The American education system must go through huge changes in the future. Education is the key for better jobs and job retention for our young men and women.
Primary and secondary education methods offered to our youths must change quickly to stay on the cutting edge. We need smaller schools, such as innovative charter or public/private hybrid schools, to apply principles of accountability and skills necessary for jobs.
Students need to be offered more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses, to be competitive with professional job seekers from abroad. Much employment in the future will depend upon skills in STEM fields.
For high school drop-outs or high school graduates not going to college right away, technical skills will be even more necessary for the entry-level jobs they seek, because career opportunities that rely on the arts and humanities will largely require college degrees.
Students will have to compete in the future with their counterparts from China, India and other economies in the world labor forces, many of whom may be just as well or better trained, and willing to work for lower wages. If this trend continues, many of the startup jobs for graduating or drop-out students from American high schools will disappear in the future. Jobs are now being globally outsourced by American companies to foreign workers that offer more attractive, lower wages for every type of manufacturing industry. That will hurt American students entering the job market in our own country, in the future.
One of the ways that K-12 education can be improved is through school reform. Our school teachers and principals need to be educated about the latest management and teaching techniques. Students need to learn how to work in teams, and to solve complex problems. Those are the skills that good, well-paying jobs will require.
Another necessary change is to lengthen the school day and the school year, so that our young people get the same amount of instruction students in other countries receive. We need longer hours in the school day, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. We also need 11 months of classes, with only one summer month off. Our long vacations hurt our children, because many of them forget too much of what they learned the year before.
Of course, longer school days and months will cost more in tax dollars, for added teachers’ salaries. Perhaps it can be paid for by a combination of more state funds, and some give-backs by teachers and other employees.
We will need to reward our best teachers on a merit-based pay system. Some employees will probably resist, but our children should come first. It will be necessary to establish benchmarks on teacher academic performances, so that fair judgments can be made about additional compensation for meeting or exceeding those education goals.
Finally, we must work on providing opportunities to keep our students in our state. Today, too many of our students go to out-of-state colleges and do not return back home when they graduate. Often, it is because they think they can get better employment job opportunities and higher wages elsewhere.
To build economic opportunities, we have to demonstrate to prospective employers that Maine has a well-educated workforce. Doing that requires that we work on two projects at once: The first is to increase the percentage of our high school graduates who go on to college. The second is to help people already in the workforce, who lack college degrees, to go back to school part-time.
Fortunately, several outstanding nonprofit groups are already working on both of these projects. The Harold Alfond Foundation provides support for students’ college education by offering a $500 grant toward college education for every child now born in Maine. The nonprofit group Educate Maine has a mission to increase enrollment in colleges, universities and technical schools. The Maine Employers Initiative encourages business to help support their employees’ educational efforts.
The Maine Community Foundation has made a major commitment to helping to build an educated workforce in our state. The foundation is helping to coordinate a number of educational ventures, overseeing numerous scholarship funds, and providing support for several organizations that are working on improving education at all levels, including early education and college degree attainment.
We all need to work to develop a better educated workforce for jobs in the future.
— Bernard Featherman is a business columnist for the Journal Tribune and former president of the Biddeford-Saco Chamber of Commerce.
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