This week I attended a meeting to discuss (I thought) the findings of a panel looking at how business and education should and can work together. This panel was broad--encompassing both private and public education and all sorts of businesses. I worried that they would have trouble trying to sort through these issues and the obviously different needs that business, private education, and public education have, but I did know some of the people on the panel and know that they are pretty sharp (Brenda Becker from Hempfield and Ethan Demme from Math-u-See--who I learned was on the panel when I arrived). We did not talk much about findings during the time I was there (I did miss the last 15 minutes). There are some obvious problems and challenges, however. Here are the biggest mountains:

1. Public and private education are too often not two groups of people doing identical tasks, but rather two different ways of looking at the world. Here is an example. During one of the brainstorming sessions, we discussed how we could all advocate (which might or might not mean lobby) Harrisburg on different issues. This, however, is where the problem starts. I have one message for Harrisburg: leave us alone (and leave our competitors alone too). My number one goal would be to say--defund all education. Education is best handled in a market. Maybe government can do things to encourage this market (they are recently moving to help fund private education through tax scholarships). This helps, but it would help more if they just cut the darn thing. The real costs of education would be evident. Good schools (whether private or public) would survive; many on both sides would fail...and be replaced by better options. The tax payer would be kept from oblivion.

2. Businesses want guarantees; schools will not give them. At one point, the business people in my group were mentioning what schools could do that would really help them. They kept asking for promises from schools that their students (all of them) actually knew and had a list of definable skills. This seems reasonable to me. The business people live in worlds of contracts and guarantees. The public school folks, however, could not and would not give these guarantees. This is a massive problem that puts the differences in worldview between businesses and public schools in focus. Business wants promises; public schools want efforts. There is no way to bridge this gap. Businesses spend a gigantic amount of money doing what schools claim to have already done. This is frustrating for tax paying businesses and rightly so. The problem at the root of it, I think, is that public schools are (for reasons of cost and gargantuan size) failing to see that they are educating students and that each one is a human being and that businesses are not hiring averages of what they do. They are hiring individuals and they want individual guarantees. This problem will get worse. Classroom size needs to fall radically (15 should be the aim; 20 the max). We are headed toward 40 in some schools. Teachers cannot know and see the problems of the individual student when burdened with this many souls. We are going away from...not toward guarantees.

3. Finally, (and this one is intractable for me), this panel is not really about education, but it is about non-college prep education. Businesses can give good feedback on the skills or problems that students have when they reach the workforce. This is true most true of students that go directly from a school into a business. It is harder to track for students that go from a school to a school to a business (often in a different area). At Veritas, most are going on to another school. Many end up in other areas of the country. Very hard to track progress using local businesses. It is easier for public schools to do this, but still when a student goes from Hempfield to Penn State and then to a business in Lancaster County how much to blame are each of the different entities if the student can not do Algebra?

So, it was sort of depressing, but depressing enough that I might have come up with a good idea. I will try to sell it next week and you might hear of it in the future.