Helping high schools
Nevada business can have
a big impact on day-by-day classroom dynamics
By
Steven Miller
BusinessNevada
Nevada employers
— like business people around the country — frequently
express dismay over the poor quality of present-day high
school graduates.
And while the
Silver State business community energetically attempts to help
out, engaging in all sorts of activities to support public
education, most often, unfortunately, it’s to little apparent
effect.
Nevertheless,
there may be a remarkably simple and cost-effective way that
Nevada employers can begin having a significantly positive
impact on the day-by-day dynamics in the state’s high schools.
To grasp the key
elements of the approach, let’s focus for a moment on the
issue of discipline — clearly, a prerequisite for education
success. Revealingly, the word itself comes from the Latin
discipulus, for pupil, and from discere, to learn.
In short, our very language reveals that the most authentic
and natural classroom discipline, in our modern sense of
order, arises when students are eager to learn and classrooms
are dominated by that attitude.
Now, cast your
mind across the Pacific for a moment and consider the fact
that Japanese high schools seem immune from most of the
discipline problems that plague U.S. high schools.
“There is a
reason for this,” notes a 1998 study from the Reason
Foundation. “Japanese students have vastly more respect for
their teachers than do their American counterparts, and more
respect for education in general.”
Is such respect
just some inexplicable enigma of the Mysterious East? No.
While culture plays a role, something much more down-to-earth
and practical is involved.
Japanese
students care more about their high-school grades, because
colleges and employers both carefully scrutinize grades and
teacher recommendations. The result is that high school
students pay attention to their teachers and graduate from
high school in greater proportions — 93 percent — than do
American students.
“They want to go
to school,” write the study authors, Alexander Volokh and Lisa
Snell, “because they are convinced, correctly, that their
occupational futures depend on educational achievement.
Employers are much more closely connected with high schools in
Japan than in the United States.”
So what would
happen if Nevada employers started requiring high-school
transcripts and not merely diplomas? Currently, notes Jackson
Toby, long-time head of the Institute for Criminological
Research and Rutgers University professor of sociology,
employers pay little or no attention to high-school
transcripts. They don’t bother to check whether, as Toby puts
it, the applicant’s “diploma represents four years of effort,
achievement and good behavior—or four years of seat time and
surliness.”
While requesting
high school transcripts would involve a significant change for
many companies, it could also save money in the long run — by
producing a higher quality average employee. And in Nevada
high schools, teachers would have an easier job maintaining
order, just as they now have an easier job managing
college-bound students.
Northwestern
University sociology professor James Rosenbaum — an expert on
the high-school-to-work transition — says that, “Since
employers ignore grades, it is not surprising that many
work-bound students lack motivation to improve them.”
While employers
commonly ask why teachers don’t exert their authority in the
classroom, notes Rosenbaum, “they unwittingly undermine
teachers’ authority over work-bound students. Grades are the
main direct sanction that teachers control. When students see
that grades don’t affect the jobs they will get, teacher
authority is severely crippled.”
Volokh and Snell
note that employer attention to transcripts has also been
explored as an answer to the problem of school violence. While
Japanese high school teachers are virtually never assaulted by
their students, the Clark County School District reported 302
suspensions or expulsions for violence to school staff in the
2004-05 school year. (Being district-wide numbers, they also
include middle and elementary schools.)
Albert Shanker,
the late president of the American Federation of Teachers,
liked this idea so much he wrote an article on it in 1990 for
Phi Delta Kappan magazine. “Long term partnerships with
high schools in which businesses agree to hire graduates on
the basis of how well they [do] in school,” asserted Shanker,
“will accomplish more than all the adopt-a-school programs put
together.”
The schools must
do their part, noted Shanker, with “a system for providing
transcripts that the business community can rely on.”
If the state
school districts lack a common, quality transcript, perhaps
next year’s Legislature can help.
After all, if
Nevada’s businesses and school districts both begin
paying real attention to student achievement in high school,
even the states non-college-bound students will discover
strong incentives to exert themselves.
<733 words>
Steven
Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and policy director for the
Nevada Policy Research Institute.
