UBEC and Wisconsin Public Service Corporation Partner to Achieve Sustainable School Improvement in Western Great Lakes Region

by Joanne M. Lozar Glenn

Talk to key players in the Wisconsin and Michigan communities that are part of the UBEC/Wisconsin Public Service Corporation (WPS) Western Great Lakes initiative, and this is what you'll hear: praise for a process that is not merely reforming but transforming how education happens in this region.

"We recognized that improving education could play a key role in the economic vitality of both our company and our entire region," says Larry Weyers, chairman and CEO of WPS, a Green Bay, WI, based provider of electricity and natural gas. "Finding a way to bring employers and educators together became a business imperative."

Jim Phillippo, manager of customer service for WPS in Marinette/Menominee, MI, says one of the first achievements of the UBEC process was a positive change in attitudes among the various groups at the table. "There used to be lots of finger-pointing," he says. "Now parents, educators and employers are sitting at the same table, putting down their fingers, and becoming champions for school improvement."

These new relationships have evolved because entire communities have realized the need for change and committed themselves to creating a sustainable base for educational excellence.

Education for All

Several Western Great Lakes-based partnerships have, at various times, tried to address the link between educational excellence and workforce employability issues, especially since the mid-1990s, when the region's economy experienced a significant shift:

• Manufacturing replaced agriculture as the predominant industry. Much as in the rest of the United States, technology became more sophisticated, and even entry-level jobs required a more technically skilled labor force. Schools were not able to keep up with these advances, hence local high school graduates lacked key academic and employability skills, and industry experienced a severe and growing skilled labor shortage.
• As an example of the region's changing economic realities, K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base in Michigan's Upper Peninsula closed in 1995, costing local businesses an estimated $55 million in annual revenue. The exodus of military families decreased school enrollment and area birth rates. School budgets also decreased, resulting in closures and teacher layoffs.
• The perception that future economic success required a four-year university degree created a "cloud" over the community. Parents believed that the better jobs required a bachelor's degree, and students perceived that these jobs were to be found in other states. These perceptions contributed to the already critical skilled labor shortage.

"We were extremely concerned," says B. J. Cassidy, assistant to the chairman-education affairs, WPS. "Our region was reaching for a future in technology. Companies wanted their employees to be able to compete globally. Employers wanted our local schools to set high academic standards for all students. We wanted all our region's students prepared for making choices about career paths and lifelong learning."

In response to these issues, WPS created and launched the Western Great Lakes Learning for the 21st Century Initiative in 1998. Today, the initiative impacts 55 school districts and more than 150,000 students in northeastern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The key driver has been a focus on building strategic, collaborative business-education partnerships whose goal is to achieve sustainable school improvement at the district level.

"We needed to focus on systemic education improvement, because the foundation of our region's economic life support is our educational system," Cassidy said.

WPS invited UBEC to bring its philosophy and process to the region and to serve as its partner in facilitating the Learning for the 21st Century Initiative. With support from a grant from the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education, UBEC released a request for proposal – "A Million Dollar Opportunity" – to provide local school district collaboratives up to $50,000 each in technical assistance toward building sustainable, community-based business – education partnerships. A number of WPS-sponsored sites in Wisconsin and in Michigan submitted applications.

Four sites qualified for and received UBEC grants: two in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (Marquette/Alger Counties and Delta County) and two in Wisconsin (Green Bay Area and Door/Kewaunee Counties).

The Foundation for Success

As a first step in helping communities develop sustainable, customer-focused systemic improvement strategies, UBEC brought to each of the four sites its unique Quality Transformation in Education Process (QTEP), a five-step process designed to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. Working with local educators, employers, parents and partnership leaders, UBEC partnered to develop a Site Action Plan that defined future actions and their expected results. The process helps create a focused environment conducive to change that stresses cooperation among all parties and an alignment of resources to achieve defined objectives.

"We have our own way of doing business here in the Upper Peninsula, and UBEC was very sensitive to that," says WPS' Phillippo, who works with both the Delta County Partners in Education and Lake Superior Partners in Education (Marquette/Alger Counties). "UBEC gave us a national perspective but they respected the individual requirements of each of our partnerships. We wanted to know what worked, but we didn't want to be a clone or cookie-cutter model." Representatives from each of the partnerships concur that one of UBEC's unique contributions was the ability of the process to "get it right" every time:

• Each analysis was real, rather than "pie in the sky."
• Each Site Action Plan represented the community accurately, identifying its strengths and its challenges.
• Each series of recommendations in the Plan suggested credible action plans that were respectful of the local community's culture, needs, and abilities.

"Effecting systemic change takes time and fortitude," Phillippo says. "We're trying to change the way people do business and the way schools teach...and change is hard to implement."

During the process, he says, local leaders learned some important lessons about the challenges of systemic school improvement. "We need open-minded players, but most of all we need students and parents at the table with us. Change won't happen until we get understanding from youth and consistent and adequate buy-in from parents."

Phillippo explains that most parents and students believe pursuing a college degree and then entering a "profession" is the key to success. "These are unrealistic expectations because only about 20 percent of jobs require a four-year college degree," he says. "Success for young people today is just as likely to be found in a highly-skilled manufacturing setting or another job requiring higher-level technical and academic skills."

