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GARY EICHTEN: All this week, we are focusing on the public schools in Minnesota, trying to learn more about how the schools work, whether they work, and what changes, if any, are needed to make them work better. But grading the performance of the education system can be pretty tricky. Among other things, you need to decide what you expect out of the schools. What standard are you going to use?

So during this hour, we are going to focus on the expectations we have for the public school system in Minnesota. Joining us here in the studio to share with us what they expect from the schools, Joe Nathan, who is with the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute, also, Dr. James Reinertsen, who is the President-Elect of the Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital and Chair of the Minnesota Business Partnerships Academic Agenda Committee.

Mary Crampton is here. She's a junior high school teacher from Central Middle High School-- or Middle School, rather, Central Middle School in Eden Prairie. Susan Larson Fleming, who joins us in her role as a parent. She already has a fourth grader in the Minneapolis Public Schools and will have a second child starting kindergarten next fall.

Also joining us by satellite from St. Cloud to provide us with the perspective of a school board member is Dee Halberg, who is the Chair of the St. Cloud School Board. First of all, thanks all of you for joining us this afternoon. Well, first of all, Dee Halberg, what are you and the folks in St. Cloud expect out of the schools? Are you trying to turn out little Einstein's or little Mother Teresa's or both or what?

DEE HALBERG: All of the above.

GARY EICHTEN: All of the above? Realistically?

DEE HALBERG: Well, I think that when we talk about students meeting their full potential, that, of course, is jargon. But it is something that I think all of us, both as parents and as board members and teachers, want of kids. We want them, whatever their potentials are, that they recognize what they are and are able to develop into full potential.

And I would like to add briefly that that's more than an academic thing. I think when you talked about Mother Teresa, it's also a sense of their place and mission in society, as well as what they need to learn to function in the society.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you have any measurements that you use that you think are particularly valid to determine whether or not the kids are meeting the standards that you hope they'll meet?

DEE HALBERG: I think that-- and I have to speak for St. Cloud, but I think I'll be speaking fairly generally for this. I think this is something that we're struggling with right now. The kind of measurements in the past have always been what I call easy measurements, the simple learning, the rote learning that they've accomplished and all that kind of thing. Those are the simplest things to measure.

What we're trying to measure now are those lasting learning kinds of things, whether or not they can apply it to whatever it is that they need to apply it to in life. And so I think that we're struggling with trying to assess that. That's, I think, what education is all about right now, trying to determine how we find those benchmarks, how we really assess the more important kinds of learnings that are going on. I think it's quite possible.

My personal belief is that it not only is going to be much more time-consuming, and it's going to take a whole new way of looking at how we test kids using the old term. But I think that if we can do it and do it well, it's going to be worth the effort.

GARY EICHTEN: Dr. Reinertsen, a nationally known economist, Lester Thurow, was on Midday a while ago, and he said, actually, it's fairly easy to measure whether the schools are doing a good job. He said all you have to do is ask business people in the area whether or not the students, once they get out of school, have the skills they need to go to work in the local businesses. First of all, I think that's-- looking at this having studied this as part of the business partnership committee, is that a fair standard do you think?

JAMES REINERTSEN: Business is one of the important customers of the schools? And so you can assess some aspects of school performance by asking the next recipient, if you will, of the schools products how did they do? How did the students perform once they got into the workplace?

I think the answer to that question here in Minnesota, anyway, was provided in part by a survey of some 351 businesses that the business partnership and the employers association and others participated in. And that survey indicated that over 50% of the businesses felt that students at the time they'd completed high school were not in a position to effectively work in the workforce.

And the other thing that the business has also said is that, as a result, well over 50% of the jobs available now in Minnesota are not jobs that they consider a high school diploma to be an adequate preparation for.

I think that's a reflection in part of the remarkable change that's occurred in the workplace in terms of the requirements, the expectations we have of our employees. But it's also a reflection of the move from a regional or local to an international standard for employees.

And so we're comparing, let's say, multinational plants like IBM's plants, which have plants all over the world, to the Minnesota experience and saying, we've learned from this international experience that we could probably do better in terms of the kinds of employees, we get.

I will tell you, as a result of that, IBM in Rochester, just to give us a very concrete example, does not hire any high school graduates for any of its positions in plant production or clerical work or anything of that sort. They require at least two years of additional training of some kind before they will hire a technical training of some sort, before they can be hired to work in the plant.

The workplace has just become too complex and too demanding of basic skills of the traditional sorts, technical skills-- very important-- teamwork skills, critical thinking skills, scientific method application skills. The workplace is not a place where you just come anymore and put in your time and obey orders and go home. It never really was. But if people think it is, they've got another thinker coming.

GARY EICHTEN: Did the survey indicate whether the students, once they get out of school, have learned how to learn enough so that they can, in fact, adapt to changing circumstances or has that kind of coming up short in that area?

JAMES REINERTSEN: Well, the data said that 90% of the employers in the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota said that today's work environment demands greater problem-solving skills than the students are coming to the workforce with.

