Educators discuss business

Monday, May 6, 1996

Cabinet officer, officials weigh privatizationBy Phillip
Carter

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Speaking before a skeptical audience of 300 educators and
business people in Century City on Saturday, Education Secretary
Richard Riley preached the values of education technology. He
demanded more business activism in schools to build the next
century’s work force.

"The industries of the future have to be invented ­ they
don’t just exist," said Riley, the irascible former governor of
South Carolina whom Clinton appointed in 1992. "The bootstraps of
the 21st century will be the ability to ‘boot up,’ to apply
critical thinking skills to technology in a fast-changing world of
international competition."

Riley’s comments came as the latest advocacy in a growing
movement in education ­ including the UC system ­ towards
privatization and a greater integration between business and public
teaching.

Riley emphasized that today’s schools must collaborate with
business to create high standards and synchronize them with the
needs of business.

"The era of ‘dumbing down’ in education is over ­ all
children can learn and all children can learn to higher standards,"
Riley said. "These ideals, this reach for high standards, has
everything to do with technology and its role in preparing our
young people to be literate productive members of society."

The audience cheered when Riley talked about funding, and gave
an ultimatum to business: get involved in education, or lose out in
competitiveness when hiring your workers.

"In purely economic terms, the need to invest in technology for
the nation’s schools is making itself more and more evident every
single day," he said.

The remarks came at a luncheon held by the Milken Family
Foundation at the Century Plaza Hotel, as part of its 1996 National
Education Conference. Immediately after Riley’s keynote speech, a
panel with one teacher, businessman and administrator engaged in a
debate on the dais with each other and the audience.

All three echoed Riley’s remarks, but added their personal tinge
to his comments about the need for business and education to work
together toward public-school privatization.

"Business needs skilled, talented work forces to be able to
compete in the world," said Bert Roberts, chief executive of MCI
Communications, at Saturday’s luncheon. "Corporations have to train
and they have to retrain; universities and colleges have to
interact in the training process, and critically, K-12 have to
interact in the process in different ways."

But with education institutions becoming more and more corporate
in nature through a growing trend of privatization, Roberts
demanded higher participation from his business colleagues in
public schools.

"From a business perspective, the burden is shifting more and
more to business to fix and solve the educational issues in the
United States, Roberts said. "We’ve gotta wire the schools, we’ve
gotta train the teachers, we’ve gotta have corporate citizenship in
this process, with public-private partnerships to improve
education."

Yet for all Roberts’ futuristic optimism about this
business-education partnership, Los Angeles teacher Helen Bernstein
injected a dose of realism when she spoke about the real conditions
in today’s schools.

"When the last speaker talks about technology in the classroom,
I want to remind him that my last classroom didn’t have an outlet,"
said Bernstein, who is president of Los Angeles’ teacher union. "It
would have been wonderful to me to have computer technology in my
classroom, but I would have no where to plug it in."

Despite her skeptical attitude towards technology, Bernstein
said that business ought to become more active in public schools
­ perhaps even by taking schools over and managing them
efficiently.

"I am floored, as a union leader who negotiates, finding myself
negotiating with people who are running a $4 billion operation, and
it’s being run by ex-teachers and ex-principals who are not
businesspeople," Bernstein said in her speech.

"I don’t know what they’re doing running transportation and
business services divisions and the rest of (the Los Angeles school
district) ­ that ought to be run by business people," she
added. "I wish the business people would take it over and make it
run right, and let us (teachers) do what needs to be done in the
classroom."

Increasingly for the UC system, the line between teachers,
administrators and businesspeople has blurred just as it has for
the Los Angeles school district. Even UCLA Chancellor Charles Young
­ himself a professor by training ­ has said his job
requires him to be more of a businessman than an educator.

"The amount of money that is available to run the university
from the state is going down … we’re going to have to find other
sources of revenue and we’re going to have to be more efficient,"
said Young in a prior interview on the subject of university
privatization.

The debate over privatization at UCLA and in the UC system has
exploded in many forums ­ student fees, business enterprises
and academics to name a few. As UCLA transitions from a
"state-funded university" to a "state-assisted university" in
Young’s lexicon, educators and politicians disagreed over the costs
and benefits of such a move.

"The move towards private resources and funding beyond state
support is one of necessity," said Lt. Gov. Gray Davis in an
interview, who has become the most vocal advocate on the UC Board
of Regents for greater connections between California’s business
and educational system.

"I am trying to build greater public support the UC system
­ UC is already a major economic driver for California," Davis
said. "I don’t propose that this research (on behalf of business)
be done for free ­ I propose that it be done at market-based
cost."

In addition to receiving the financial benefits of research,
Davis went on to argue that the value of a UC education would soar
because of its practical application.

Nonetheless, several prominent critics of UC privatization spoke
out against this growing trend away from broad-based liberal
education to focused, applied research-driven education. Among
these, former-UC President Clark Kerr argued that the trend may
have done irreversible harm to the UC’s traditional mission of
"research, teaching and public service."

"It is important to be a productive member of the labor force,
but it’s also important to be a good citizen and to have morals in
life," said Kerr, the architect of California’s 1960 Master Plan
for Higher Education. "I think (education) has gone too far toward
just being a good member of the labor force, to the neglect of
being a good citizen and having a good knowledge of the
humanities."

David Saxon, another former UC President and physics professor
at UCLA, added in a telephone interview that public schools ought
to retain their broad-based educations and avoid the pitfalls of
business-oriented education.

"Private institutions can focus on technology or they can focus
on religious studies," he said. "But UCLA has a part to play in the
University of California which has the responsibility of providing
the citizens of this state an education in a very broad
spectrum."