BOSTON – Massachusetts’ school system is widely considered to be the best in the nation, but state business leaders say it’s not good enough to produce the kinds of employees they need to fill high-tech positions.

According to a new survey commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE), 69 percent of state employers say it’s difficult to find potential employees who possess the appropriate skill set.

To solve that problem and to give the state a competitive advantage in the increasingly global economy, MBAE officials are calling on lawmakers to adopt some fairly substantial K-12 reforms, according to the Boston Globe.

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The group’s new report – “The New Opportunity to Lead: A Vision for Education in Massachusetts in the Next 20 Years” – recommends creating more charter schools and giving government-run schools more flexibility in making personnel and school operation-related decisions (i.e. a longer school day).

The MBAE’s new report also calls for universal pre-kindergarten (though some studies suggest such programs have virtually no long-term impact on student achievement) and expresses support for the nationalized learning standard experiment known as Common Core.

“Other recommendations are more radical, such as devising a statewide contract for all teachers,” the Globe reports. “Currently, unions negotiate contracts with their respective school systems.”

Although the Globe doesn’t report it, we have to assume the state’s teacher unions hate this idea, as it would make contract negotiations a state-wide issue and subject them to intense scrutiny. That, in turn, would make it much more difficult for the labor groups to sneak various financial goodies into the contract.

But we digress.

The main point of the business alliance’s report, as one of its authors put it, is that Massachusetts needs to find ways of “unleash(ing) greatness.”

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“You can’t order someone to be great, but you can create the conditions for being great,” Sir Michael Barber, an author of the MBAE report, told the Globe.

While many of the MBAE’s recommendations make sense to school choice advocates, it’s important that Massachusetts leaders understand that public education is about far more than cranking out workers who meet the needs of employers.

Not only is that a fool’s errand – as work skills are continually changing and evolving – but it ignores the higher purpose of public education, which is to equip the next generation of Americans to be thoughtful and active participants in America’s grand experiment in self-government.

Training students in the STEM disciplines (science, engineering, technology and mathematics) is important, but it’s not any more important than training future voters and leaders in the disciplines of history, government and literature.

STEM courses will help students get a job, but history and literature will help them keep and maintain their country.

Just a thought as leaders in the Bay State settle in for what’s bound to be a long and lively discussion about education reform.