JOE NATHAN: I think it's good that--

GARY EICHTEN: This is Joe Nathan.

JOE NATHAN: --you're saying that it's not just about business. That is to say, schools are not just farm teams for America's businesses. We heard earlier about Mother Teresa. Well, I don't know about Mother Teresa, but frankly, as a parent of three children who attend the Saint Paul Public Schools, I want our children to know something about the arts. I want our children to know how to keep their bodies healthy. I want our children, frankly, to know how to work for justice and to work for a better world.

And sometimes those kinds of ideas are encouraged in corporations. Sometimes they need to have the courage to say, wait a minute, is our company really following the OSHA rule, or is our company really following the Pollution Control guidelines?

So I completely agree that one of the groups that we need to listen to are business groups. But I think there are a number of other groups as well. And I sometimes I get very nervous when I hear someone say from on high, all we have to do is ask business. If the kids are prepared, then we'll know. I think that we expect our public schools to do far more, and I didn't hear in your comments any disagreement with that.

But I think it's important to understand that as a part of a democratic society, we are preparing youngsters not only to be workers, but also to be citizens. And that means we have to do some things in schools that sometimes business groups don't necessarily agree with.

And I'll just tell you very briefly that when I was a public school teacher, as I was for 15 years, I had a group of students who, as a part of their classwork, looked at three large companies that were smelling up the air and did an enormous amount of research and filed petitions and went to the legislature and testified.

And ultimately several companies were very unhappy with this, but we were successful in getting those companies after several years to stop polluting the air. And in fact, one of them ended up being very happy with us because it came up with a new process. But I think the point here, Gary, is that it's important to understand that critical thinking skills and working for justice is also a part of what I think we should expect from public schools.

GARY EICHTEN: But Mary Crampton, do we expect too much from the schools? You're teaching junior high. Wouldn't it make your job a lot easier if all you had to worry about was making sure that kids learned their math or their reading or something instead of this fairly wide range of social mandates that we place on the schools?

MARY CRAMPTON: Well, it is a really wide range. And I think that daily you go into the classroom and you're kind of awestruck by the amount of information and the amount of learning that you want to communicate to your students. And there are always issues that come up in classroom that are not-- technically I teach geography. That's my title. That's my training.

But in relation to geography, we always have to talk about things that go on in the world that have to do with social justice, that have to do with business and industry investment in different places in the world, and how that impacts those places. And that might not be on my agenda for that day. I might be wanting to teach about climate, but I need to teach about something else that's happening.

Today, we're being preempted by the president and his response to what's going on in Moscow, in Russia. And every year that I teach about Russia or the Soviet Union, I need to change what I do, because every year there's new information.

And I think one of the overwhelming things that most teachers feel is that there's just an enormous growth in the amount of information and the amount of issues that we need to teach kids. And 6 and 1/2 hours a day isn't enough time, so we struggle with that.

GARY EICHTEN: Susan Larson Fleming, do you think that your children are going to get the kind of education you want them to get?

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: I think that I have a great role in ensuring they do. I think we've talked a lot about what the schools can do, but I think parents have to have very high expectations as well. And I feel that I'm in partnership with the schools. I don't abdicate responsibility when I send my child off in the morning. I feel that it is my responsibility to know what's going on and to participate as possible in the schools and just to find out-- be available. And that is harder and harder, I think, in these times.

GARY EICHTEN: Why so?

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Well, people are working. Schools aren't close to where people live. Children mostly are bussed out of their neighborhoods. So former sort of links of camaraderie aren't necessarily there, harder to find. There aren't enough hours in the day.

JAMES REINERTSEN: Do we--

GARY EICHTEN: Go ahead, Dr. Reinertsen.

JAMES REINERTSEN: I was going to piggyback on that. The business partnership has recognized that the schools are one part, a very important part of our community's effort to produce a next generation of productive citizens. But they're not the only part. We tend when we describe our expectations of the schools, I think, to load an enormous amount of stuff onto the schools.

And in our report on this, we said it this way. It's as if we've said to the school systems, take our kids, whether they're prepared or not, nourished or not, fatigued from work and athletic practice and all the other things that they get involved in.

Groggy from watching six hours of TV, may or may not have good parental role models of reading and serious conversation and lifelong learning, and then give these kids a world class education in the three R's and so forth, but in schools that are beset by violence, disrespect, and apathy.

By the way, while you're doing this, also fulfill these 508 state-mandated tasks. And if you don't, we won't give you the money. And oh, one more thing. We tell them, do this all in 180 days, instead of the 210 to 230 your international competitors get. It's kind of like good luck.

I think that when we have these expectations of the schools, we also have to recognize-- and it's become said so often. It's almost trite, but it's terribly important. It takes an entire community to raise a child. And it's a little unfair to load all the expectations only on the schools.

I think the teachers and school superintendents told us very loudly and clearly when we interviewed them over the last several years trying to learn about this problem that they felt put upon on this issue of expectations. And parents are an incredibly important part of helping that community develop that's going to raise a child that's a productive citizen.

