WASHINGTON — The CEO of Texas’ largest company said Wednesday that elected leaders in his state and elsewhere have badly distorted a nationwide push for common academic standards for public schools, bashing the so-called Common Core curriculum even as U.S. students and workers alike fall further behind their global peers.
“I’m extraordinarily disappointed in my home state,” Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of Irving-based Exxon Mobil, said during a quarterly meeting of Business Roundtable. He and other CEOs were highlighting what business leaders have called a major impediment to hiring: the lack of technical skills among job-seekers of all ages.
Common Core is a set of academic standards that grew out of a National Governors Association effort to make it possible for states to compare how well their schools are preparing students. After being embraced by the U.S. Department of Education, it has become a lightning rod among many conservatives.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has routinely touted Texas’ refusal to adopt the standards. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has said the standards intrude on local decision-making and should be abolished everywhere.
But Tillerson said the standards are embraced in 40 states and are badly needed. He said they merely set minimum standards in key academic areas. States and school districts decide how and what students are actually taught, he said.
“Some have found it opportunistic” to paint Common Core as an example of federal overreach, he said. “But what the common core is not is a mandate on your curriculum. And yet it has been described as the federal government telling you what you will teach. It is anything but that.”
Tillerson and three other CEOs spoke after President Barack Obama urged members to embrace his executive action on immigration.
The CEOs — from Exxon, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Siemens Corp. and Frontier Communications Corp. — each decried a widening skills gap that they say makes it difficult to fill jobs that require even basic levels of technical understanding.
While they were speaking, Business Roundtable and Change the Equation released a survey completed by 126 CEOs who said their firms have 200,000 open jobs. Sixty percent require at least basic grounding in science, technology, engineering or math. Forty-two percent require advanced training in science, technology, engineering or math — the STEM fields.
“It really does start in the K-through-12 level,” Tillerson said. He said colleges and employers are forced to spend far too much training new students or workers on skills they should have learned in high school.
“I don’t think the [K-12] schools realize that we’re their customer,” he said. “They need to produce students with skills that allow them to get a job. If they don’t, they are essentially producing a defective product. And in this case, the product is a human being. It’s tragic.”
Tillerson cited some progress in Texas. A program at the University of Texas aims to strengthen the science and math background of elementary school teachers, he said. And he touted a program in the Dallas school district that rewards students for STEM achievements.
Follow Michael A. Lindenberger on Twitter at @lindenberger.
To post a comment, log into your chosen social network and then add your comment below. Your comments are subject to our Terms of Service and the privacy policy and terms of service of your social network. If you do not want to comment with a social network, please consider writing a letter to the editor.