Employability Project

Will your child be prepared to compete in the job market when they graduate?

 “We have a responsibility to communicate reality to parents. If, according to employers, schools aren’t doing what they need to be doing, then we want parents to know they have the power to change their local educational system.”

-Randy Gaschler

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An Introduction to the Employability Report Card Project

by Ellen Kaskie

The name is perhaps a bit misleading in its mildness:  The Employability Report Card Project.  Because of course “employability” is not a project at all, but a concrete necessity in the economy – a wall, if you will, that stands between success and failure for workers and businesses alike.  Business must have workers who can leap, climb, or claw their way over that wall in order to thrive, and it is not a “project” for them or for the nation.  It is a matter of survival.

Potential workers have to deal with that same wall.  First, are they able to scale it with the educational preparation schools have given them?  If yes, will they be able to continue to meet the challenges they find on the other side?  Why?  If no, why not?  Are they motivated to try again or did we neglect to teach them that?  What else did we neglect to teach them?  Could they have learned it at school?  Should they have learned it at home?  What is “it” and why do they lack it?  For these workers, it is also a matter of survival; employability pays the bills, raises the children, supports the businesses, moves the economy.

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Employability, School Funding, the Individual Learning Plan, and You

by Ellen Kaskie

Here’s the situation in a nutshell:  U.S. employers say that our public schools are turning out students who are inadequate to the workplace; government, which supplies most of public school funding via taxpayer dollars, has demanded mandatory demonstration of basic competencies through tests and measurements; teachers say they can’t be expected to educate students when they are forced to get them to keep passing standardized tests; and parents, long told by educators to just get out of the way, feel betrayed and fearful for their children’s futures.  Can something as simple as an Individual Learning Plan make a difference?

Where did our public schools go wrong?  What is to be done about it?  For all of the outcry against mandatory standardized testing and its classroom equivalent “teaching to the test”, this situation did not happen in a vacuum.  At the very least, our public schools are expected to turn out students who can read, write and do sums.  Surely we should be able to ask them to do it on command.  Such students may then go on directly to the work force where they will build on this basic foundation with specialized training and daily application.  Or they may continue on to college where they will further strengthen and refine this foundation . . . before going on to the work force where, like their non-college peers, they will build on it with specialized training and daily application.

If the foundation is weak, the house will fall.  Employers have found the foundation very weak indeed:  it has been estimated that only 15% of our students leave school with the basic skills necessary to participate competitively in the workforce.  If the public schools were a business, they would have gone under in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Well, public schools are not a business.  They belong to us – to all of us, parents, students, teachers, employers – and we pay dearly for them.  Neither are public schools a magic door through which we may send our children at age six and receive them back, well-nourished and fully formed, twelve years later.  We, as a community, all bear the responsibility of forming and educating our children.  If “teaching to the test” is not the best way to produce a literate workforce with a strong foundation capable of supporting lifelong learning, what is?  What should we try?

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