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Well, I think it's a whole community. And one thing I know I want for my children is not only that they have reading, writing, and arithmetic, if you will, but that they're nurtured and respected as individuals. That they are, in a sense, welcomed into a community of learners that starts so early in their lives. And it's this idea of developing critical thinking, of developing processes to deal with the world. Because by the time my children finish, things will be so different. Things are different year to year.

DEE HALBERG: I'd like to suggest that I don't think that most of us are really concerned about the expectations that come out of the schools. I think it's good for the society to have high expectations of the schools and of those of us that are concerned and work directly with the schools.

On the other hand, I think that society also has to support the change that needs to happen and to give people a feeling that it is, as has been already indicated here, a community partnership. That it isn't just the teacher, it isn't the superintendent, it isn't the school board, it isn't some particular individual, but it is a community effort that has to take place.

A full commitment that these kids are our kids, they're all of our kids, and we expect a lot out of them, but we're also going to be there for them. And I don't mean just in terms of financial help, although that, of course, is a critical thing. But also in terms of saying to people, we recognize when you're doing a good job. We know that this takes a lot of time. We know that the class sizes are large, but we're going to try to be there to help.

And I think that we can accept high expectations on the part of the public, as long as we know that that public is also there as a support system to us. I think the difficulty is and has been that they expect the schools to do this and this and this and this, and then they're always complaining about what we're doing, feel that partnership.

GARY EICHTEN: Right. Why do you folks think that-- now we were talking to some folks yesterday and they basically said, gee, the schools are really doing a pretty good job on the whole. And I kind of get that sense sounds today for the most part. But yet there is this perception out there that, boy, something's fallen through the cracks. The kids just aren't learning the stuff they need to to get by. Is the public's perception that far askew?

JOE NATHAN: I work at the Humphrey Institute, but I spend about 80% of my time out in schools listening to teachers and parents and hopefully learning from them. And I guess I just throw out a couple of statistics. I think the public is right.

And I think that we need to have new kinds of schools, because I think we're about at the stage people were hundreds of years ago when they were looking at candles for indoor illumination, and then gradually people began looking at electricity and thinking, maybe that made some sense. And the schools in fundamental ways are very much like they were 70 or 80 years ago.

There's one teacher 25 to 35 students in a classroom in the elementary schools. They're pretty much self-contained. There are a few exceptions, such as ones that you heard from this morning. But by and large, we have the same basic model. We've made far less use of technology than the business community. We don't make nearly as much use of the world outside the school as some of our competitors.

The Japanese we often here spend a lot more days in school. Actually, they don't. They don't spend a lot more days in buildings. They do make much more sophisticated use of the entire continent, the entire country. Their kids are out 20, 30, 40 days a year all over the country as a part of intensive and thoughtful field trips.

But I guess I'd throw out a couple of statistics. Last year, the Minnesota Community Colleges did a study of the people who were entering-- this is Minnesota. This is not North Carolina or Mississippi or Arkansas, with which we sometimes compare ourselves. And they found that only a quarter of the youngsters entering our community colleges in this state had college-level math skills, and only half of them had college-level writing skills. And I think there are a variety of reasons for that. But I think if we look at skill levels in this state, it's not acceptable.

I also think it's worth noting that last year there was a study of math skills comparing youngsters in Minnesota with other states around the United States, and that found that once again, we were above average. The problem, of course, is that average is awful. And only a quarter of the eighth graders nationally could do what teachers thought they ought to be able to do, and above average Minnesota was 31%. So I think we have a long, long way to go before we ought to be satisfied.

JAMES REINERTSEN: Let me put a specific example on this issue. I think our expectations as parents are sometimes dulled because our usual measure of success is that our children graduated and they went on to the next level of schooling.

But what Joe has just described is, was that student then capable of fully using that next level of opportunity? And in 25% or 50% of the cases in math and in communication language skills, probably not. There was some remedial rework required then at that next level in order for the student to fully grasp the opportunity.

But meanwhile, back in the community, the community thinks our child graduated and went off to school. Things are pretty good in the schools. There is a gap between our assessment of our own schools. People say, oh, our school is pretty good. But you ask them about the national education system, they say, well, it's terrible. There's a reality gap there.

GARY EICHTEN: It's kind of like Congress.

JAMES REINERTSEN: A little bit like the same thing. The specific example I want to cite for you is going back to the IBM plant in Rochester, they don't hire high school graduates because of the skills in both technical and basic skills.

But also the teamwork and critical thinking skills just don't seem to be present. They do hire-- and we're used to hearing this kind of stuff almost to the point we're tired of it. They do hire the 18-year-old product of the school systems in Singapore and Taiwan and so forth into their school systems-- into their jobs, rather.

I was shocked to hear-- I don't know why I should be shocked to hear this, just simply because we're not used to hearing it this way-- that they also hire the high school graduates in Mexico into their plants. We're used to hearing about the schools in Taiwan and Japan being somehow or other exceptional in producing products that are useful-- work well in workplace settings and so forth. But we're not used to hearing that from schools in Mexico.

