The 1990 Perkins Act required states to develop new systems of performance measures and standards for vocational education, including measures of academic gains, occupational competencies, and a variety of labor market outcomes. This feature of the legislation marked an important departure from past policy. Rather than emphasize compliance with innumerable procedural requirements, the new law required state and local vocational educators to define student and institutional outcomes and set standards for expected performance.
This new policy reflected related developments inside and outside the vocational education enterprise. The then-fledgling High Schools That Work Consortium (HSTW) of the Southern Regional Education Board had just affirmed its commitment to "keeping score." To become a member of HSTW, participating schools had to adopt the consortium's goals for raising student achievement and increasing students' participating in higher level academic courses. They agreed to monitor progress on these goals through a rigorous biennial assessment conducted by the Educational Testing Service and by collecting and using other data on students and teachers.
About the same time, work was proceeding on developing national standards for the major academic disciplines--math, science, English, and history. With varying degrees of specificity, these efforts defined, for the first time, what elementary and secondary schools throughout the nation should expect their students to know in the basic academic disciplines that are the mainstay of American education.
In the early 1990s, work also began on industry skill standards. The U.S. Departments of Education and Labor sponsored 22 projects charged with clarifying what students need to know to succeed in such industries as electronics, bioscience, photonics, health, and retailing. To further build on these efforts, Congress created the National Skill Standards Board, which today is supporting more systematic development of standards in fifteen major economic sectors, which taken together account for virtually all paid employment in the modern American economy.
These activities represent impressive accomplishments in a relatively short period of time. Yet much remains to be done. Indeed, as remarkable as each of these achievements is, we are well short of realizing their promise for improving education, academic as well as vocational. And, in the absence of a strategy for connecting these rather independent initiatives more closely, one or more may be cast aside as yet another well-intentioned but ineffective education reform. Where are we, then, and what needs to be done?
First, all three of these initiatives--state and local accountability systems, academic standards, and industry skill standards--need to pay more attention to one another. To date, each has evolved rather independently. Although a few states have tried to incorporate industry skill standards into the systems of performance measures and standards developed under Perkins, most have not; nor have they integrated academic standards. Similarly, statements of national academic standards are largely silent on their relationship to the work world or how work-based situations might be used to provide concrete applications of the recommended academic knowledge and skills. The 22 industry skill standards projects largely ignored national academic standards. As a result, most of the academic content in these projects is decidedly low level, hardly a platform for advancing more rigorous academics for students engaged in secondary or postsecondary vocational/technical education.
Second, additional resources must be devoted to using academic and industry skill standards in combination to design integrated curriculum with clear, challenging educational objectives. Used in concert, academic and industry skill standards constitute a powerful tool for joining the respective expertise of academic and vocational teachers to create demanding new learning opportunities for students who have not fared well in traditional academic classrooms. Many teachers, academic as well as vocational, believe in the benefits of better integrated instruction for students, but they lack readily available curriculum and also the time and skill to develop it themselves.
Third, we do not yet have adequate instruments for assessing students' ability to apply academics to the kinds of difficult, concrete, interdisciplinary problems typical of the modern workplace. Nor are there yet widely accepted and well-regarded tests for measuring students' mastery of industrywide or advanced occupational knowledge. Although there has been much progress on this front during the past five years or so, currently available tests are limited primarily to assessing competency in rather narrow, entry-level occupations or basic employability skills.
Fourth, we must devote more energy to developing capacity at the local level to implement performance measures and standards and use data on performance to improve curriculum, teaching practices, and student achievement. Educators are accustomed to viewing data as something to report to somebody else, rather than as a tool to better manage their own operations. Although most all states invested significant time and resources in developing the measures and standards required by Perkins, few have yet achieved widespread implementation at the local level. One reason is that most localities do not understand how to use these accountability systems for their own purposes. Therefore, measures and standards appear to be but one more reporting burden imposed from above.
Federal policy can play an important role in all four of these areas. It can support further refinement of academic and industry skill standards and encourage their voluntary adoption by states and localities. It can stimulate development of standards-based curriculum and professional development that helps teachers improve their instructional practices. Federal policy can also lead to development of more effective assessment and help underwrite technical assistance to states and localities that makes better use of measures, standards, and performance assessment.
For federal policy to achieve these aims, however, it is important that future legislation recognize that measures and standards serve two different and sometimes conflicting purposes. On the one hand, valid measures and standards are essential for promoting more effective local program improvement. To accomplish this end, accountability provisions must allow for state and local variation in objectives, program emphasis, and systems for collecting and using data. Imposing one system that "fits all" is likely to fit no one. On the other hand, measures and standards also have an important role to play in improving national accountability, providing better information for monitoring and modifying national policy. Achieving this objective depends on generating information that is relatively uniform across states and localities and also consistent over time.
Both of these are worthy policy objectives, but it is unlikely that both can be realized with the same strategy. National accountability is best achieved through national data systems and evaluations that can produce uniform, consistent information that meets acceptable standards for national data. Local program improvement will be maximized through national leadership that provides strong but flexible direction and support for technical assistance that recognizes widely varying needs and priorities. With a well-crafted strategy for addressing each objective, public policy aimed at improving vocational/technical education can aim for the same higher standard it is striving to set for students and teachers.
Gary Hoachlander is an NCRVE site director and president of MPR Associates, Inc.