Although the standards movement has permeated the academic disciplines and work-related areas, so far academic and industry skill standards have been developed almost entirely independently of each other. While some of the academic standards make reference to "skills needed for the workplace" or other "real-world" phenomena and all of the industry skill standards developed by the pilot projects refer in some way to required academic skills, in the past there has been almost no coordination across the academic-industry divide. For the most part, the representatives of the academic and industry skill standards groups who attended the conference were completely unknown to each other before the conference.
The isolation of the two groups is slowly beginning to change. In late 1995, the National Governors Association convened a conference in Kansas City that was attended by a variety of individuals working on school reform and industry skill standards as well as a small number of individuals who had worked on the academic frameworks. In late 1996 and 1997, several groups have worked towards more coordination. NCTE and the International Reading Association are planning to publish a volume that will extend the discussion of their standards into the areas of workplace literacy, career education, and school-to-work. In their Call for Papers, NCTE (1997) has requested essays that "reflect on the changing definitions of literacy and the need to build relationships between educators and workplace communities." In early 1997, the National Skill Standards Board (NSSB)[4], the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education, and the U.S. Department of Labor's Education School-to-Work Office initiated a project called "Building Linkages." This is explicitly designed to develop three-way linkages or crosswalks between the academic and industry skill standards in various states and selected national industry skill standards. The projects now sponsored under the Building Linkages auspices are expected to build multistate partnerships that promote linkages between academic and industry-recognized skill standards at the state level. The consortia members will work with local businesses, labor organizations, and education and training agencies to explore effective methods of incorporating academic and technical/industry skill standards into school-to-work systems.
While these developments are encouraging, they are only beginning and have so far had little effect on the standards themselves. There was no consensus at the conference about the particular form that more coordinated standards would take. Indeed, there was some conviction that no one form would work for everything. In this section, we shall look at some of the standards considered at the conference to develop an understanding of the current relationship between academic and industry or occupational skill standards as they have already been written.