DEE HALBERG: Well, I have a question about that. And I think that without going into the whole business of whether we're measuring apples and oranges, I think the fact that 90 some percent of our kids go on to post-secondary education would lead me to say that those students that don't go on to post-secondary education statistically couldn't be compared with those in Taiwan and so on. But I don't want to get into that issue.

My question that I have generally that I don't have an answer for is that I believe, too, that we've got a long way to go. In fact, I doubt that we'll ever be satisfied with what we're doing, nor should we. But the fact of the matter is that there's tremendous amount of change that's going to have to happen within the system to get where we want to go in this world class citizenship that we're talking about.

And that means change. I mean, we're not talking about just upgrading math or something. We're doing some really drastic kinds of change in terms of how you organize kids within a system, what you expect of your teachers and all that kind of thing.

And I submit that right now, when it comes down to the practical application of this, the public is scared of that change. I submit that the public is really scared of that change, because when you try to do it, they're worried. Like, all of us-- and I'm approaching 60 here one of these days-- all of us are comfortable with what we had, what we understand. And what we're going to have to do is to do something different. But it's something different and people are afraid of that difference.

MARY CRAMPTON: I would go along with that. I think one of the reasons American parents register comfort level with schools is because they recognize just the schools that they went through. In the community where I live, they're facing an enormous budget deficit and they say, well, cut programs, cut staff, and they already have class sizes of 33.

And they have no idea, I don't think, that they're already offering the minimal program. They meet the minimal state requirements in all the subject areas. And there is nothing left to cut. So there's some real disparities between what's out there and what the perception is of what's out there. I think there's some real concerns that we need to address regarding that disparity.

But on the issue of change, you're absolutely right. I teach in a secondary setting and I teach in a suburb that's, by most definitions, a very comfortable suburb. And the parents have high expectations for their children, as we all have. They are very concerned about how change, fundamental change in public schools is going to affect their child's academic future.

If we switch over to outcome-based education and we make portfolios and we list all these wonderful things kids can do, how is that going to affect their class rank? And are they going to be able to get into the college of their choice? Are the colleges that they want to send their children to going to accept this new way of teaching kids and this new way of measuring what they're capable of doing?

Are they going to be able to go where they want to go and pursue what they want to pursue? Even though we all know in the education business that we're on the right track and we think that what we're doing is right, there's a lot of resistance out there to that kind of change.

GARY EICHTEN: Are you worried about that with your child?

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Well, I'm not so worried-- well, I'm not so worried. I'm one of those parents who thinks that my child's school is just excellent. And my child's school is doing a lot of things working with team teaching, something you talked about this morning, doing a lot of teamwork thing as a school that has recognized that math scores maybe weren't so good in five years ago, targeted that as something that the staff as a whole would work at.

I think as a parent, I'm a little more worried about when people start talking the whole system that the individual school, the individual teacher, the individual classroom gets lost. In Minneapolis, probably the strongest thing they've done is lowered the class size.

And as much as you talk about changing systems, changing ways of teaching, the fact that you don't have 35 students in a class makes such a difference. My daughter has 24 students in her class, and it's fabulous. And I think next year when my kindergartener comes in, they're talking 19 students. That's wonderful. For a public school, that's wonderful.

And getting back to my point about nurturing and welcoming these students and their parents into the system, if you will, I think what could be better? You know that something really exciting is going on there because the teachers and the staff are talking to each other and working together to help the kids.

GARY EICHTEN: I want to remind everyone that we're listening or you're listening, rather, to a special edition of Midday here on Minnesota Public Radio. This is part of our focus on education. All week long we are taking a look at K through 12 education in the state of Minnesota. It will all culminate with a town meeting on Friday from 11:00 to 1:00 at the World Theater in downtown Saint Paul. You're certainly invited to come by in person or join us via the radio on Friday.

Today, we're focusing on what we expect from our public schools. We're joined by a whole panel of people who know what they're talking about. Dee Halberg, who is Chair of the Saint Paul School Board, Joe Nathan, Center--

DEE HALBERG: Thank you.

GARY EICHTEN: --with the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute, Dr. James Reinertsen, who is the President-Elect of the Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital and Chair of the Minnesota Business Partnerships Academic Agenda Committee, Mary Crampton, who teaches at the Central Middle School in Eden Prairie, and Susan Larson Fleming, who has a child in the Minneapolis school system.

Was there ever a time when the school system was any good that we could look back and say, well, gee, this was really what we're trying to get back to?

JOE NATHAN: Several years ago, I was hired by the National Governors Association to work with them and develop a set of recommendations about what governors could do to improve the nation's schools. The first question I asked a number of governors was what was the graduation rate in the 1920s, the good old days? Most of them thought it was 80% to 90%. Listeners might think about that question. What was the percentage of American youngsters who graduated in the 1920s?

The answer is 24%. We've never had as high a percentage of youngsters graduating from American schools. As Dr. Reinertsen said earlier, I think one of the problems is that we have much higher expectations today of our schools than we've ever had before.

