As you can see from the various stories in the current edition of Employer Advocate, AIF and our lobby team are incredibly focused in our efforts with the legislature. We have already established ourselves as the leading voice on energy issues from the perspective of the business community with our Florida Energy Council, which helps drive policy discussions and initiatives to our Board and then to our lobby team. Now, AIF is in the initial throes of creating our seventh council: the Florida Education & Workforce Development Council (FEWDC), which will operate similarly in the dual fields of education reform and workforce development.
Why is this important? Quite simply, it is because our educational system, though still improving, is not producing graduates with the depth of knowledge in the basic skills that employers need. We need graduates that can, at a minimum, do three things: write cogently, think critically, and speak articulately. That is not what we are getting today. This is one of the reasons that AIF supported legislation such as school choice (vouchers) and the FCAT exam. While neither are yet perfected, they both offer parents and students a new beginning and the measuring stick that is so fundamentally needed to gauge how our students are doing.
As I travel around the state and the country, I continually hear from employers that we need dramatic change in our education system. And they are right. First, we must change the way we think about college. By that I mean, we do a disservice to our children when we continually preach that every child must go to college. Because the statistics clearly document that 40% of all children in Florida will never go to a post-secondary institution. Consequently, we are killing the self-esteem of those children who, for whatever reason, do not want to go to college. That’s why this session we worked with Sen. Don Gaetz and Rep. Will Kendrick to help them pass their key legislation: Career Choice Academies. Notice that it wasn’t called vocational education, because that retro connotation reeks of failure. The fact is that plumbers, electricians, cable technicians, computer specialists, etc., are all worthy jobs that can pay a very decent salary and thus provide success to anyone so motivated to learn the skills necessary. Think about what you paid for anyone with these skills the last time you needed them. Not everyone has to go to college; and, in fact, we couldn’t afford to have every child go to college, if for no other reason than we simply don’t have the space for them on our college campuses.
Second, we must radically change the way that we measure progress for our children in schools. Currently, any measure of a state’s education system as reported in newspapers or magazines chronicles the various state rankings of per capita spending, graduation rates, etc. This is the wrong measuring stick if we want to achieve a world-class education system. In a 21st Century globalized economy, our competition is not with Iowa, Minnesota or Michigan; our competition is with China, India, South Korea and Taiwan. Yet, what are we doing to measure our performance with the Far East? Frankly, not much. Last year in China, hundreds of millions of their students learned English on a daily basis. In all of America, only 24,000 students learned Mandarin Chinese, one of the three most commonly spoken languages in the world (along with Spanish and English). So, how does the U.S. education system compare worldwide? By the time a student is 9 years old, our education system is near the top in world rankings. By age 13, our education system ranks about equal to the world average, and by the time the student gets to be 17 years old, America ranks in the bottom four education systems in the world.
Our challenge is to insure that the education Florida children are receiving is relevant to their future success. To accomplish that we must fight the status quo thinking prevalent in our educational system. We must advocate for and instill multi-culturalism and multi-lingualism because we must effectively compete world-wide, not just across America. As we move forward here in Florida, know that AIF is dedicated to becoming the leading voice in education reform as well.
516 North Adams Street ● Post Office Box 784 ● Tallahassee, Florida 32302-0784 ● Phone: (850) 224-7173 ● Fax: (850) 224-6532 ● www.aif.com
