Why should we care about the relationship between academic and industry skill standards? One could argue that they serve different purposes. Academic standards define what all educated citizens should know in particular subject areas while industry skill standards indicate what skills are necessary to work effectively in particular occupations or industries. Education reformers are often reluctant to design curricula explicitly to prepare young people for work because many believe that the short-term needs of employers can be in conflict with the broad goals of education. Educators emphasize that these broader goals include the development of the capacity for independent thinking and a spirit of questioning and inquiry.[3] According to this view, an education designed primarily to prepare students for work might not include subjects such as the humanities, art, music, and history. Instead, it would include only simplified and less rigorous aspects of mathematics and science. A focus on work preparation would, therefore, result in a narrow and impoverished education. Education reformers who are suspicious of industry skill standards see work preparation and broader educational objectives as fundamentally conflicting goals. In contrast, the call for better coordination between academic and vocational skills is based on the argument that better coordination and more interaction among the groups developing those standards could strengthen both academic preparation and preparation for work. The following paragraphs present four broad arguments for better coordination between the two sets of standards.
First, many educators and policymakers, especially those involved with vocational education, have argued over the past several years that it is important to strengthen the connections between academic and vocational education (Grubb, 1995). The traditional separation between these two forms of education has been judged to have negative social and pedagogic effects. The goal of integrating academic and vocational education has now been articulated in important pieces of federal education legislation including the 1990 reauthorization of the Perkins Vocational Education and Applied Technology Act and the 1994 School to Work Opportunities Act. Changing technology and work organization have created more sophisticated demands for jobs that have traditionally employed graduates of vocational education programs. Wages for lower-skilled jobs requiring little education have fallen significantly in the last two decades, and higher levels of education are now required for access to jobs with wages adequate to support a family. In the past, many employers admitted that they wanted entry-level workers who were prompt and would follow orders. Now, however, many state that they want workers who can solve problems, work in more uncertain and less well-defined circumstances, and take initiative and responsibility (Bailey, 1995; Murnane & Levy, 1996; Stasz, Ramsey, Eden, Melamid, & Kaganoff, 1996). These are the types of activities previously expected from workers who had a good academic educational foundation and who had often been to college. This suggests that academic preparation for workers at many levels has become more important.
Second, there is a substantial body of cognitive research which suggests that relating learning to work applications (or general applications outside of school) can strengthen academic learning. For example, work applications can provide important motivational benefits by showing students how the skills that they are learning are actually used in the workplace and in society at large. The purpose of the application here is not necessarily to prepare the student for a particular job, but, rather, to use the industry or occupational context to motivate a deep understanding of the relevant academic skills (Raizen, 1994; Resnick, 1987). Furthermore, a broad industry context can offer opportunities to combine and integrate different academic disciplines. Rather than using piecemeal or ad hoc examples from the "real world" to illustrate the use of particular academic skills, teachers can combine aspects from many disciplines to design projects and curricula organized around industry or occupational themes. For example, agriculture can be used to motivate learning in every subject. Applications to mathematics and the sciences are obvious, but it is also not difficult to come up with applications from literature, social studies, or history. Well-chosen experiences in an industry context can give a coherence to the academic studies that is difficult to create when subjects are taught independently and in the abstract. Although at first this may appear to be a pedagogic issue, the substantive content of what students are taught is also fundamental. In response to this, new curricula are being developed that encourage sophisticated applications to problems and issues outside the classroom and that recognize the importance of interdisciplinary thinking (Vickers, 1997). Thus, sets of academic and industry skill standards that remain isolated from each other will hardly encourage and may hinder new approaches to teaching. Certainly, coordinating the development of academic and industry skill standards would at least offer many opportunities to pursue an integrated approach. From this perspective, both sets of standards could be improved.
Third, many jobs indeed require sophisticated academic skills and, thus, preparation for these types of jobs is consistent with a rigorous academic education. Changing economic and technological factors also influence those required skills. For example, knowledge of probability and statistics has become much more important for many jobs, even though these branches of mathematics are not traditionally emphasized in high school mathematics courses. Forman and Steen (1995) have argued that mathematics used in the workplace today is much more likely to involve sophisticated applications of more elementary mathematics principles than the elementary applications of more complex mathematics that characterize traditional curriculum materials. If this is true, educators and employers, working together, could develop a mathematics curriculum that would be more oriented towards the actual use of mathematics in the workplace, but would be equally as sophisticated as the current curriculum. Thus, better coordination between the development of academic and industry skill standards would increase the opportunities to deepen the academic curriculum in ways that are also consistent with trends in the workplace.
Fourth, while educators are likely to have a poor understanding of skills used in the workplace, employers or even workers are often not in the best position to evaluate the academic content of the skills that they need. For example, employers might believe that their workers do not need to know algebra and at the same time complain that their employees cannot work effectively with spreadsheets. Thus, they fail to understand the algebraic basis of many spreadsheet operations. Alternatively, employers may think that their workers need only simple mathematics without realizing that modern quality control methods depend on a sophisticated understanding of statistics. Forman and Steen (1995) argue that much work-related mathematics involves sophisticated and advanced applications of basic mathematical principles, yet employers may notice only the basic principles. By working together, employers might realize that the mathematics that they need is more complicated than they thought and educators may begin to understand that work-related applications offer greater opportunities to teach sophisticated mathematics than they might have expected.
Moreover, industry skill standards that do not communicate the high levels of academic performance required for occupations in their industries can give misleading messages to young people. As we shall see later, an examination of the industry skill standards suggests that some (but not all) of the industry skill standards set expectations for academic skills that are lower than those required for graduation from high school. Nevertheless, employers still say that they want high school graduates. Thus, there must be some misconceptions or miscommunications if employers prefer to employ high school graduates yet define specific skill requirements at a lower level indicating a satisfaction with skills learned by the tenth grade.
Therefore, the continued division between academic and industry skill standards has several disadvantages. It promotes a separation between academic and vocational skills at a time when many educators and employers are increasingly challenging that separation. It threatens the accuracy of both sets of standards--employers may not have a good understanding of the academic content of the skill that they want and educators can lose touch with the central applications of what they are teaching. In addition, it forecloses the opportunities to create standards that could deepen both academic learning and preparation for work.