I want to mention a quick thing about expectations and comments about there's nothing left to cut. Frankly, one of the concerns that I have-- and I want to salute KSGN for spending a week on this subject and Minnesota Public Radio for spending a week on this subject-- is the amount of attention that's given to athletic accomplishment versus academic accomplishment.

GARY EICHTEN: Unfortunately, we're not on TV, of course. And what we had here-- and I imagine there were hands coming together in St. Cloud as well. And four people are on the table here all clapping. Go ahead, Joe.

JOE NATHAN: Well, we spend millions of dollars on elementary, middle, and secondary school, high school athletics in this state. I was a high school athlete. I was a college athlete. Our children participate in athletics, and I think there's a real value to it. But I think we're so far out of whack in terms of the amount of attention and frankly, the amount of funding that we give to this relative to other kinds of things that we don't even know where whack is.

The reality here, folks, is that if you look in the major Metropolitan newspapers in this state-- and I write for a couple of them-- if you look at the major Metropolitan newspapers and you look at the amount of attention that's given to athletic accomplishment, and if you look at the amount of attention that's given to academic accomplishment, I think we are giving our youngsters a very dangerous message, which is, as for today, if you look in a major Metropolitan daily in the Twin Cities, you'll see a full page devoted to outstanding young women who are playing basketball and do it very well.

And that's great. But when was the last time you saw a full page devoted to the pictures of outstanding people in science or mathematics or drama or theater? I think we're giving youngsters a very dangerous message.

When I talk with people from Japan and Taiwan and other countries, they're amazed at the amount of attention that we give to sports relative to other kinds of accomplishments. And I don't think we ought to do away with athletics, but I think we ought to have a much broader respect for academic and artistic achievement.

GARY EICHTEN: Do you think, though--

DEE HALBERG: I think that.

GARY EICHTEN: Go ahead.

DEE HALBERG: I think it underlines what I was trying to say before is that the public schools really, to a large extent, respond to the values of the society. And the reason that we put a lot of money into athletics is that that's what the demand is from the society. I agree fully with what you said.

But I remember talking not very long ago to a group of teachers who were saying, oh, the class size, particularly at the primary level, we need to have more time with these students-- so on the usual arguments and so on. And they were valid.

And I said, well, if I were queen of the world, I would go and I would say, well, given only the amount of money that we have right now, we're going to cut out all inter-- I want to say intercollegiate, but you know what I mean-- athletics.

We'll keep the good intramural programs. We'll still have kids learn how to use their bodies so that there will be a lifelong kind of activity, but we'll cut out all the intercollegiate kinds of things so that money can be saved to put into the ratio. Now, it wouldn't solve all our problems. But the fact of the matter is it happened to a board that did that. I mean, that's a rhetorical question.

JOE NATHAN: Well, let me just say that I don't think it's only imposed by the community. I'm familiar with at least one school district in the central part of the state, which tells teachers that if they're going to hire them, they're going to have to start at the entry level, except if they're football coaches. And this particular school district has made an accommodation.

And I heard the superintendent say this recently to a teacher who they were interested in hiring to establish a new kind of school, a chartered public school, that she would have to come in at an entry level unless she was a football coach. And that school district has worked out an accommodation at the request of the principals, allowing people to come in at their full salary, that is to say, receive the benefit of the number of years of experience. But the only exception that they make is if it's a football coach.

GARY EICHTEN: Folks, I may be dumb as a post though, but I still don't get it. Wasn't there a time when kids got a pretty good education? Maybe not up to global standards of today, but by the standards that we were measuring at that time. People were getting a good education. They could still participate in sports. The schools were providing the bands and all of that sort of thing.

MARY CRAMPTON: We lived in a time where we had a strong manufacturing economy and kids who didn't make it in that setting, in that rigid kind of school setting were able to leave school and go out into the world of work and make a productive living. That's no longer true. We know now that kids have to have more than a high school education.

GARY EICHTEN: So we have to drop all the fun stuff just so they can compete with Singapore?

MARY CRAMPTON: No, we don't have to drop the fun stuff.

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Why is that the fun stuff only?

MARY CRAMPTON: We need to put the fun stuff in its proper perspective. But it's a real hard thing for the schools to do alone. We can't compete with Hollywood. We can't compete with the Twins. It's very tough to tell kids that geography is important if Kirby Puckett is making $6 million a year. How can you compete with that?

JAMES REINERTSEN: I think one way to think about it, Gary, at least from a business perspective, is that the workplace, which might have been fairly simple 50 years ago in terms of its requirements, has just simply moved far faster than the schools have in terms of the kinds of skills that they've been bringing to bear or bringing the students to be qualified for.

And I think that is partly been because of an internationalization, if you will, of the workplace. But it's also been because of the incredible complexity of the society in terms of diversity, in terms of the requirements for teamwork in a work setting. These things are not very simple.

