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CB> By Albert Shanker
CB> Last year, a national survv  > 3,000 businesses reported that 
CB> companies
CB> hiring young graduates pay very little attention to their high school
CB> achievement. This was not exactly news. It simply made explicit the 
CB> weak 
CB> link
CB> in the U.S. between school and work that some people have been 
CB> worried 
CB> about
    I'll ask the question that Shanker doesn't want to hear: why _should_ 
businesses care about HS achievement?  
    Businesses are in the business of making money for themselves, not in the 
business of flogging HS sophomores to work harder and take tough courses.  
Few businesses hiring _college_ grads even look at _college_ transcripts.  If 
a business doesn't see any relation between college achievement and later 
work to the point that evaluating college grades and courses taken is 
justified, why should that business care about even-more-remote HS 
oursework?
    If businesses thought there was a cause-and-effect relationship between 
HS grades and workplace productivity, they'd have done something about their 
hiring policies long ago.  But the mere fact that businesses don't care about 
HS grades says it all about how businesses see HS coursework as irrelevant to 
the work world and HS grades as an unreliable measure of anything.
CB> businesses would undoubtedly have said that high school graduates are 
CB> often
CB> so poorly prepared that it is not worth the time and expense to see 
CB> whether
CB> John got better grades or took tougher courses than Bill. The trouble 
CB> is, 
CB> as
CB> I wrote in an earlier column about this survey ("Linking School and 
CB> Work,"
CB> April 23, 1995), this is a "self-fulfilling prophecy." If a lot of 
CB> people
CB> start withdrawing money from a bank because they are afraid it will 
CB> fail, 
CB> the
CB> bank will certainly fail. 
    Just the fact that refusing to bank with weak banks may create a 
"self-fulfilling prophecy" of bank failure won't convince any business to put 
its money in a bad bank, either.
CB>  However, a second round of findings based on data from the National 
CB> Employer
CB> Survey links hiring more-educated workers with increased 
CB> productivity. In
CB> "The Other Shoe: Education's Contribution to the Productivity of
CB> Establishments," researchers from the National Center on the 
CB> Educational
CB> Quality of the Workforce looked first at the effect on productivity
CB> associated with an increase in the book value of a company's capital 
CB> stock.
    This survey is biased by ignoring the workplace of most HS-only workers: 
small businesses where stock prices aren't easily calculated!
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