard, communicate and function as a team, have the ability to solve problems and have a good attitude.” One executive told us “work experience is as important as a degree.”
We should clue in our political leaders, starting with the president, that having a college degree is no guarantee of a job. Family-wage jobs with benefits and a promise of a career are out there for the taking without a college degree. Several businesses we visited are looking at replacing up to 50 percent of their work force in the next five years. One company has had a position open for three years and cannot find a candidate. The sand and gravel work force is so affected by retirement that companies are calling back workers in their 70s.
Every business had positions filled by college graduates, but every one also had more jobs that did not require a degree. Getting out of high school and working at a job, gaining experience in the categories that human resources officers and business owner-managers are looking for will do more to get a family-wage job than having a college degree. One owner said, “Regardless the amount of education you have, it comes down to working — having a work ethic.”
My conclusion: Our education system is doing little of substance to prepare students to be truly “career ready.” There is too much emphasis put on everyone going to college, “free community college” or knowing stuff rather than knowing how to do stuff. It’s not all the fault of the education establishment because it is guided, or bullied, by politicians enchanted with graduation rates and test scores — which, by the way, not one employer ever mentioned as important to getting a job with his or her company.
Our education system is aimed in the wrong direction. If you were a terrorist trying to destroy America’s system, you would do the very thing we are doing to ourselves: focusing on test scores that mean nothing to the students who are taking the tests and nothing to businesses that are looking, sometimes desperately, for workers to replace a rapidly aging work force.
One manager said, “If we could ask one thing, it would be bring back shop classes, give students the chance to learn how to do things and solve real-life problems.”
A look at goals set by the Oregon Education Investment Board for investments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics shows clearly the status of students. The top goals are political and hazy: “Increase graduation rates, increase teacher effectiveness, increase math and science scores, increase early college credits, decrease achievement and participation gaps for students of color and students of poverty, increase math achievement” and then comes “Increase student interest in STEM.”
Lost in the mumbo jumbo of state mandates, political correctness and threats of being put on a watch list for statistical failure is the student — the poor soul left as an afterthought when it comes to “education reform.”
If reform was truly for the benefit of the student, “Increase student interest in STEM” would be the first priority. If that happened, both instruction and achievement would get better. When students are interested in what they’re studying, they find instruction relevant and rigor will be ratcheted up, appeasing those who feel the answer to the unengaged student is raising standards higher and higher.
If you read the Oregon Education Investment Board two-page list of “career and college ready” goals for our education system, you will see the word “work” only twice, lost in a maze of political correctness and ivory-castle buzzwords. Oregon’s secondary education system is more dedicated to a score or a product than to a process that produces students who know what work means and have experience doing it. Dropping classes in the arts, including industrial arts, does just the opposite: students are denied opportunities to work with their hands and their minds.
Oregon can point to the buzzwords, but the shame is the lack of opportunity to learn and experience work skills that will enable students to compete in the work world. It would be nice to see our students as the No. 1 priority in Oregon’s system. Sadly, they are not.”
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