This respect for a broad range of career and learning opportunities is evident in the diverse corporate partners the Great Lakes Learning for the 21st Century Initiative has attracted: partners like Mead Corporation, IBM, Humana, McDonald's Corporation, Schreiber Foods, Inc., and others. "We need all of our employers at the table," says Paul Bredael, community relations leader at WPS, Two Rivers, WI. "We want to make sure our communities are strong and healthy, and that we have good economic and business development. Education is the key for our future success." Bredael added that the region's new partnerships have created more effective face-to-face interaction between business and schools. "The partnerships have helped us get a better idea of how our schools are teaching," he says. "Businesses provide a customer voice for education and students and parents are better able to identify emerging workforce opportunities.

"Schools also benefit. When we can educate students about career possibilities in our local communities, we lose fewer people and schools increase their enrollment."

"This is the first time that community members, business leaders, and education leaders are sitting together at the same table," says Joanne Leonard, manager of customer service at WPS, Wausau, WI. "There isn't a Them and Us [anymore]," she said. "Educators are finally trusting [that] we aren't in the business of telling them how to teach, but in the business of helping them address the growing gap between the skills we need for our workforce and what we are getting."

Bredael says the initiative has helped communities take the focus off programs and place it on strategic actions. "Business has learned that in the long run, programs in isolation don't impact academic, technical, or employability skills," he says.

A focus on systemic processes rather than programs helps school districts use their resources more effectively. "Fundamentally, the most effective partnerships align and allocate resources so they support the achievement of desired goals," says Steven Kussmann, UBEC's executive director.

Kussmann added that the success of these partnerships is due in part to their structure as independent, non-profit organizations. "UBEC strongly advocates this type of structure," he says. "As an independent organization, a partnership can better bring all parties together in a cooperative, non-confrontational manner. As a non-profit, the partnership can tap various resources and funding opportunities, such as foundation grants and corporate contributions."

UBEC's emphasis on building strategic relationships has favorably increased constructive communication between employers and educators and led to a greater awareness of the cooperation needed to achieve and sustain success. As Vickie Micheau, executive director of the Delta County Chamber of Commerce (Escanaba, MI) put it: "We now have an understanding that quality education for our youth is everybody's responsibility."

A Series of Successes

Last year, UBEC and WPS expanded the initiative at three new Wisconsin sites in Oshkosh, Marathon County, and the Lakeshore area, comprising Sheboygan and Manitowoc Counties. With this development, the initiative is now in various stages of development in seven sites in the Western Great Lakes region. Initiative accomplishments to date include:

• Business and education work together as partners, working toward the same goals:
  • Improving academic and technical skill achievement for all students;
• Raising the quality of entry-level employees;
  • Lowering recruiting and screening costs; and
  • Enhancing the local economy and quality of life.
• The groundwork for successful and sustainable school improvement is in place:
  • Partnerships are taking a systemic rather than a program-based approach;
  • Partnerships are aligning and leveraging local, state, and federal resources to support Site Action Plans;
  • Partnerships are implementing measurable strategic actions with accountability for results.
• Businesses throughout the region have increased participation in career centers sponsored by schools and by organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce. For example:
  • Employer expertise (from the manufacturing, commercial art, building trade, automotive industries) is being used to design the technical centers of the soon-to-be-completed East High School in Wausau, WI;
  • School systems in Marquette-Alger Counties are modifying curricula to incorporate the real-life applications students' need.

As a result of this type of change, says June Schaefer, superintendent for the Marquette-Alger Intermediate School District (ISD), MI, students now can choose career path studies that are more diverse and better focused.

• Community-corporate relations have improved due to the:
  • Elimination of political barriers that historically impeded meaningful progress;
  • Adoption of local ownership of the reform process and outcomes.
• UBEC and WPS have created strong alliances among the region's employers. These alliances include:
  • Large and small businesses such as manufacturing, health care providers, hospitals, bankers, technology companies, chambers of commerce, and unions;
  • Educators and other community members, including superintendents, principals, school board members, technical schools, colleges and universities, parents, and students;
  • Nonprofit organizations, including foundations; and
  • Agency/government leaders, such as social service directors, probate judges, Michigan Works, economic development corporations, and workforce investment board members.

Tracking Results

As part of its commitment to systemic change, each site agrees to set benchmarks for measuring progress and create strategic action plans that encourage accountability. In Delta County, MI, for example, Mead Corporation (Escanaba, MI) is working with educators to plan curriculum and develop performance assessments that will improve academic achievement and employability skills. These assessments will include measures such as student achievement test scores, employability skills attainment, and declines in student truancy and other problematic behaviors.

In Marquette/Alger Counties, MI, partnership representatives from local schools are engaged in dialogue with human resource (HR) specialists from area businesses. "Educators want to clearly understand what employers look at when they interview entry-level employees," ISD superintendent Schaefer says. "What [kinds of instruments] can we develop that will assess competence authentically_ Employers need to buy into and validate those measures."