Baby boomers are now parents and even grandparents, and they don’t remember school being this way. They don’t remember kids graduating without being able to read, write and do math. They don’t remember not learning the basic skills every job requires — be on time, be ready to work, show up every day. And they don’t understand why their children and grandchildren have had so much trouble learning these lessons in school.

Just as their parents predicted, the unruly, disrespectful baby boom now understands the value of an education, and what they have seen in their kids’ schools makes them uneasy. Says local education guru Ginger Hovenic, the same goes for local employers and that is what has sparked the explosion in the business community’s interest in education.

Hovenic runs the Business Roundtable for Education, part of the nonprofit arm of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation created in 1992 to be the “voice of business” in the ongoing debate about education. There doesn’t seem to be much going on locally in K-12 and higher ed that she doesn’t know something about.

And she agrees the local business community is taking an ever more active role in education at every level.

The Chamber itself has led the way with a dual strategy consisting of its nonprofit Roundtable and a rising political profile. Hovenic’s Business Roundtable for Education promotes an ABC policy, she says, of “accountability, best practices and comprehensive school reform with charter schools.”

A compilation of best practices in elementary schools is about to be published as a companion to the Roundtable’s 2001 book on innovative high school programs. Hovenic says that the best practices effort has an important benefit beyond publicizing exemplary classroom programs.

“Best practices was a way to get 125 business leaders back into classrooms all over the county to see what works and then they spread that word at the business and social events they attend.”

Federal tax rules prevent the nonprofit Roundtable from any political activity, but its parent Chamber of Commerce has been upfront in promoting the careers of school board candidates it sees as supporting the back-to-basic reforms led by Alan Bersin, superintendent of San Diego City Schools.

Jessie J. Knight Jr., Chamber president and CEO, says while his group has not endorsed or contributed to school board campaigns, it has recruited potential candidates.

Separate from the Chamber, several prominent business leaders have handed out enough money to drive up campaign costs, most recently in the 2000 school board election. Padres owner John Moores, Wal-Mart heir John Walton, businessman Malin Burnham and Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, among others, ponied up more than $545,000 on behalf of a pro-Bersin candidate, attorney Julie Dubick. While their efforts failed, it raised the money bar in local school board races and made clear the business community’s intent to make a deep mark in local educational policy.

In a town where many of the hopes for economic growth are pinned on high-tech enterprises, it is no surprise that much of the business outreach into schools has a technological edge to it. The scope of business involvement ranges from individual projects to corporate initiatives.

Kaiser Permanente physician Ricardo Sistos describes his own journey from a small central Mexico town to Stanford Medical School to show middle- and high-schoolers the trip is possible.

Sistos founded the Hippocrates Circle three years ago to, in his words, “introduce medical careers to students who might not even be considering them because they are so far outside their realities.”

He recruited nine other Kaiser doctors — a total of 22 — of different backgrounds and medical specialties and made contact with the schools around Kaiser’s Otay Mesa clinic. Nominate kids for the Hippocrates Circle, he told them, who may not be top academic performers but who have potential and may have a strong interest in science. I will give them a year-long hands-on introduction to careers in medicine.

Sistos’ Hippocrates Circle launches its fourth year this month with up to 60 students. Under his direction, they will meet first to hear the Kaiser doctors’ accounts of their personal paths to medical school. In January, they will tour Kaiser’s South Bay facility from top to bottom. In March, they visit UCSD Medical School to meet med students and hear a mini-lecture. In May, they gather with their families for a dinner celebration.

The Hippocrates Circle now operates with funding from Kaiser corporate and the Kaiser Foundation. But where some businesses do educational outreach on their own, other businesses join forces.

Enter the San Diego Science Alliance, which links its A list of tech-heavy corporate supporters with schools countywide for the goal of increasing science literacy.

From roots in the Salk Institute in 1988, the SDSA was founded in 1995, says founder Pat Winter, to help more tech-based companies reach out to classrooms.

“No one knew how to get in touch with each other,” she remembers. “We have made it easier for the companies to do that kind of outreach.”

Past activities have included a “Science in San Diego” series for teachers to learn the latest from scientists in their own labs, which has evolved into Pisces, a program to improve science curricula and teaching in elementary school.

More recently, the alliance has focused on activities for kids, such as the upcoming seventh annual Technology Fair, slated for February, and the BeWise program, which hosts science-themed sleepovers for middle school girls and women scientists from local businesses.

The alliance also publishes and Web hosts a Science Resource Catalog, now in its seventh edition, that helps teachers find science-related programs and internships, and keeps a countywide calendar of science-related events.

Community colleges in San Diego have developed their relationships with business to a fine art. With the leadership of Chancellor Augustine Gallego, the district’s four campuses are dotted with centers and programs tying course offerings and the needs of business together as closely as possible.

Gallego can talk for hours about examples.

“We have the MESA (Math, Engineering and Science Achievement) program at City College under the direction of Rafael Arreola, who is an engineer himself. Hewlett Packard provided the wireless computer lab and other businesses donated $100,000 in equipment and other technology.

“Also at City we have the Center for Advanced Competitive Technologies, which we opened in 1990 with a focus on manufacturing, CAD and machine tooling using the latest software.

