Common Core and Career Readiness?, Common Core Is Not An Education Development Model, It Is A Workforce Development Model.

My colleague Jane Robbins during Family Research Council’s Common Core webcast last night said Common Core is not an education development model, it is a workforce development model.

Which is very true.  You see all of the buzzwords associated with workforce development.  Making kids college-and-career ready,” preparing kids to be competitive in “a 21st century global economy”, help reduce the skills gap that we are seeing… yada yada…

It is no coincidence that we see a lot of corporate buy-in on Common Core from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc. as they have swallowed the Kool Aid that is the promise of Common Core.  It runs hand-in-hand with the workforce development model that has been pushed for years.

What is behind this push?  This article from The Fiscal Times was emailed to me.  It cites a paperby Peter Cappelli who is a professor at the Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources.  He makes an interesting observation reported by The Fiscal Times.

He suggests that what is really driving the discussion about worker skills is a combination of employers seeking to hold down payroll costs by keeping wages as low as possible – and a longer-term effort to transfer responsibility for training workers from employers themselves to the taxpayer.

“The evidence driving the complaints about skills does not necessarily appear where labor market experts might expect to see it, such as in rising wages,” Cappelli writes. “Instead, it comes directly from employers – typically from surveys – who report difficulties hiring the kind of workers they need. The assertions explaining their reported difficulties center on the idea that the academic achievement of high school [graduates] is inadequate or that there are not enough college graduates in practical fields like computer science and engineering. The recommendations from these reports include increased immigration and use of foreign workers as well as efforts to shape the majors that college students choose.”

The article continues…

More telling, though, is that Cappelli, who is also the author of the book Why Good People Can’t Find Jobs, notes a disinclination among employers to train existing workers; he says they look instead to hire individuals who already possess a specific skill set. In many cases, he finds, the business community is pushing the public sector to provide the sort of training that workers used to receive through apprentice programs, professional development programs and other on-the-job training.

“The view that emerges from these arguments is one where responsibility for developing the skills that employers want is transferred from the employer onto job seekers and schools,” he writes. “Such a transfer of responsibility would be profound in its implications.”

While increased training programs could reduce businesses’ costs, Cappelli notes, the end result is likely to be a less efficient system in which key job-related skills are necessarily left out.

Common Core has been found wanting in preparing students for college.  It’s unlikely it will be successful preparing students for the workplace either.  And, according to Cappelli, we can thank this shift on corporations who want to shift their job training costs to taxpayers.