Traditional forms of education do not provide the best preparation for this emerging economy. Vocational education has been too focused on specific skills and occupations that are likely to change in the future. Traditional academic education by itself is also inadequate, because it does not equip students to apply their abstract knowledge, or to learn in the context of practical problem-solving. In addition, the United States has, for three decades, funded a complex and bewildering array of job training programs. Welfare moms, disadvantaged teens, dislocated workers, high school drop-outs--every state is trying to turn them into taxpayers instead of tax consumers. So far, though, the results have been disappointing.
A successful school-to-work system would equip all young people with high levels of academic and occupational knowledge and skill, and would enable them to find employment that uses their capacities. Furthermore, training programs for adults should be connected vertically so participants can move up to new skill levels. The terms "education" and "job training" must be linked before these programs can succeed in their long range goals--lifting people out of poverty and saving tax dollars.
Here at NCRVE, we put learning to work. Each of the following documents focuses on the link between work and learning, for either adult students or youth.
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From Getting to Work: A Guide for Better Schools, by MPR Associates, Inc.
One of the greatest challenges facing educators today is how to prepare students for living and working in a rapidly changing world. The days of the single lifelong occupation are gone forever. Mastering the changing and complex opportunities of the work world will require providing all students with a broad, rigorous foundation of knowledge and skills.
Meeting this challenge demands new approaches to education. One promising strategy is an increased emphasis on the integration of academic and vocational learning. In this model, students not only learn to work--they also work to learn.
By better integrating academic and vocational instruction and by carefully linking classroom-based learning to work-based learning, educators can raise the understanding and achievement of many more students--especially those who have difficulty with the abstractions of the traditional academic curriculum.
To achieve this aim, Getting to Work guides educators in using the world of work to create a rigorous, broad-reaching curriculum that will prepare students for the full range of postsecondary opportunities as well as for successful careers. Each of the five models may be purchased separately for $65.00, the facilitators guide for $150.00. The complete set is $395.00.
From Cooperative Vocational Education in the Urban School: Toward a Systems Approach, by James R. Stone III (MDS-1041)
Even as the national economy continues to grow and most major corporations are doing well, they are not necessarily generating net new jobs. Typically, large businesses have achieved efficiency and productivity through considerable "downsizing." In fact, recent statistics suggest that Fortune 500 companies have been shedding, not adding, workers for the past decade to become more competitive in the global market.
The definition of high-skill, high-wage occupations has proven elusive (in one state, it has been operationalized as any job that pays at least double the minimum wage). A number of pilot programs, primarily a result of youth apprenticeship efforts, have targeted machining, medical technology, and printing and graphics. For some youth, there will be opportunities for work-based learning in these and other high-skill industries. Cooperative education, or its look-alike companion, youth apprenticeship, offers one structure for connecting school to work.
In addition to existing high-skill, work-based learning opportunities, there is the potential for school-business partnerships to be formed that might focus on high-skill occupations not presently existing in any great number, but that are predicted to grow, such as telecommunications. Partnerships could evolve between businesses representative of such future industries and schools. In this approach, schools could foster the creation of what Secretary of Labor Reich (1992) has called "symbolic-analytic zones" and build a workforce for the future. $2.50
From Evaluating Job Training Programs in the United States: Evidence and Explanations, by W. Norton Grubb, (MDS-1047)
Although the benefits of current job training programs have been small, the problems they address--unemployment, underemployment, and welfare dependency--are too serious to ignore. Therefore, rather than abandoning job training programs, the appropriate response is to determine how to reform them.
The real problem with existing job training programs is not that an individual component here or there is not of adequate quality, but that the offerings of the "system" as a whole consist of a welter of different services, none of them obviously more effective than any others and all of them poorly coordinated, with individual programs of limited intensity not linked to other opportunities even though they are intended for a population with substantial needs. In contrast, the most effective programs seem to work because they encompass a combination of mutually-supporting practices. This suggests that the most powerful approaches to reforming job training would first create models of more comprehensive and interactive employment-related services, and then worry about the quality of the individual components.
Fortunately, there is already a model in the United States that could be used as the basis for reforming job training, though it has not yet been implemented. The School-to-Work Opportunities Act, passed in May 1994, is intended to apply to secondary and postsecondary education programs, but it presents a vision that could be used to guide job training programs as well.
The realization of this vision for an education and training system, in which all components are related to one another, might seem to be a daunting task. Implementing such a system would take substantial time and legislative care--qualities that are in short supply in the legislative system of the United States--as well as additional public funding, which seems unlikely given the current anti-spending mood of the country. But as an overall vision for job training, it has the potential for eliminating many of the problems which beset current job training programs and for improving the outcomes which now seem so meager--in ways that a piecemeal approach to reforming job training could never accomplish. $12.00
From Linking College and Work: Exemplary Practices in Two-Year College Work-Based Learning Programs, edited by D. D. Bragg and R. E. Hamm (MDS-795)
First and foremost, many work-based learning programs are a relatively expensive form of college education, especially in comparison to a purely classroom (school-based) program. Frequently, two-year college administrators look to nursing and other health programs to point out that work-based learning is costly. Knowing this, if work-based learning is to be increased in the two-year college, more funding will be needed to create more programs. Furthermore, this funding will be needed over an extended period of time to sustain the new initiatives. We further recommend that any new funding come from multiple sources at all levels of government and from the private sector. Without that support, little growth will occur in work-based learning at any level within the nation's educational system, secondary or postsecondary. The present federal Carl D. Perkins vocational and applied technology legislation, tech prep, STWOA, and other government initiatives are too inadequate and tentative to promote large scale growth of the approach. Newer legislation proposed by the U.S. Congress leaves these programs to the discretion of state and local officials, making it important to clearly articulate the benefits and needs of work-based learning at that level. It will also be important to point out the benefits of work-based learning for older adults since prior government-sponsored initiatives has focused on youth and young adults, such as the youth apprenticeship programs (Smith, 1994).
Second, with additional funding, we believe the nation would benefit from having more work-based learning programs located in two-year colleges and operated by them. We also conclude that secondary work-based learning programs could benefit from utilizing tech prep and similar articulation agreements to connect to postsecondary work-based learning. Programs serving a solely postsecondary population should be designed to recruit and educate older rather than younger students. These programs will need to work with businesses some of which have already engaged older students in work-based learning opportunities. We believe that programs that require intensive occupational-technical training are most appropriate for the postsecondary level, especially those that provide career ladders upward to further postsecondary education. Programs in the health occupations, engineering technologies, business, and agriculture often provide these career ladders for students. In contrast, secondary work-based learning should concentrate on career exploration, pre-employment skills, understanding the nature of business and the world of work, basic workplace skill building (e.g. being on time, team work, communication), and developing a work ethic. Secondary programs should be designed to engage high-school students more fully in understanding the workplace and preparing them for more extensive training at the time they enroll in the higher education or other employer-sponsored training experiences. Programs at either the secondary or post-secondary level need to be conceptualized in a manner consistent with life-long learning where individuals move back and forth between education and the workplace. $18.00
Note: These are two out of six recommendations made in this section of this report, which is the second phase of a two-part project. The first phase, a survey of work-based learning programs in two-year colleges, is published as MDS-721.