REAL DRIVER BEHIND WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT OF ARIZONA
For Arizona to continue to build global competitiveness within the New Economy, the dominant arrow in its quiver will be its working people. People with advanced degrees and experience manage, engineer and market corporate production. People with skills and training do the multitude of tasks within both the public and private sectors. We have incumbent workforces, emerging workforces and retiring workforces. Workforce members are attracted, created, retained, and lost.
Attraction is working well. A study for the Arizona Strategic Plan for Economic Development showed that Arizona ranks 12th in college attainment of our workforce. Creation is in deep trouble. The same study showed Arizona in the high 40’s in K-12 education. Eight years later our K-12 education is still stuck in the lowest quartile among states.
During the Industrial Economy workforce was one of several economic drivers that were unique to a region and changed slowly. But with the New Economy these advantages are eroding. Workforce remains as the most important. But with cheap broad-band telecommunications part of the Arizona "workforce" can live anywhere and contribute from a virtual workspace. To enhance our competitiveness we must create and develop a workforce that is committed, and stays in Arizona. A good K-12 education will produce graduates satisfied with Arizona and wanting to have long and successful careers.
While we build freeways, sports stadiums, resorts and great retail and high tech companies, we have allow our schools to languish. We could continue our past defacto strategy of not building a world class education system and continue to invest in importing talent. Our construction industry will continue to prosper while our kids will not.
Obviously we need a better strategy. That strategy can be driven by the same force that is driving the New Economy. This driver is information technology. The workforce-employer compact has shifted from the Industrial model of "lifelong loyalty-employment on any job" to the New Economy model of "continuous employee professional development and enthusiastic job performance doing what the worker does best." Arizona is positioned to apply this compact to a workforce of 50,000 incumbent K-12 teachers and school staff.
Teachers want to use information technology to support academic performance and increase the retention of their students. But only a few have had even the beginnings of a professional development program. They need continuous professional development to reach and maintain the skill and experience level needed to integrate technology into their classroom work process.
The formula for the technology-effective K-12 classroom is straight forward:
The computer component is on its way to Arizona’s K-12 classrooms. For the past two legislative sessions ALTP advocacy has supported technology as part of the Students First funding legislation for K-12 facility renovation. The $50 million new funds for soft capital can be spent on software and computer equipment. School Facilities Board Guidelines specify one multimedia networked computer for eight students.
As business people in the 1980’s we have all had the experience of computer investments being initially wasted by failing to integrate them into a transformed work process. The critical missing element was investment in workforce professional development. Learning from these mistakes, an initiative is in place to fund teacher professional development for all 50,000 K-12 workers. The entire annual cost of putting one teacher in a K-12 classroom is approximately $130,000. The ALTP estimates that for $1000 a year per worker dedicated to professional development will do the job. This critical second K-12 investment will ensure the payoff on the hardware investment and in a world-class workforce for Arizona.