Even in the midst of a recession, there are shortages in such jobs as engineering, healthcare, and information technology. The Employment Policy Foundation estimates that 80 percent of the impending labor shortage will involve skills, not numbers of workers. Obviously, the pipeline issue is serious.

The corporate world cannot fix the pipeline problem alone. It is complex and will take the collaborative efforts of educators, government, not for profits and most importantly parents. Corporations employ parents. Parents have the most direct influence on their children’s lives and today many parents spend more time at work than they do at home. Combined weekly work hours for dual-earning couples with children rose 10 hours per week, from 81 hours in 1977 to 91 hours in 2002, according to a study by the New York-based Families and Work Institute.

Bill Gates was on The Oprah Winfrey Show a couple of years ago and said that if we do not do something about public education, The US will soon lose its status as a world power.

He and his wife Melinda have already allocated over one billion dollars through The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to radically change the course of public education in the US. They have also launched a nationwide campaign called “Stand Up” to encourage everybody to get involved in some way.

But the poor state of education in this country is not a new story. The last concerted focus on the poor quality of US schools was in the 80′s.

Lots of corporations got involved back then too, such as IBM and Xerox. Former Xerox CEO David Kearns pursued a mission to save public education for nearly two decades after traveling to Japan convinced him that education was what gave that nation its competitive advantage. And, in 1986, Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, wrote an influential report on education titled “A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century” in response to the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk.” Tucker found that American schools had been too slow to adapt high school curriculums to the real-life demands of college and the workplace. Citing the failure of educational experts to account for the trends of globalization in the last half of the 20th century, his studies comparing education in America with that in Western European and Asian nations revealed the U.S. to be severely lacking. According to Tucker, “The authors of A Nation at Risk made a terrible mistake. They thought…it was the performance of our schools that had changed. What had changed was the world around them.”

Unfortunately, these efforts just seemed to fizzle out. Even though executives were sent into schools to help, culture clashes thwarted the efforts. The corporate envoys talked a different language, had different processes and in some cases were considered arrogant and elitist. Educators felt that their expertise was not valued and resisted the changes the corporate gurus suggested. Most of the efforts just stopped.

Fast forward to today and the current outcry. In Jonathan Kozol’s book “Shame of the Nation,” he claims that public schools are more segregated today than they were in 1968. He calls them apartheid schools. The performance of the so-called ”apartheid” schools is appalling. According to Kozol:

• By 12th grade, today’s average black and Latino student is doing reading and mathematics at the level of a white seventh-grader.

• Only 6% of students enrolled in urban schools will graduate from high school.

• Nationwide, from 1993 to 2002, the number of high schools graduating less than half their ninth-grade class in four years has increased by 75%.

• In total, 30% of US high school students drop out and 50% of blacks and Hispanics drop out.

ABC News 20/20 aired a special called “Stupid in America.” The investigative news program found that, at age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.

Twenty-five years ago the US ranked number one in math and science in the world. Today we rank number 25 in math, number 20 in science and 12^th in reading.

Who is to blame for what Bill Gates calls a state of emergency? The issues are complex and systemic and it does no good to play the blame game.

I think the only way we will see change is if parents are held much more accountable for their children’s education, and I think employers can play a significant role in facilitating greater involvement.

Employers have an incentive to require parental involvement and to monitor the outcomes for the children of their employees. If the children of current employees do not receive a quality education, the shortage of skilled workers will escalate beyond the dire predictions we have now.

The corporate world needs to get involved again in public education, like they did in the 80s, but this time focus on parents rather than the teachers and administrators. The business world needs to help their parents with parenting skills, give them incentives to require their children to stay in school and to excel, provide career exploration opportunities for students and parents on the types of skills that will be needed, and in general make education their business. The bottom line depends on it.

Specifically, how can the corporate world encourage parents to get more involved in their children’s education? Here are several ideas:

• Provide parenting skills training on-site, or collaborate with a not-for-profit to provide the service.
• Not only give time off for parents to attend parent-teacher conferences but expect and reward parents for attending school functions.
• Establish “education advocates” to step in for parents when they are not able to meet with teachers and to help them understand and navigate the system.
• Set up tutoring programs with employee volunteers.
• Provide career exploration training for parents and students.
• Monitor student report cards and hold parents accountable for their children’s progress. Reward both parents and students.
• Utilize existing venues like “take your children to work day” to focus on the importance of education and to provide career exploration.
• Provide scholarships and employment opportunities for the children of your employees.
• Make education everybody’s business, with marketing and communication efforts throughout your organization.

Mary-Frances Winters is founder and CEO of The Winters Group, a 25 year old diversity and organizational development consulting firm headquartered in the Washington, DC area. She is the author of three books, including Only Wet Babies Like Change: Workplace Wisdom for Baby Boomers, Inclusion Starts With I, and CEO’s Who Get It: Diversity Leadership From the Heart and Soul.www.wintersgroup.com