As we think about the “great resignation” and how industry’s urgent workforce needs might impact the way they work with schools, it’s worth looking back at the history for some context.

The early days of the public education system were shaped a fair amount by employers needing a large workforce with a common baseline of skills, both during its founding and then, in the 1920s, with the advent of vocational education. From that point, we saw employers involved more in a charitable and volunteering role: With a deep and fairly-skilled labor force after World War 2, they saw little reason to do more than what their role as community citizens required.

That changed in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration released the “A Nation at Risk” report, which claimed, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” This alarm bell was joined by a call from the administration for communities in general, and industry in particular, to make a major investment of time and resources in our school.

That call was met by employers, who invested a great deal in working with their local schools. That support brought with it some much-needed structure: Districts began hiring partnership directors, and national organizations like the National Association of Partners in Education and the Business Coalition for Education Reform sprang up to support the effort.

However, despite this investment, schooling and school outcomes remained unchanged, and employers failed to see any returns on their sometimes-significant investments. From an employer’s perspective, the focus was on inputs, the schools controlled the process and outcomes were an afterthought. As a result, employers began to abandon their schools in the mid-90s, and by 2001 the national organizations were gone entirely.

Of course, the issues didn’t go away, so employers took a different approach: Trying to influence policy and legislation. So, in the late 90s and 2000s you saw corporate leaders take a public stance on education (Craig Barrett of Intel for example) and direct political outreach through corporate-driven organizations like Achieve and Change the Equation.

These efforts did create some positive outcomes, such as Achieve’s success in promoting the alignment between K-12 graduation requirements and postsecondary entry points. Without employers in the room at the local level, most students were still funneled into a “four-year college for all” pipeline, and without the kinds of industry connections that would have helped them to think about and plan for their futures. The exception being employers who had become directly involved in Career and Technical Education programs, particularly in areas with critical workforce shortages.

Which leads us into today.

We are at an inflection point. All of the tools that employers had to buffer the lack of qualified and skilled graduates are gone. The Boomers are leaving the workforce in droves and outsourcing to other countries has been revealed as risky due to our recent and ongoing supply chain issues. In the meantime, skill requirements just continue to increase. As a result, I expect to see a full-court press of all of the strategies above – public statements, policy influence, and a new approach to education engagement, one with a clear focus on workforce preparedness, and fueled by the accountability mindset of No Child Left Behind that was lacking in the 80s and 90s. We’ll even see some employers and industries trying to bypass the schools entirely, like the ones that have just started their own schools. So, I would suggest we all get ready to be active partners to these employers, because they’re going to be bringing a lot of resources – and expectations – to our doors.

 

Brett Pawlowski is Executive Vice President of the National Center for College and Career (NC3T) (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance, and tools. These strategies help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.