And when you put all those together and say, well, it's no longer just a matter of the three R's, which might have been OK in 1920 to get somebody fully functioning in a work setting, they just aren't OK anymore. That's not enough. The demands that we talk--

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Well, what does the business community going to do about it? I mean, you're talking a lot about what the school should do, but what is your piece of this?

JAMES REINERTSEN: Well, I'm glad you asked because we've taken this very seriously and we've said, we've got a lot that we as work folks can do. And the list is long. I've got 14 different items here. I don't think you want me to go through all of those. But I would just highlight a couple of them.

One of them is something we call the partners for quality education initiative. And if I'm not mistaken, I believe Eden Prairie has been participating in this. We hope to expand this to about 200 schools by 1995. And this is a situation in which a business and a school system work very closely together to learn together of how we can help to transform the school systems into the thing that we'd all like them to be.

The core of that is this philosophy called continuous improvement. But it's more than that. And it's not a matter of the businesses bringing this wonderful knowledge to the school systems. In every one of these instances, there has been at least as much learning coming back from the school systems to the business as from the businesses to the school systems. We've been learning a lot from each other. That's one effort that we are very strongly committed to.

We'd like to expand the discussion in and with the schools about customer feedback, if you will, from the business community. We'd like to give honest and useful feedback to the schools about the performance of the products of the schools as they've worked in the next upstream level, both in higher education setting and in the business setting, if those are the two main options that most students take after they graduate from high school.

There are a variety of other initiatives we have, but we really feel like we want to be part of this. We think that rational employment practices on the part of businesses for high school students would be a very important part of this. We think in some respects we have sometimes contributed to the problem by employing students 40 or lots of hours a week. And it's kind of hard to carry on a high school education when you're working that hard.

JOE NATHAN: One of the voices that unfortunately is not with us today are inner city children of African-American, Hispanic, Native American. And I guess without wanting to represent myself as such a person because I'm not, I guess I'd say I'm cautious about some of these proposals. Not all of them, but some of them, because a number of youngsters just don't believe they're going to be jobs for them, whatever their level of education.

I've spent a lot of time in inner cities in the last five weeks listening to youngsters and looking at surveys and looking at companies-- IBM has been mentioned. But look at nationally what's happening to IBM. I mean, IBM is cutting thousands of people. We here in the Twin Cities have seen thousands and thousands of people with excellent educations cut from their jobs. I happen to know several of them who are in their 50s, who have master's degrees and in advanced math and science.

I think that it's important for school districts and companies to work closely together and to learn from each other. But I also think that we have had, frankly, in this country, an investment policy over the last decade that has encouraged a number of corporations to take businesses overseas, to invest in other countries, to not, frankly, invest in new products and services, but to gobble each other up. We're seeing the fruits of this with Northwest Airlines, without getting into that whole discussion.

There are lots and lots of youngsters, frankly, particularly in inner cities and in portions of rural America, including greater Minnesota, who really question whether they're going to be high-quality jobs for them, regardless of how well they do in school. And I think the evidence is that a lot of corporations are really cutting back.

And while there's a lot of comment nationally from business groups about we need higher standards, there also are many corporations cutting back and real questions about how many of those jobs there will be. And many projections that say there will be a relatively small number of jobs that require a great deal of sophistication and many jobs that will require low skills. So it's a real challenge for our economy.

GARY EICHTEN: Do kids at the junior high level or middle school level and even elementary level stew about these things, or do they have other concerns? Has this only become something that students start to think about when they're getting close to graduation?

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Well, in the sense that their parents are stewing about it. I mean, that kind of atmosphere, I think-- I'm glad to hear Dr. Reinertsen talk about these kind of initiatives. But I also think that it seems that traditionally business has been in an adversarial relationship to families, and that I think more of these-- I mean, daycares on site, giving employees time off to be involved in their child's education.

I mean, these are not things that great thinkers need to sit around to figure out. I mean, parents need that kind of support. And I don't think families have been given that kind of support in this society, and children have not been valued. And I think we have to look-- if we're going to look at systems and how they impact families, I think we have to look at simple things, like, how do we give families time to spend time with each other and to nurture their structure?

MARY CRAMPTON: When we talk about how Japanese students and Taiwanese students are able to go from their high schools into the workforce and be sufficiently well-trained, what we often leave out of that discussion is the role that business plays in that. Many high school students spend their last two years in high school in a setting that's designed by the company that they have a lifelong contract with.

Sony comes in and prepares a school with their machinery and their equipment and the skills that they want to teach, that they teach to these students, along with advanced mathematics and the other skills that they will need on that job site and in that job setting. American industry doesn't do that. So when they complain, I have a real frustration with that. It's not apples and oranges, and we can't compare those to.

GARY EICHTEN: What do we expect in terms of-- all students are entitled to a public education in the United States, but as a practical matter, how does that work itself out? Do the schools of necessity have to target, not the lowest common denominator, but hold back the brighter students and try to shove along the slowest students and serve that great middle group? I know ideally everybody will say, well, no, the education program is structured for each individual child. But as a practical matter, how does this work out?

