MAKE SURE YOU GET A WARRANTY -- WHEN HIRING A HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE 

When Japanese auto makers initiated the unheard of practise of offering new car buyers 50,000 mile warranties, North American car manufacturers panicked and jumped to match it's main competitors. It was an expensive move, but not without a moral. They also learned that it is better to make a product right in the first place, rather than spending so much money fulfilling the warranty.

Starting in 1994, graduates from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school area in the United States, with a student population of 640,000, will come with a warranty along with the now-tarnished usual diploma. The education warranty will work just like a car one. If the hired student's skills do not match those embodied in the warranty, the school will absorb the cost of bringing that student up to the required level!

This is not unexpected. For the past decade, business, both in the United States and Canada, has been telling the educational establishment that a mere high school diploma no longer carries the same value as in the past. TIME magazine reported that Pacific Bell complained that "more than half of its applicants for entry-level jobs, such as operators, fail a simple seventh-grade reading and math test. Many others companies have reported similar experiences. A large number of Canadian business operations have been making similar complaints for some time.

The idea is also under consideration in Maryland and Massachusetts. In Los Angeles the warranty covers more than basic reading, mathematics and effective communications. Students must also have adequate thinking skills. They must be able to solve problems, reason logically and describe mental visualizations. They must possess such personal qualities as integrity, self-management, initiative and responsibility. If they don't, you bounce them back. And if they don't measure up when they return, as with a car, you stop dealing with that school and its product (see recent "Dr. Tomorrow column on Japanese schools moving into North America).

If you think car makers in Detroit and Oshawa went through a wringer during the past two decades, watch what cries this innovation will evoke in educational circles: from students and teachers. California graduates will be expected to know how to budget time and such resources as money, materials and staff. They must know, not learn on the job, how to lead, negotiate and work on a team. They must know how to use technology to access, organize and interpret data and how to understand and improve social and organizational systems and be able to select, and apply trouble-shooting technology.

Gabriel Cortina, Assistant Superintendent on the Labor Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) doesn't beat aroundthe-bush. "In the business world, sharing responsibility for a project is called teamwork". "In classrooms, the way we teach today, it's called cheating", she explains. The teachers union is "livid" according to TIME. But the superintendent at the PlymouthCarver Regional School District in Massachusetts said her teachers "viewed it as a big vote of confidence in them".

Executives say the warranty is needed and that finally the educational establishment is willing to confront a serious problem.

If the Canadian educational system doesn't match up, don't complain in future years when your kids are living at home until they are 30 because nobody wants to hire them.

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