Working at Cross-Purposes

Abstract

PERHAPS it is naivete, but when it comes to making policy in education, the business community's left hand doesn't seem to know what its right hand is doing. The pell-mell rush to add more requirements and rigor to the high school curriculum, for example, is being fueled by business leaders' alarm over the performance of young people in school, over their plans for college, and over their entry-level skills (even though the hiring practices of most corporations in this country eschew the new high school graduate). Even Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, one of the most enlightened school reformers from the business world, doesn't seem to see the connections between what business says it wants and what business actually does. He told a Senate hearing this spring that today's students are fully immersed in the digital culture, while their schools are stuck in the demands of 50 years ago. Consequently, many high school students today are bored, unchallenged, and disengaged from the high school curriculum, Gates argued. Thus they either drop out or simply try to get by. True. But when school lets out for the day, many of those same young people are engaged in propping up a consumer economy as low-wage workers. By working low-wage jobs, they help businesses make their bottom line, and, as an added benefit, those businesses prosper from the teenage buying power that comes from having part-time work. If many students fall asleep in class, don't finish their homework, read less and less for leisure, and don't care about delving deeply into academic instruction that, as Gates so rightly pointed out, has not adapted to change, who can blame them? Teenage employment is sanctioned by our laws and fostered by a low-wage economy. It also is a lot more appealing to a generation focused on instant gratification and on buying the latest digital toy. By the time they are seniors, 80% of high school students have been employed at least part time, and at any given moment, at least 30% are gainfully employed outside of school hours. Official research about youth employment is far out of date and is strongly influenced by the ups and downs of the economy. However, it is obvious that youth employment policy and business interests have intersected over the years. In the 1970s, at least three federal commissions studying high schools recommended work experience for high school students. Then A Nation at Risk came along in 1983 with a suggestion that young people should spend more time on academic studies and less on employment during high school. But some programs today incorporate work experience as a tool to keep students engaged and enrolled in high school. In 1998, a federal study recommended limiting the number of hours that 16- and 17-year-olds could work during the school year. This proposal, from the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the Institute of Medicine (National Research Council), stemmed from concerns about child labor. While there are time limits on the 14- and 15-year-old crowd, the law was never changed for older teenagers. They can legally work as much as they want, as long as the occupation is not hazardous. Do the benefits of working outweigh its distractions? Research is mixed on the issue, but the changing demands on high school graduates probably call for a new look at the effects. Some studies cautiously concluded that adults who had been employed while in school earned slightly higher wages than those who did not work. One study found that this wage advantage dissipated over time. Another study (this one of men only) looked at income at age 27 and found that going to school and not working had much bigger payoffs than combining school and part-time work. (These studies are cited in a U.S. Department of Labor Report on the Youth Labor Force from 2000. …