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Well, as a practical matter, I think we've even seen studies where boys are treated better than girls because they're more vocal. So I mean, it's not only economic and how fast someone gets it. It's is the teacher teaching to only the boys in the class?

I think perhaps what becomes important is this team teaching approach, where there's more than one person who has the entire responsibility, where many people working together can respond to individual skill levels. Some kids are better at certain things. If you can regroup and address those children, so much the better. They're more satisfied in what they're doing as well.

MARY CRAMPTON: There's a lot of conflicting data out there on how kids best succeed. If you talk to people who are advocates of gifted and talented education, they will tell you that those kids need to be homogeneously grouped and they need to be with their intellectual peers. And that that's the way they're going to perform best. And if you talk to people who are advocates of kids on the other end of the spectrum, they will say just the opposite.

And the school is trying to somehow find a path between those and to include everybody. The latest catchword is inclusion. I teach two inclusion classes. That means I get a fully certified person in with me and some kids with very special needs. I'm not sure it's serving the best needs of all the kids in my classes.

I see opportunities to engage the kids I teach who are gifted and talented, but I also see that other kids staring off into space when that happens. When I try to direct things for the kids in the lower end of the spectrum, then I see my gifted and talented kids going off into never, never land. So it's really hard to know what's the best way to serve the needs of all kids.

GARY EICHTEN: What would be the reason for not kind of breaking them up a little more into groups based on their abilities so that the brightest kids can be challenged and the other-- is that socially unacceptable these days or what?

MARY CRAMPTON: Well, it's not exactly PC. It's not politically correct now anyway. It was when I was in school. There's a lot of information out there. I think maybe Joe can speak to this.

JOE NATHAN: Well, I think it's not just politically correct. I mean, we can argue all day about research studies show this, and research studies show that. I think one of the really wise things that Minneapolis and Saint Paul Schools have done is to offer a variety of programs.

We hear a lot about how the suburbs are this or that. But I think if you look at Minneapolis and Saint Paul's, they've been pioneers not just for the state, but for the country in offering different kinds of schools, recognizing that children learn in different kinds of ways. And that a youngster who succeeds in an open school is not necessarily going to succeed in a traditional school, and so on and so on and so forth. Minneapolis and Saint Paul have offered Montessori schools, and some youngsters blossom in those kinds of schools.

The other part of it, for many of us, is to really change what happens in terms of learning. And so for example, in Little Falls, an English and a social studies and a science teacher working together on a three-hour a day class studying the Mississippi River. And within that three hours, you can do much more. You can actually get out on the Mississippi River some days.

So they're changing the way school is organized. And youngsters who are really good at writing are helping youngsters who are not so good at writing as they write the history of the area. Youngsters who are really good in science are helping youngsters who are not so good in science.

And incidentally, there are a lot more youngsters in that school interested in science because they see real practical applications. Youngsters who are particularly interested in geography are helping others. So we're using the idea to some extent of the one room schoolhouse, where older youngsters help younger youngsters, and where youngsters who have particular talents in one area help others.

I think we're also coming to recognize, incidentally, that there's no one best kind of school for all youngsters. We've learned with our post-secondary option program, a law that lets 11th and 12th graders go to colleges and universities, that some youngsters are, frankly, just bored stiff in high school. That they are ready to be treated more like adults than most high schools are willing to do. So I think we've offered different kinds of programs, and that's part of what we need to do to meet an increasingly diverse group of kids.

GARY EICHTEN: Dee Halberg, how does things work out in St. Cloud?

DEE HALBERG: Well, I'm going to be a little more general, although I think it's certainly true of St. Cloud. I still believe-- and I've been on the board now about nine years. And as I look at our honor graduates and I talk to them, I'm always tremendously impressed with these young people.

I think that we're turning out-- at the top end, I think they're as good as they ever were and probably better. And I don't want to put the bottom end because that puts a value on it. But for those that historically were not expected to learn as well, I think we have a lot to learn about that. But we certainly are doing better than when I was teaching 30 years ago. On the other hand, I think that--

GARY EICHTEN: But there are kids who seem to be functionally illiterate when they're getting out of school, a lot of them.

DEE HALBERG: Yeah, there always were. The problem was now we've just brought them along. And the question has been in the last several years, should we be giving degrees to kids that don't have certain academic skills? And I think that's become the big question of the last half decade, I suppose.

GARY EICHTEN: Any big changes likely, Dr. Reinertsen? The business partnership is suggesting a major overhaul of the way the schools are financed. State takes over most of the funding of the core of the education system around the state, and many of the extras for that matter.

And then the local school district kind of supplements, from my understanding, extracurriculars and that kind of thing. If that program were adopted, would we be looking at significant overhauls so that the school system could make that great leap forward, or is that just a small piece of the pie?

JAMES REINERTSEN: I think it's a piece. It doesn't really change the classroom teaching processes in the way that Joe was describing earlier, and all the other things that are important to all of this. But it would provide for equality of resource opportunity, let's put it that way, throughout the state.

