We need a national effort to improve the nation's educational system.

• Author: Horner, Larry D.
• Position: Education

We need a national effort to improve the nation's educational system There is a broad consensus on the need for educational reform in our nation, but there is none on how we should proceed. This lack of focus is sapping the energy of the educational reform movement, and the implications for business should be the concern of every executive.

Of 285 proposals presented in 20 recent major reports on educational reform, only nine proposals are supported by five or more of the 20 studies. More telling, more than 70 percent of the recommendations have but a single champion.

It should not surprise us that the proposals for reform are numerous, fragmented, and sometimes at apparent cross purposes. The problems don't reside in a single, readily attacked sector of our educational system. Our problems are far broader, beginning with early childhood development and continuing through on-the-job training. They are also rooted in cultural attitudes. What our leadership must attempt is a reweaving of the fabric of American life, reestablishing the links between education, work, and a private sense of purpose.

To accomplish this, those of us participating in the Task Force on Human Capital sponsored by the Business-Higher Education Forum are convinced that the entire nation must undertake a major examination of the structure of our educational system and the policies governing our educational priorities. The overriding goal is to prepare all of our young people to enter adult life with the basic education and skills they need to function in the modern world.

In this effort, we must begin with the basics. This means fostering child-development services, expanding public pre-school education, and revitalizing and redirecting elementary and high school education. In short, we must abandon the pretext that an educational system designed for the nineteenth century can prepare our people to compete worldwide in the twenty-first century. We cannot assume that the current structure can do better in the future what it is failing to do now.

Our society has to find a way to bridge the gap between the system we have and the system we need. Right now, one-fourth of the potential U.S. labor pool lacks a high school diploma, a piece of paper that in itself no longer even guarantees literacy. Some 27 million people--nearly 15 percent of the adult population--may be functionally illiterate. They cannot handle the written word well enough to read a bus schedule or safety...