Basics should be taught in high school

Many parents think today's good-paying jobs require lots of education. So they conclude that their children should go to college. And they are partially right.

The global economy has changed our nation's workplace to where there are boundless opportunities for those who have the knowledge and skills prepared to take them. Some require a college education. There are also many good-paying jobs that require higher skills. The past generation found that a high school diploma got you in the door to decent-paying jobs. But today, a high school diploma is no assurance that a graduate would have the basic skills needed to get one of the jobs in the current market.

Public education, designed for the industrial economy, is slow to change in preparing students with the skills required for the new high-performance workplace. Today, high-wage employers spend needless recruitment dollars trying to hire college graduates, and bypassing high school students, in order to find workers with strong basic skills. If all students left high school with those basic skills, employers would have a wider and less-expensive pool of workers from which to choose. Furthermore, parents would not have to send their children to college to get the basic education they should have received in high school.

Employers now have good-paying jobs that do not require a college degree but do require the new higher skills that include: (1) the hard skills — basic mathematics, problem solving and reading abilities at levels much higher than high school graduates now attain; (2) the "soft" skills — the ability to work in groups and to make effective oral presentations; skills many schools do not teach; (3) the ability to use personal computers to carry out simple tasks such as word processing. These are the new basic skills needed for all students, whether they go to college or not, regardless of gender, regardless of race (see Murnane & Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills, 1996, and The U.S. Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving the Necessary Skills, SCANS, 1992).

As early as 1995, a Dan Jones & Associates poll commissioned by the Utah Partnership for Educational and Economic Development found that half of Utah employers thought finding qualified applicants was their main problem and that basic skills were the most important ones needed. Over 80 percent of employers favored strengthening the school curriculum that emphasized basic skills and positive character traits, including career counseling.