And we were surprised by the disparity in available resources, if you will, per student around the state. And in a country that at least says that it wants to provide an excellent education for all of its youngsters, we are dividing up the resources in a rather inequitable way if you look at the data from the state of Minnesota.

GARY EICHTEN: How so? You mean from district to district?

JAMES REINERTSEN: District to district.

GARY EICHTEN: And that's a function of the way the finance system works, or there's something more at work here?

JAMES REINERTSEN: It's exceeding complex, and I would not propose to you that I'm an expert in this subject. My part of the business partnerships activity was in the academic agenda. But I will tell you that their data was a real shocker to me when I read it. It showed that in at least in some school districts, almost twice as much money per pupil was being spent. And it really shocked me because I didn't think Minnesota had created a system that would do that.

JOE NATHAN: Well, it's true.

GARY EICHTEN: By the way, we're going to go spend a whole hour talking finance on Thursday. So those of you who are eager to talk finance, I know our time is about out here, but don't feel left out. We're going to spend an hour on it. I'm sorry, Joe.

JOE NATHAN: I was just going to say, Gary, that it is true that there are inequities, and these inequities are very, in some cases, frustrating. But I also think we need to understand that there are social reasons for these inequities.

For example, the reality is that Minneapolis and Saint Paul spend more than some suburbs and some communities in greater Minnesota. And Minneapolis and Saint Paul, in my opinion, at least, have some complexities with which to deal that some of the communities don't have to deal.

So I know sometimes I hear calls for equity in funding from some communities where they don't have many youngsters who don't speak English as a second language and a variety of other things. So I think we have to be very, very careful as we push for equity. Yes, it's not appropriate for some school districts to be spending $3,000 and others to be spending $6,500. But I also think that we need to look at what were asking.

I think finally, we need to look at something else that's in the Minnesota business partnership report, which is to give teachers more power to create the kind of schools that they think make sense. This is, I think, one of the problems of the school system.

There are very few consequences for doing a bad job, and very few rewards in the system for doing a good job. And this is part of the idea behind the chartered public school idea, where schools will be held accountable for results, not just for rules.

But we have a system right now where wonderful teachers work. And in fact, when we did a study last year, we found that three of the last 20 years of the teachers of the year, three of those teachers of the year had been laid off. Now, what kind of a system is it which lays off, because of their relatively low seniority, some of the very best teachers?

I think we've got a system that needs to look carefully at its funding and needs to look carefully at greater involvement of parents, but also needs to look at some fundamental questions about rewards and consequences.

GARY EICHTEN: Mary Crampton, you're a teacher. You feel put upon, stifled--

MARY CRAMPTON: Oh, I just talked to Kathy, one of those teachers last week, that's a tough call. Teacher of the year is a teacher who's a representative. Whether that person is the best teacher is a question that I would not want to wrangle with, but certainly representative of the hard working teachers that are out there.

And it's really hard to find in the system ways to reward those people. And I could tell you a lot of stories as the teacher rights representative from my building, but I won't because this is not the proper forum. [LAUGHS]

The teachers do work hard. They work very hard. But in any organization, there are people who need to take opportunity of more growth opportunities. And we need to provide those for people to and not make it so difficult for them to do that.

All the people that I know that I work with work hard and they're trying new things, and they're legitimately trying to make it work. And I applaud them every day. And every day I learn something new from one of my colleagues. That's exciting and rewarding to me, and I'm glad that I'm teaching.

And every day those kids come in and they do the same thing for me. They're a lot smarter than we give them credit for, and we need to do better by them in the public schools. And I wouldn't presume to know anything about the financial answers to that, but we need to work together as a community to do it.

GARY EICHTEN: Susan Larson Fleming, we only have a minute left. I'd like to give you the last word here as our representative parent of the day.

SUSAN LARSON FLEMING: Well, I think that certainly has been my experience, that the teachers and the children are more intelligent than we give them credit for. I think that the system as a whole does a lot of symbolic or not symbolic things that make the community insecure.

They, for example, pink slip all the teachers, the new teachers in the spring. Or they decide that we don't need all these buildings, so we sell them, we knock them down. And two years later, they build a new one. And so the community says, well, which way is it? Couldn't you look at the birth records and figure out that maybe five years down the line, you would have students coming up?

So I think those are the kinds of things the community as a whole sees, and that unless you're actually sending a child every day, it's hard to know and it's hard to see what a wonderful job they're doing.

GARY EICHTEN: Thanks so much for joining us. I'm afraid we're all out of time. We've been talking about the expectations that we have for our public school system. Our guests today from St. Cloud via satellite Dee Halberg, who is Chair of the St. Cloud School Board, Susan Larson Fleming, who is a parent, has a child in the Minneapolis school system, Mary Crampton, a junior high teacher from Eden Prairie. She teaches at the Central Middle school.

Dr. James Reinertsen, who is President-Elect of the Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital and also Chair of the Minnesota Business Partnerships Academic Agenda Committee, and Joe Nathan, who is with the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute.