Educating New Economy Citizens

Moderator
Representative Jon Draud

Panelists
Vicki Fields, District Technical Coordinator, Kenton County Schools
Craig True, State Board of Education
William Wilson, Deputy Executive Director for Education and Outreach, KET
Myk Garn, Chief Academic Officer for the Kentucky Virtual University

Jon Draud

Make sure you’re in the place you want to be. It’s called “Educating New Economy Citizens.” Apparently, I wasn’t here for the last session, but from what I heard, a lot of discussion led back to this particular topic: education. My name is Jon Draud and I’ll be the moderator for this distinguished panel today. I’m a state legislator in our Commonwealth of Kentucky, State Representative from a district here in northern Kentucky, an Associate Professor at Northern Kentucky University, and I used to be a school superintendent. Of course, one of my main interests is this whole area of education and it made me think. I had an opportunity to hear the first session with Chuck Martin and it brought to my attention again this issue of educational haves and have-nots. It seems to me that we may be having even a more difficult problem as all this technology develops to the degree that Chuck described it a little while ago. I did want to mention a couple of statistical issues in Kentucky that are very important for all of us to be aware of and, certainly, if technology can help with that, I know that all of us are interested in that being accomplished.

One of the things we face in Kentucky is that about one third of our citizens in this state are functionally illiterate. That means they work at the fifth grade level and below. Whenever I hear that, I am just astounded by that. We also have about 40 percent of the people in our adult working population who cannot read at the appropriate level in order to be functional in their job and do the kind of things that need to be done. Keeping in mind that we have probably one of the most progressive elementary/secondary education programs in the country with the Kentucky Education Reform Act, which was enacted 10 years ago, we still face these difficult problems.

We’ve certainly received a lot of national attention with our higher ed reform, and, of course, we have a big challenge in that area trying to get individuals to go to higher education and to actually complete higher education. So I’m anxious to hear what our guests have to say today because these people are outstanding in their fields and experts and what I want to do is try to learn some things from this experience. The members of our panel today: to my immediate left is Craig True, who will be representing the business sector and also as a member of the State Board of Education. William Wilson is Deputy Executive Director of Kentucky Educational Television. He will be representing the public media. Myk Garn is with the Virtual University and will be helping us to understand its role in higher ed. And then Vicki Fields is one of our representatives here in northern Kentucky. She works with the Kenton County Public School District as one of the consultants for technology. I’m going to ask each of them to give you a brief overview of their backgrounds so you know where they’re coming from and any general statement that they want to make about this issue. Then I have some prescribed questions that I’ve developed that I’d like to ask each of the panel members and then we’ll leave about 15 minutes at the end for you to ask questions of the panel members. So that’s the format that we’re going to follow and we’ll start with Craig.

Craig True

Thank you, Jon. My name is Craig True. I’m a native of northern Kentucky. I graduated from Northern Kentucky University, but that was 25 years ago when they called it Northern Kentucky State College. Since that time, I’ve worked with PriceWaterhouseCoopers for 25 years, so I’ve had a chance to see a lot of changes in technology in the New Economy in those 25 years. About a year and a half ago, I was asked to move and head up our practice in Washington, D.C. that heads up the mergers and acquisitions group for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where we give advice and counsel to those companies wishing to merge or acquire or be acquired by other companies. I also served, as Jon mentioned, for the last 10 years as a member of the State Board of Education in Kentucky, where we set policy for the education activities of the public schools. So I get a chance to see this from really two perspectives. The first is that of our clients as they work to acquire or merge with other entities and how technology in the New Economy affects them. Then secondly, we in Kentucky are trying to educate our children so that they can compete and really win in this New Economy. I, myself, was dragged kicking and screaming into the New Economy but I’m here, and I can tell you from my experience that this is a speed, intelligence, and information economy. Companies that want to acquire other companies can’t wait a week or a week and a half for somebody to read a hard document in terms of the merger and acquisition agreement or the negotiations that they’re going through. These things are done quickly. They need speed. They need quickness, and they need people who can respond to that quickly. People who cannot respond quickly in the mergers and acquisitions field just aren’t players in that field. I’m looking forward to being on this panel, too, and learning from the other distinguished guests. With that, I’ll let go of this.

My name is Bill Wilson. I’m Deputy Executive Director for Education and Outreach at the Kentucky Educational Television network. My background is that of a former teacher, former assistant principal, and then I’ve spent some time in the private sector as well. I have a deep and abiding interest in technology as it relates to education, but, primarily, I am dealing with it from the standpoint of the schools and the educational side. One of the things that I’ve noted is that the new-economy citizen is a “SMART” person. That’s not only a word, it’s an acronym in the sense that they are able to (1) “S”—select. In the old days, you took what you were taught. The new learner of today or tomorrow selects what they want and they do it when they want it. The “M”—the map—mapping is part of it. There’s an old concept that’s now taking new fruition called cognitive mapping. What that means is that people can design their own learning activities and now we throw technology into that and we note that they can design their own technological elements as they progress through the learning chain. And then the “A” means to act. You have a plan but you’ve got to act on it, and then you have to “R” review that plan, and you have to review it quite frequently. And then you do everything you can to “T” target as best you can. In my mind’s eye, the new-economy citizen is like a heat-seeking missile. It will change direction, but it will always keep going forward, and everything we do in technology has to be designed to take advantage of that.

Myk Garn

I’m the Chief Academic Officer for the Kentucky Virtual University. My background is in photography. I was a community photographer instructor and commercial photographer for about 10 years and got hooked into the corporate side of things—doing corporate training via satellite for Eastman Kodak Company. Most recently, I was in Georgia for three years as a director of Distance Education Policies and Planning for the university system of Georgia. I came to Kentucky about a year and a half ago to be part of the startup of the Kentucky Virtual University. It’s been pretty exciting. We’ve gone from about 250 enrollments our first term to this fall we have a little over 3,100 enrollments, which is a good success story and that’s a success story because of all of the institutions that are working together on this. One example of this, in Chuck Martin’s presentation, you saw the Morehead online application. Through the partnership of all of the public and private institutions in the state, you can go to the Kentucky Virtual University and fill out an admissions form for all of the institutions in the state—one form. It’s pretty powerful work that we’re doing here, but we have a long way to go.

We did a survey this spring that showed out of the roughly 3.5 million citizens in Kentucky who could go to college, about 1.4 (million) said they had enough education, but 1.6 million said they needed more and of that, 1.1 (million) said they wanted it over the Internet. That’s a pretty good number. If you take all of the students enrolled in higher education in Kentucky, subtract that out, cut that number in half, and cut that in half again, you still have a number larger than all the students we have in higher education. There’s a huge potential market out there. We see as our potential market people like the 24-year-old student who went through the Cisco academy and got a great job, but didn’t have time to go to school and now they realize they need some more education to move up in the company, or some retooling. Or the 28-year-old mother who wants to complete that degree she started before she had three kids and needs to do that on their schedule and study at 10:00 at night on a Sunday. And the 42-year-old worker that wants to shift careers, but can’t leave that job they’re in now because they have a family to support. Or a 35-year-old high school dropout that wants to get the GED so that they can get back in line and start taking instruction. All the way down to 20-year-old traditional students that want to try to get through their degree program faster or find themselves out of sequence for the courses they are trying to take and that course is available from another institution. So these are a number of the different customers that KYVU sees and looks forward to serving.

Vicki Fields

My name is Vicki Fields and I’m the District Technology Coordinator at Kenton County Schools. I came into education different than other people at this table in that I came from private industry. I worked for Nielsen Marketing Research and worked with data and, if you’ve ever worked with numbers for any long term at all, technology is the only way to be able to churn all of that information out and get reports. That was my job, to make sure all those reports went to local businesses here in the Greater Cincinnati Area. Technology to me was a way and a means to provide what we needed to do as a service as a company. As I became a mother, I became interested in what I perceived to be a schedule for education. Boy, was that a mistake, and as I applied to work in education, I found that the same ethics and hours that I spent in the private industry applied here as well. So I took over the technology there approximately 15 years ago and have been in that district all this time. The most important thing that I can tell you that we do in our field is that we’re preparing your future workers for this New Economy and these children, as you talk to them, don’t think of technology as the word “technology.” You know they were born with this hanging on the side of their crib. So we’re the ones that refer to it as technology. They refer to it as a way of life, and I think the most important thing that we can do in the K-12 arena is to be sure that when our children leave to go on to these jobs or to other postsecondary opportunities, that learning is a lifelong thing. Learning does not stop when you graduate from high school and, if you look at what roles and jobs children will have in the future and in their complete future, they’re going to change jobs many, many times, and they’re going to have to reconstruct their knowledge. They’re going to have to constantly research and find out what is important to know at that particular moment. So again, the most important thing we do at K-12 is to be sure that children know how to acquire knowledge, how to build their own knowledge, and know that they will be lifelong learners.

Jon Draud

Thank you, members of the panel. One specific question I would like to ask first I’d like to ask each of you all to respond to. This idea of the New Economy: define that as it relates to your particular field, for example, business and higher ed, the public media, as well as the elementary/secondary schools. So, if you would, I’d like for you to try to define for us what the New Economy means in your particular field.

Craig True

Thanks, Jon. As I mentioned previously, I think what we’ll find is that the New Economy is going to have a lot of similarities in every field that we talk about, but it’s information. It’s technology that’s used, from a business perspective, to gain an economic advantage, to gain a competitive advantage over your competition, so that you can provide the product or you can provide the service faster, more exhaustively, and more accurately than your competition can. The result is your shareholder value goes up, so your shareholders are happy and you keep your job so you’re happy. And you can see that, as I mentioned before, in a number of areas in terms of mergers and acquisitions where people need merger agreements reviewed quickly, they need to move quickly to make the deal because there’s lots of competition for the deal. But even as they look at these target companies that they want to acquire, one of the key things they’re looking at is—and it can be the fanciest “dot com” in the world or it can be the widget manufacturer down the road—how they are set up for the future, in the next four to five years.

How are they going to buy products or sell products to their customers? And I’m not talking about selling dolls or CDs over the Internet. I’m talking about chemicals companies looking for a way to procure raw materials quickly and efficiently so that they can lower their costs, still have quality, and compete effectively. So my clients look to those things: what plans do these people have in the next four to five years to compete effectively in this New Economy because if we don’t think they can do it, then they’re not worth the money they’re asking for and we’re not buying it. So from a business perspective, that’s how I see this New Economy playing out and the critical capability of those who can and will prosper. Those who can’t will be gone.

William Wilson

The one word I’d like to use in terms of defining the New Economy according to my business is the word “digital” because it will allow us to do things in education that we’ve never been able to before. We’ve generally been provided education in a linear fashion and now we understand learners have different needs, desires, and times in which they want to learn. Therefore, digitalization will allow us the opportunity to do that. But our attempt is to simply try to serve the learners wherever they are. Dr. David Thornberg, who’s a futurist, said that learning takes place at one of three places. It takes place around campfires, around watering holes, and in caves, and no matter how you put it, it takes place in those three areas. Now, campfire is anything that illuminates. It can be an exhibit. It can be a television program, or it can be a computer program, but anything that excites people is what we would classify as a campfire. There are many ways to do that and what we’re trying to do is to broaden the ways that that can be taking place.

We produce CD-ROMS, we have television programs, we’re on the Internet, and we provide instruction on the Internet. Then, once people gather that information in one way, they’ve got to go around to a watering hole, and what that simply means is people want to have an opportunity to check things out. They want to have a chance to interact with other people on it and that means if you are talking electronically, then you’re talking about the Internet. If you’re talking about college, you’re talking about the Grill. But, either way, you need a place where people can connect and exchange ideas related to that concept. And then, people learn in caves. That is, they take the information that they’ve received that they’ve been stimulated to understand and they try to internalize it and try to make it applicable to something in their lives. What we’re trying to do in education is to do this in an expeditious process. It’s been said the world is moving exponentially, while we as educators are moving incrementally. We need to catch up pretty quickly. Business is telling us what their demands are in terms of needs and we are trying to struggle to do that. But we cannot look a businessperson in the eye and say, you’ve got a need and we’ll provide for that need for you two years down the line. That, ladies and gentlemen, will simply not work. So what we’re attempting to do with the New Economy is to provide things in a very fast-paced, very quick manner, in short segments. We use the term at KET of chunking. We want to give it to people when they want it and in whatever manner they want it and wherever they want to learn.

Myk Garn

We tend to think about what we’re doing with the Virtual University in terms of helping the institutions, the providers that we work with, prepare in the New Economy to have the skills that Bill was talking about and those capacities. I tend to think of it in terms of my kind of three K’s of virtual education: capability, quality and capacity. (Laughter) OK. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Jon Draud

I was just getting ready to brag on this panel until that happened.

Myk Garn

Yes. That’s how they let me in. Capability at the institutional level is being able to actually utilize technologies and the Virtual University is very involved in that. We provide a number of the infrastructure elements as well as working with some of the policy areas to do that: things like an online catalogue, the virtual library, the help desk, and all of those other support services that go with this. With quality, working with faculty and institutions, this is a new environment that we’re in and the quality of what we’re doing, interestingly, was never suspect when it was done on site. All of a sudden now that it’s online people have a lot of questions, but well-asked and profound questions. And we’re working very hard to address those. It’s interesting enough that all of a sudden we’re turning around and wondering how that’s done on campus. I think the ultimate end of this will be a higher level of quality in both areas. The real challenge for us is in capacity. As we look at that 60-80,000 new students that are supposed to come into our system by 2020, the number of new faculty that it’s going to take to teach those new students is somewhere around 1,700 or 1,800 new faculty. One thing we’re learning right now about technology is that it doesn’t necessarily scale in that way; that ratio of faculty to students doesn’t necessarily change. And we need to look at models that might, and I say might, allow us to do that, but might allow us to use different types of faculty. The question was brought up in the other session about adult education. If we’re going to move from the 50,000 that we’re teaching now to 100,000 to 300,000, that’s doubling and six times the number of teachers there that we need. Technology can help with that. It can provide better resources, but that’s one of our challenges: to fit what we have with technology to the capacity that we have to use it.

Vicki Fields

When I define how the New Economy relates to the field of K-12, I think of delivery of instruction. As children are growing, they expect to be able to receive their instruction any time of the day, anywhere, any place, whether those children are in public schools, home schools, or in a community center. They look toward the Kentucky Virtual Library where they can use those resources for online knowledge building as well as the virtual high school, and, even as you look out across the state, some of the other school districts are beginning to deliver online services to their schools. So I look at the New Economy as it relates to our field as the way instruction will be delivered to our students.

Jon Draud

OK. Thank you. The next question I want to direct specifically toward the topic of our discussion today related to the educational system. How can the educational system provide meaningful learning experiences to prepare citizens for the New Economy?

Craig True

As you know, the theme that we’ve been trying to use in Kentucky for the last 10 years is, what can students do with what they know? And that’s the key benchmark. In the New Economy, as employers look for employees, they’re going to look for folks that can do things with what they know, not just be shown how to do things. And, I think, as was mentioned previously, it’s so important for the school systems to be able to work into the curriculum of students every day the use of technology, to go find new information and they can find it globally now. They can go find information anywhere, and take that information and do something with it. We should provide something that shows that they know more, that illustrates to others to accept their point of view. Those are the types of things that I think we need to be doing educationally to prepare our students for the New Economy. We’ve come a long way. Back in 1993 in the public schools, I think there was an average of one computer for every 193 children. In Kentucky’s poorest schools and in Kentucky’s more affluent schools, the ratio now is six children for every one computer. The real hump is where do we get enough money to make it one computer for every kid. I’m working on that.

William Wilson

The system can do a lot to provide more meaningful experiences for young people. First of all, it has to be quick. It has to be relevant. It has to be, in my mind’s eye, interactive. The idea of passive receiving of instruction, I think, is long gone. We have to engage our learners and get young people involved. If not, they’ll probably tear up our classrooms. The fact of it is they’ve got to be involved. In doing this, with the new technologies, we can address one of the age-old questions. In a classroom a teacher says she can’t deal with 30 people or 25 people, but with technology, you can assess, you can do a whole lot of things with prescriptions. You can do instruction and evaluation and you can have all these people operating at different levels at different times. And to that end, the teacher truly does become a facilitator in the classroom as a guiding light, as opposed to a fountain of all knowledge, as such. So the bottom line is, I think, we can provide meaningful instruction by simply doing some very simple things. But the one thing I want to key on is doing whatever we do in an expeditious manner, especially if they’re interested in getting out and getting jobs, and young people are now being afforded great opportunities. It is very difficult for them to sit in a classroom when their friends are out making $100,000 just because they know how to maneuver a few keys around, so we’ve got to make that instruction relevant and we’ve got to do it as quickly as we possibly can.

Myk Garn

I think one of the most interesting things about technology that it has given us, especially learning over the Internet where Virtual University is focused, is the asynchronism of it. We’re no longer bound as we thought of distance education as sending education out where we could overcome geographic barriers, but it’s time barriers that really have the real promise. A good example of that in terms of making this meaningful: we had a group of 911 operators that came in and said they had a real problem. They had lots of turnover and needed a training program. They thought this would be a good way to do it, and one of the real challenges was that they had a number of adjunct part-time 911 operators and they didn’t have a budget to train those folks at all. In talking with them, it became really obvious they had computers, that’s what they worked on, and, in fact, they could do the training right on the work site with those people when they were off, when they were on breaks, at different times. The training is there when you need it and you schedule it around your life. It just makes all the difference in the world. The real challenge for us is, as someone earlier said, we’re two minutes after the big bang. We are right at the beginning of this learning curve of how we teach differently when time is not part of our teaching structure, when things can go on asynchronously when a discussion takes place over the course of a week or more. Right now we’re converting what we’re doing in the classroom to teaching online, and that’s an OK place to start. But eventually we’re going to get to, and I think this is the additional promise of this, the ability to really mass customize which is one of the older business terms. Eventually we will be able to allow students to craft their own education and to learn in their own way under the guidance of skilled tutors, mentors, and faculty and not necessarily tie them to that learning by lecture, by rote, by testing that we know how to do now. The challenge is learning how to do that and moving towards that direction in that model.

Vicki Fields

And we refer to that as 24/7, right? When we talk about the experiences or the educational system providing meaningful learning experiences, we think about the things that kids can do in the classroom that will pertain to their future as an adult, and we look at students doing things like simulations. Do you realize that 1.5 million children voted online during the elections last week? They were so concerned about the results and what impact it might be on the election that they would not release those, and I don’t think they’ve released them yet actually. (Laughter) Good. We also talked about students doing dissection, you know some people have a real problem with children and going through that process, but now those things can happen online again 24/7. It doesn’t make any difference what time of the day. Some children learn better in the morning; some children learn better in the afternoon. We have to be able to adjust for that flexibility. You as employers expect your personnel to be able to do that and it’s part of their personality and how they work best and we want to try to accommodate that in their learning experiences.

We also have to look at giving kids the opportunity for solving real problems and giving them data sets where they can get on the Internet and solve problems through any courses that are available. So those kids can experience what a real issue is and how to solve it, not just something out of the textbook or on the library shelf, but finding data and comparing it all across the country, such as being able to share with children from Wisconsin about water samples. When has that experience ever been able to help them in the past? Because as an employee, you would expect them to find information from other companies, and isn’t that what all the New Economy and the global economy is about? My husband recently told me he would never use technology 10 years ago; he was just not going to have any part of it. He’s a small business owner here in northern Kentucky. I noticed that now he orders his supplies from Denver, Colorado, and they are shipped from Mississippi and every Thursday as I go by his office building, I see that tractor trailer there unloading things. That was the person who told me that they would never, ever use technology. It isn’t about technology; it’s again, as the gentleman mentioned before, about profit and loss and that margin.

Jon Draud

Thank you very much. I knew we had an outstanding group of individuals on our panel, I just didn’t realize how outstanding. You all are very fortunate to be here today for this session. The third question I’d like to ask deals with the kind of skills that our youngsters need in the New Economy as contrasted with the skills that have been required in the past. In other words, what type of skills do our students need in this New Economy vis-à-vis the old economy?

Craig True

I guess the first thing I’d say, Jon, is it’s not geographic anymore. We used to think of people going to work in a certain geography and this will convert things to global. People don’t care where you are. People don’t care where I am. There’s a cell phone. There’s a computer. There’s a fax machine. And people expect me to be available. The days of me saying I’ll be out of town for a week and I won’t be accessible just don’t exist. Employers are going to look for people who understand technology and can master it every day of their lives. They will want people who have been trained to solve complex business problems to look at what issues there are and to come up with recommendations on how to deal with those issues. They’ll not have to move around the globe, but they’ll have to be able and ready to work anywhere, anytime in a global economy because people can get to you from anyplace on the globe and if you’ve got expertise, they need that expertise. They need people who can sell their ideas, be resourceful, be creative, and not wait to be told what to do. They need folks who pay for themselves. You don’t look at paying a person’s salary in exchange for work. You look at paying a person a salary or give them their stock options based on what value they brought to the organization, how they cut costs. How did they expand markets, or think about new ways to sell our existing products in the new areas or geography? So using technology to find those answers are the types of things that I think are different in this New Economy than what we’ve been used to in the past.

William Wilson

As it relates to skills, I’ve been told that 85 percent of the people in the workforce lose their jobs, but they do so not because they don’t have what we call basic skills but because they can’t get along with one another. They can’t seemingly fit into a teamwork environment. So, obviously, when we think of critical skills necessary for the future, we’re talking about teamwork skills, collaborative skills. Of course, our schools are beginning to set up to encourage collaborative learning, but if you have a problem in school, and you go to your next door neighbor and ask him for help, that’s called cheating. In the work world, that’s called collaboration. So we train people differently a little bit. Now another skill that was mentioned this morning I can personally testify to is research skills. My son was not doing too well in advanced physics and I couldn’t help him, and so he went to one of the television teachers at KET and he put him in contact with a chat room. So he started being tutored by a University of Alabama professor, and he raised his grade not to an A but he got a B out of it and I was quite pleased with that. But he was receiving tutoring from the University of Alabama. And then he found out that he could connect with some other physics students around and I mean he was really going gangbusters, but research skills are most critical. One other skill that I think is very, very important, and it sort of slides by people because we don’t pay too much attention to it, is good keyboarding skills. A lot of times I look sort of silly at a keyboard or at a computer because I can’t type fast enough. I’m thinking, but I can’t type. Keyboarding skills are very, very critical during this day. So, you have the critical thinking skills, the attitudinal skills, the research skills, and then you have good keyboarding skills.

Myk Garn

I guess I want to focus on a sort of subset of those workers and the New Economy, the ones that I work with most frequently, and those are the faculty, the teachers that we have in our education system now. The different school systems and higher education systems are struggling mightily to figure out how to help faculty move from pretty much a pre-industrial model. It's a guild craftsmanship model, where we create each student one mind at a time, and which we’re pretty good at, and pretty darn proud of. But we need to change that into a different kind of process, one that we view with a lot of suspicion. Moving to an assembly process could be a lot more efficient, but could it be as effective? And we don’t know. But those are challenges that we have, so I look at the skills that we need. We need to think of that workforce, and working with them, help us understand. I mean us from the standpoint of these external agencies, like the Virtual University, with its whole new model of doing things out there. We need to help faculty understand that, work with it and begin to research it and learn how to leverage those advantages in the technology, in the pedagogy that we can use technology to teach with, and make a more efficient, effective system. There are a lot of challenges to that and those challenge a lot of the basic assumptions that we have about how we approach higher education and reward it.

Vicki Fields

Different skills that I see in students today over prior years are because they’ve become explorers, they are investigators. They have to be able to synthesize what they read and when they find and research that information, they have to be able to give a report. They have to be able to take all of that data and come up with something that is factual based. Those are skills that are easier for the students to learn than I think it is for the teachers to teach because they come from an older preset way of teaching. So we’re not only changing the skills of students, but we’re also trying to change the skills of our teachers as well. One of the things that we’ve not discussed here, and I don’t know if this is exactly where we need to put it, but I think it is one of the skills that we really need to work with, and that’s leadership skills. As we look at leaders for our future, no matter whether that leader is a leader of the brownie troop or if that leader is the CEO of a company, those leadership skills are very important. You can do that with children.

In leadership academies, they share information, children visit businesses, and they see how technology works. There’s a program throughout Kentucky called the Student Technology Leadership Program. It’s very important that students work with leadership. They learn how to train not only their peers, but they work with training and dealing with adults. One of the problems we see in the field of IT is that they’re a little lacking on personality skills, we’ll say. And one of the things that we do with our Student Technology Leadership Program is work with those students on how to properly treat people. How do you do customer service? There will always be personal help and customer service around and those leadership skills are very important and one of the skills we need to be working on with our children.

Jon Draud

Another issue I would like for each of you to respond to is the question of what role do you see the schools actually playing in educating citizens for the New Economy? Is that role changing where there will be more partnerships? Or, from your point of view of each of the areas that you represent, what role do you see the schools playing in educating citizens for the New Economy?

Craig True

Speaking from maybe a business perspective, businesses need to do what they have been doing, but they need to be doing more of it and that’s partnering with the school systems to help the school systems provide the type of what I’ll call raw materials. A lot of people don’t like for me to refer to graduates from college or high school as a raw material, but for a business the raw materials that you buy from the ground and the oil and all that stuff, that’ll be there, we know what quality that is. The key raw materials to gain competitive advantage are the quick minds and the creative thinking that you get from your employee base. And if you don’t have that, you won’t have competitive advantage. So the first thing I think is partnering. The second thing is for businesses to continue to realize they have to make continuing investments in their people's education. You can’t hire somebody and expect him or her to do the job for 30 years because 30 years from now that job won’t be there. So continue to invest in the continuing education of the people. And, lastly, from a business perspective, I think, too, create environments where you can make mistakes, where creativity is rewarded and help people to continue to teach and train themselves. That’s the investment that business needs to make in order to help schools help us reach the New Economy.

William Wilson

I’m reminded of a quote by Mark Twain, when he said he had never allowed school to interfere with his education. I think there’s some recognition of the fact that all learning doesn’t take place within those four walls, but, having said that, we know that our young people spend a lot of time there, so the question is what can schools do? And, I think they can do a whole lot. As I’m looking in the audience I see Representative Gippy Graham, who is a big leader in the fight for continuing community education. One of the things I’ve often wondered is why we don't open up those school doors more than just from 8 in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon. I understand that there are lots of questions of liability and what have you, but I think we can also think about how to open those schools up, make them more part of the community. It bothers me every time I see people start running around building community centers when, in fact, the schools should be that community center. And I know that, in fact, we talked earlier about students learning at different times, I think what about having night school? All we’d have to do is resolve the beings, the buses, and the books issue and we can roll on with it for the most part. So the bottom line is, I think the schools can first of all open their doors. I think the issue of partnerships is very, very important because without that you certainly can’t bring the people into the schools as you would like. There is a concept called “Cities and Schools” where businesses are actually going in and setting up within the educational setting, so that when people go to school, they learn a whole lot about real life situations and parents can come and join their kids in that endeavor. So I think there are ways to invite businesses into the communities. The models are already established nationally for that. I think I would just like to see more proliferation of that activity here in Kentucky.

Myk Garn

I think one of the areas that the schools are best at, or have challenges in as well, is the idea of rationalization as we go through this process of moving to use technology and being part of this New Economy. One of the best examples I’ve heard lately is that about 1824 there were roughly 6,000 different time zones in the United States. Because if you were traveling from one town to the next on horse, it really didn’t matter if it was three minutes earlier or later in that town when you arrived because it was several hours later when you got there. By 1854, there were four time zones because of trains. It really mattered what time you were on which track when you got to the next town. Things could get real bad real quick. And I think that idea of rationalization is what technology is forcing us to face now, and is driving some of these things. We have duplication of effort that the Council on Postsecondary Education is looking at if we have multiple programs going on at multiple institutions. For a long time we have prided ourselves on being unique with everything we do. This calls into question at what cost do we have to be unique everywhere with everything that we do?

Facing issues of in-state versus out-of-state tuition, does that make a difference to us in this time when a student can be in-state, out-of-state, or out-of-country with equal ease? A very good issue is financial aid. We put together with KCTCS an online Associate in Arts program because we think we need a beginning place where students can come to school and get started getting a degree. That makes good sense, but also a number of these students need money to do that. Financial aid says you don’t get money unless you’re full-time, and, in fact, you have to be full-time and pretty much on the campus to get that aid. Those are things the federal government knows are issues and they are working to solve. The more students we bring in that want this kind of education, the worse that problem gets and the more we need to solve it. One of the things I learned in my prior experience in Georgia was you can spend a lot of time trying to solve policy, but if you don’t have a problem, you really can’t do much about it. That was one of the joys of coming here to Kentucky. That’s what we do. We’re creating some good problems here and hope to solve every one of them.

Vicki Fields

I have to agree with Mr. Wilson. I think that it’s very important for the K-12 arena to open up their doors to the taxpayers. Kentucky has spent $600 million in technology and the infrastructure in every school district in this state. That means that the money has been provided to every district to have Internet access in every single classroom in this state. If we’re able to train our current population of K-12 students, why not open up those doors and make that available to the adults? As we’ve talked about the New Economy and retraining the workforce, we need to also concentrate on those that are beyond the 12th grade and need to be trained. The equipment is there. The staff, our teachers, have been trained to do this. It’s an automatic fit.

Jon Draud

I have a couple of other questions, but I think I’ll defer my questions because I’d like to make sure the members of the audience have an opportunity to ask specific questions that you’d like to ask of our panel. So, it’s your opportunity now if you have some questions that you’d like to address to the panel.

Questions, Answers and Comments

Questioner

I am Dan Humpert, a Kenton County Commissioner. There’s a perception in northern Kentucky that the Workforce Development programs are underutilized and are failing the region. I’d like the answer with respect to the skills required. Is this a Catch-22? Are the 40 percent of the people that are underemployed that need to be retrained the same people that digital divide talks about that don’t have the skills or the tools, and that don’t even know that they need to do this? In other works, is that a problem? Is that what we’re talking about?

Craig True

I don’t know if I know enough about those programs to respond particularly, but I would think that when 40 percent can’t read, that 40 percent aren’t going to be very good when it comes to technology and the things that employers need them to do. Employers have to go out and find somebody, so I think, hopefully, business is coming to the realization that they can’t just sit around and complain that the programs don’t do what they have to do. Employers are going to have to do what they need to do to get a workforce that works for them. But, other than saying that, I really don’t know enough about the Workforce Cabinet situation to offer comment.

Jon Draud

I would just comment, Dan, that I think the effort in workforce development is a reasonably new one, though, for Northern Kentucky and, like many other problems in education, they’re not solved in a short period of time. As most of you probably know, one reason we’re in the condition we’re in in Kentucky, is that even though we’ve done a pretty powerful job for the last 10 years, we neglected education for over 100 years in this state and it’s going to take some time to make things happen. So I would suspect part of the reason is that it is just a new development for the business community with workforce development, but that’s an uneducated kind of response.

Questioner

I am Mark Kaser from the Kentucky Wood Products Manufacturing Corporation. I’m an economic development entity with an evaluator of the industry. We face a tremendous shortage of teachers that have the skills we need in training centers when we lost our industrial arts program. We’ve got the infrastructure in place, but the teacher pay equity is a problem and we can’t bring that new technology mindset into the education program for people to participate in the Virtual University program. So we’ve got the infrastructure sitting there underutilized because of trained people. How do we get them out of the private sector to come into the community college and education system when the pay equity is not attractive? Once we get them we tend to lose them because the private sector is demanding like you say, so they go back, so how do we overcome that hurdle?

Craig True

I notice he gave me the microphone on that. I love my colleagues here on the panel. First, just interestingly enough, quite frankly there is really no such thing as a teacher shortage. From what I’ve been told, there are shortages in areas because most of your teachers flock to your urban areas where the pay is better. One of the things that we’ve been talking about and recommending is to do a little pay incentive. In other words, better teachers are winding up teaching our advanced courses and in our urban areas. One of the things that we think could be reasonably done is restructure the pay scale to give incentives for people to go into rural areas or areas where we need help and assistance. So one easy way is that we have to think of financial incentives. Now I know there are some other things that people would like to think about, but getting teachers to relocate from a major metropolitan to a rural area is very, very difficult.

Myk Garn

I think that brings up good issues. One of the things we’ve looked at with KCTCS is the challenge of getting teachers to do programs. I will admit to being a techno advocate or subversive, and we look very hard with the Virtual University at how to do this asynchronously and without an instructor being present. That isn’t the case in all situations. There are some things you need an instructor for. But one thing in asking that question makes you think about whether you need them there all the time. One of the great advantages of being able to teach online is the instructor doesn’t have to be there. You can harvest your instructors from another area where they are plentiful or at least cast a broader net to find them. It does mean that they may need to come there, but maybe this is twice or four times during the term for weekend sessions, where you’re doing a full Saturday for the actual hands-on skills sessions. Or it’s utilizing people who are there, available locally to do some of the skills training, and you can have this expert teaching from a distance. I don’t think those are all the solutions, but they do provide some more options and some alternatives for those kind of situations.

Craig True

I think I’d like to respond to that also because I know you’re really talking about competing with the private sector; it’s one of our major problems. My opinion over the period of my career in education is that we’re not going to ever be able to compete with the private sector unless we make salaries more competitive. Let’s face it, we live in a capitalistic system and salaries are important in this country, whether we like to talk about it or not. We, in education, talk a lot about intrinsic kinds of motivation, but there’s a lot of extrinsic motivation that’s very important to teachers and educators and I still think one of our top priorities has to be to make our salaries competitive. I know that’s an old line and nothing ever happens about it, although we’ve made tremendous progress, but we’re still a state that has a difficult time in really providing the resources that we need.

