The academic standards examined at the conference take a variety of forms.[5] Some were more specific about the substance of the knowledge that students were expected to learn. English/language arts standards, at one extreme, focused on process-oriented skills. The entire set of standards consisted of twelve statements printed on one page. For example, Standard #5 states that "Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes" (NCTE and International Reading Association, 1996, p. 3). The standards developers refrained from specifying the types of literature that students would be expected to read. In contrast, the history standards specify the particular knowledge about history, for example, stating that the students should know about the "massive immigration after 1870 and how new social patterns, conflicts, and ideas of national unity developed amid growing cultural diversity" (National Center for History in the Schools, 1996, p. 104). The academic standards gave little direct mention of skills needed for work. Clearly, the authors of the standards did not conceptualize their mission as preparing students for work in any direct way. Indeed, traditional academic programs have not emphasized concrete applications. While there are aspects of the standards that refer to work-related situations or are directly applicable to work, these links are usually not made clear.
The mathematics standards do include many references to work. The authors of the standards suggest an emphasis on word problems and the use of "real-world problems to motivate and apply theory" (NCTM, 1989, p. 126). The following is an example of the type of problem that they encourage:
A container manufacturing company has been contracted to design and manufacture cylindrical cans for fruit juice. The volume of each can is to be 0.946 liters. In order to minimize the production costs, the company wishes to design a can that requires the smallest amount of material possible. What should the dimensions of the can be? (p. 134)
The authors argue that this simple work application can be approached at many levels of sophistication and can serve to illustrate a wide variety of mathematical techniques and concepts. The Mathematical Sciences Education Board has put together a collection of work applications that illustrate the sophisticated use of many different levels of mathematics in realistic settings.
Usually the standards do not have an explicit emphasis on work situations, although they sometimes do offer applications to work. For example, the high school performance expectations for social studies require that students, "Describe and compare how people create places that reflect culture, human needs, government policy, and current values and ideals as they design and build specialized buildings, neighborhoods, shopping centers, urban centers, industrial parks, and the like." And, "Propose, compare, and evaluate alternative policies for the use of land and other resources in communities, regions, nations, and the world" (NCSS, 1994, p. 118). These types of skills can potentially have wide applications in many jobs. The history standards also include issues that may have applications to work. For example, history students are expected to understand "the connections among industrialization, the advent of the modern corporation, and material well-being" (National Center for History in the Schools, 1996, p. 104).
All of the standards documents include material that suggests how the standards might be used and, in some cases, this points to activities or projects that have relevance to work. For example, the language arts standards describe an elementary level project that would culminate in a class presentation and associated activities about water purification after the pollution of a community's water supply. In this project, the students and the teacher decide together on the best sources of information, including books, print media, interviews, or other sources. The students then prepare written material and a presentation including a debate on the best remedy for the problem (NCTE and International Reading Association, 1996, pp. 50-51).
In general, the standards for each of the disciplines include many skills that have potential applications in the workplace. Nevertheless, these applications are rarely made explicit. Thus, while students who meet the academic standards may have learned academic skills that are potentially useful at work, many students will never have had opportunities to apply them to realistic work-related problems. And indeed, many employers complain that workers often do not seem to be able to apply their school-learned knowledge. Research also suggests that there is often weak transfer of academic knowledge to what should be relevant applications outside of the classroom (Berryman & Bailey, 1992).
Moreover, this is related to a further problem with the academic standards. While most educators, parents, and policymakers generally favor "higher standards," there is no absolute normative measure against which to set the standards. What will a student be able to do if they meet those standards that they would not be able to do if they failed to meet them? Most of the academic standards were set by educators based on their judgment about what students should know, usually to proceed to the next level of education. For the most part, those judgments were not based on objectives from outside the discipline or the education system. To be sure, preparation for work is only one of several educational objectives; nevertheless, it would be useful to have more conscious discussion of work applications (as well as cultural and other applications) as part of the general discussion of the intent and design of academic standards.