“And at Miramar College we are about to complete an advanced transportation and alternative fuels center and a regional biosciences center, both of which we have developed with input from the business community.”

Students in, for example, the clean-room technology program graduate into jobs making $60,000 to $70,000 a year. And Gallego disputes the idea that students who learn technical skills will find them outdated soon after graduation. “We stress the underlying importance of reading and math, and the ability to work in groups and problem-solve. These skills are transportable and every employer looks for them.”

The community colleges also collaborate closely with individual employers such as SDG&E and the U. S. Navy to provide continuing employee training at the Mission Valley-based Employee Training Institute and on individual bases.

The Evolving Collaboration Principle

Collaborating with business is the foundation on which the Entrepreneurial Management Center at SDSU is built.

Local companies have been involved from the beginning in creating the center, reports Sanford Ehrlich, business professor who runs it and holds the title Qualcomm executive director of entrepreneurship.

“Corporations have been doing educational philanthropy for hundreds of years,” he observes. “If there has been a change, it is that our visions are now mutually constructed with companies who want to participate in that vision. This is in opposition to the old ivory-tower approach, where we the faculty call the shots. There is a strong recognition that this is a mutually beneficial relationship.”

What businesses want, he says, are employees with entrepreneurial mindsets and high capacity to deal with change.

What schools such as SDSU want is a realistic, up-to-date picture of the current business climate. “By working with us, they can help us shape our curriculum so we can improve the product we deliver to them.”

That corporations are beginning to influence what the campus offers, he says, “is to the betterment of the university, which can produce employees who are better equipped to deal with what companies are facing.”

One thing the center has learned from this interaction is that entrepreneurial skills are welcome attributes even for those seeking jobs in large corporations or nonprofits.

Ehrlich says SDSU’s master’s degree entrepreneurship program had start-up ventures as its main focus. “But many of our corporate advisers asked us, ‘Why don’t you have a corporate entrepreneurship class? We need you to open students’ eyes who thought corporations were large and slow-moving.’”

The entrepreneurial mindset, says Ehrlich, is more than wanting to start a small business. Rather, it is “the ability to recognize and screen opportunities. As a person moves through a career, as they see an opportunity, they will know what questions to ask to know if it’s a real opportunity.”

This is a skill that not only benefits engineers and scientists, he points out, but also liberal arts majors who become entrepreneurs.

These words liberal arts rarely come up in corporate conversations about education, although SDSU, for example, offers almost twice as many liberal arts majors as those in science and engineering.

In fact, says UCSD’s chief fund-raiser, “People in the humanities have to shout from the highest hill that we can’t afford to forget the humanities as we develop resources for education.”

James M. Langley is UCSD’s vice chancellor for external relations, where he is about halfway through a $1 billion fund-raising campaign. Even at his tech-centric campus, he says, “The strongest support we receive for the humanities is from our alumni who are maybe 10 years into their science or engineering careers. They come back and say, ‘The most valuable classes I took here were outside my major.’”

Langley cites UCSD alum Fred Chang, now an SBC executive who recently made a major gift to the humanities at UCSD. “He said that although he resented having to do it at the time, his required humanities course in the classics as an undergraduate was the one that stretched him,” Langley reports. “It showed him that technology has to respond to human needs, and he specifically mentioned having to study Aristophanes’ ‘The Birds.’ Twenty years after graduating, he said he knows now it had a profound effect on him.”

Langley admits it is true that students get jobs more quickly if they master hot technical skills and that employers want workers who are ready to contribute immediately, and this makes it harder to interest business leaders in the humanities.

Despite this, UCSD is home to some of the nation’s leading humanities-related programs including theater arts, which operates in partnership with the La Jolla Playhouse and is ranked third in the nation behind Yale and NYU. “Our chancellor jokes that it’s the highest-ranking program west of the Hudson River,” Langley says. “If we expose students to the humanities, although they may resist or even resent it, we know they will be grateful in the long run. We are better acculturating young people so they will see the world in a more sophisticated light.”

In recognition of this, UCSD will earmark about one-third of its billion-dollar fund-raising goal to enhancing its non-technical campus programs.

Mary E. Lyons sees a similar goal for the University of San Diego, where corporations and local business have just made major gifts up to $250,000 to build the campus’s new $47 million Shiley Center for Science and Technology.

When businesses support USD and other institutions, says the university’s new president, “there has to be a return on their investment, a return that does more than just sustain the economy and the community, but which adds value to it.”

As a private institution, she adds, USD has no floor of government funding below which it can’t drop. “The cost of providing the kind of education the community and the world needs is very high, and we can’t lay it all on the backs of students. We must receive support from the community, and we must return it in the quality of our graduates.”

Lyons will make her first State of the University address Sept. 17 to USD’s network of corporate supporters, known as BusinessLink. Through it, USD cements its relationship to its corporate donors with access to its on-campus vending contracts, preferential campus recruiting, faculty consulting and continuing education.

Although there are as many ways for business to influence education as there are businesses and campuses, the trend is clear: the business community is no longer content to write checks as benevolent but uninvolved contributors. As the baby boom enters its years of greatest economic power, it will insist on being generous in a very hands-on way.