Questioner

Dan Ash and I am the Director of the Metropolitan College in Louisville. I’ve heard some talk about the support for technology in public school systems. I’ve just returned from the Conference of National Licensed Businesses where it was reported that 75 percent of the jobs that are out there today require more than high school. I’m real curious about what you think that business or primary education or government need to do to do more partnering with higher education. I have a vision of hundreds of students who are accustomed to 12 years of working with all the great things you’re saying and walking into classrooms and, I’m a psychology professor so I know of which I speak, finding that that’s indeed not the case in higher education.

Jon Draud

Who wants to challenge?

Myk Garn

Oh, you mean me? Well, I think our view of that is that it is a moving target in the sense that technology is coming to those who are trying to avoid it as well. So those skills are becoming more common and I mean the basic entry-level skills of being able to work on the Internet, use a browser, and some of those things. I think that that barrier is becoming less. I think one of the challenges that we have, and Chuck Martin was talking about that, was people shopping online while working. And I think the same challenge is true for education. When that’s available, is this something you do on your lunch hour? How does the company think about that? We can provide a vast number of courses, programs, and things like that. We’re working very hard to do it, but getting it into the corporation and having the corporation value that and set that time aside is a challenge. Some have embraced it very well where they’ve set up computer labs in places where people can do that or they allow people to learn at work. Others see that as a real challenge. I think someone earlier brought up the real challenge is in the smaller businesses and that’s where, if there’s one person doing a job, to have them take off an hour during the day is kind of tough. It’s almost easier to get them offsite for a day for a workshop than take that one hour a day every day or once a week for a class. So I guess I see the capability or the entry level coming lower for those people, but I see the demand on the corporation and the company to look at the need for that and create the space, the time, the equipment, the capability as increasing.

Craig True

Yes, I guess I’m blessed to work for a company like PriceWaterhouseCoopers, that it is people. That’s all we’ve got, so we spend the time. There’s 160,000 of them and we spend a lot of money making sure that they make that jump because we don’t expect them to do deals when they come out of college. But we certainly expect them to have the gray matter to be able to absorb information and learn from it. We make such an investment in it that it’s difficult for me to relate to your question. I’m sorry.

Jon Draud

We’re going to take one more question.

Questioner

Ashley Davis and I work for the Governor’s Office of Agricultural Policy as their Communications Director. I really like what you all have said about educating and opening the schools up to the public. Rural society, you know, is where a majority of the population is in the state of Kentucky. How are you going out and reaching those people? What education programs are you going to provide for those people? And how are you going to train them coming from an agricultural background? Right now in agriculture we’re missing a whole gamut of dollars just because with the value-added products, our farmers produce them, but somebody else is the middle man and getting the money for them. Because our farmers can’t sell and I guess it’s a big question, but I mean, I think it’s great addressing the urban issues, but I think they also have to address the rural issues.

Vicki Fields

I’ll address that. I was born and raised in the rural part of Kenton County and you’re right, farming was very important to my family when I was growing up. I was in a meeting several weeks ago and I listened to the Superintendent of Todd County talk about how important technology was to the farmer and global positioning. While I could not sit here and relay all the wonderful things he said about it, he made it very clear to us sitting in that room that technology was very important to them. And then I’d like to come back to this gentleman that was talking about the wood manufacturing. I think the concept and what we’re talking about here is that no matter what we do, everyone has to be learning constantly, and it doesn’t make any difference whether that is city, urban, or rural. There will always be people. There will always be houses built. We will always need carpenters. We will always need plumbers. When my microwave broke last week, I was dying for somebody to come fix that thing. We will always have the service industry of some type. You’re right; the financial ability or the money you make is what runs this country and as long as those people want to be able to survive, they will come looking. They’re not going to sit back and wait for things to come to them. They’re going to come looking for help, whether they go to their co-op or whatever. It is important for us as educators and working with children and with those farmers in rural areas that we make sure they are aware of the programs that are available. But, again, as stated on this panel, our centers, our schools do need to be community centers and open to everyone.

Jon Draud

Thank you, Vicki. I planned to end this session but one of my outstanding colleagues, Gippy Graham, is here, our State Representative. Gippy, you have a question you’d like to ask?

Questioner

Gippy Graham here, and it’s not really a question, it’s just a couple of observations. In listening to all this discussion, it has been my experience in looking at the thing, that most solutions to problems are solved in the community. If you look at it in its entirety, this New Economy and training in technology, we’ve got to also remember that students have a place. They live in a community and in their community they have assets. They are assets in every community. We know through assets of individuals that if we look at the assets in the community we can also make assets of the students and come to a better society. There is a place. We have to make sure that young people feel that place in my opinion. The problems aren’t going to be solved, I don’t think, unless we really start involving the community. Bill, you mentioned it, I think, that’s a key and I’m pleased to find that in the General Assembly now we’re moving in that direction, too.

Jon Draud

Thank you very much. I appreciate it and thank you all for coming and I’d appreciate it if you gave the members of the panel a round of applause. (Applause) Let me also remind you that you are all welcome to stick around at the reception right outside the doors and to come back later on this evening for Kentucky Tonight.