CONCLUSIONS: THE IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOL-TO-WORK PROGRAMS

The co-op seminars at LaGuardia Community College have been developed for almost the same reasons as the connecting activities of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act--to link school-based and work-based learning. It is, we think, relatively clear that an approach like the co-op seminars can be successful in that role. In doing so, there are a number of lessons from the LaGuardia experience that should be considered in setting up such connecting activities:

• All students at LaGuardia, whether occupational students or liberal arts majors, are required to complete a series of work-based placements. This creates a large student population in co-op, which, in turn, creates a culture in LaGuardia in which co-op comes to be appreciated. In contrast, within an institution where only a few students are enrolled in work-based learning, it would be impossible to generate a supportive culture around STW programs or to develop anything like the co-op seminars.[18]
  
  The presence of large numbers of students in co-op also creates the economies of scale necessary to create certain elements--like the Co-op Prep class and the co-op seminars themselves--that support work-based learning. The sizes of these classes tend to be between 15 and 25, and with smaller numbers it would be much more expensive to provide such classes. In addition, the constant refinement of the co-op program in general and the co-op seminars in particular could not take place unless there were substantial numbers of students enrolled.
  
  
• A work-based program (like cooperative education) is much more than a simple experience at work. There are many different elements with potential educative power, ranging from work experience coordinators, to fellow students, to fellow workers, to intentionally structured exercises like the Co-op Prep course and the co-op seminar. Giving some thought about the potential role of each--rather than, for example, thinking of some of these elements (like co-op faculty) as purely administrative and others (like the role of fellow students) as inconsequential--can enhance the educational potential of any work-based experience.
  
  Similarly, work experience is not an end in itself, with a self-evident educational potential. In the LaGuardia approach, the work placement is viewed as a laboratory for applying the concepts introduced in classroom instruction, allowing students to relate their particular daily routines and tasks to the larger institutions in which they live.
  
  
• At LaGuardia, work placements and seminars are started after a student has completed one or more courses in his or her major (as well as after any remedial work is completed). This allows students to begin their work and the related seminars with a foundation of relevant knowledge.[19]
  
  
• In many institutions, the responsibility for work experience programs is given to existing administrators (and instructors), adding to their burdens and virtually guaranteeing that work-based learning will be badly neglected. The LaGuardia experience clarifies that work-based placements, and the co-op seminars associated with them, require adequate resources for coordination and instruction. (Indeed, this is a logical activity on which to spend STWOA funds.) The development of connecting activities like the co-op seminar also requires stability (including consistent support from administrators over time), since developing the co-op seminars at LaGuardia has been a process of successive refinement and adjustment over two decades.
  
  
• The selection of faculty for connecting activities like the co-op seminars needs to be carefully considered. Individuals who come from the world of work have special advantages, since they can provide "true stories" and other forms of socialization about workplaces; indeed, this seems to be an ideal way to involve individuals from the business community. However, depending on their backgrounds and instructional proclivities, co-op and other faculty have certain advantages as well. Finally, little thought has been given to the inclusion of non-co-op faculty in the LaGuardia co-op seminars, though the potential for doing so as a way of reinforcing certain academic content is high.
  
  
• The pedagogy of connecting activities like the co-op seminar should be carefully considered. Although didactic instruction based on the methods of "skills and drills" is certainly common in high schools and community colleges, this is probably the least effective approach to the issues raised in the co-op seminar.
  
  An alternative way to assure the quality of connecting activities like the co-op seminar is to adopt standardized content, texts, and learning activities as the LaGuardia program has. In this way, all students share a common core of content and learning, no matter what the idiosyncrasies of individual instructors are. Quality control can also be maintained through classroom observations by administrators and student evaluations. However, we caution against the idea that any form of instruction can be "teacher proofed," since student understanding of employment-related competencies and interpretation of career possibilities cannot be achieved simply by programming teachers to follow a set curriculum.
  
  
• If pedagogy is important, then instructor training cannot be neglected--particularly if instructors have varied backgrounds. There are many reasons to think that, without special intervention, most teachers would use conventional didactic, teacher-dominated approaches--community college faculty are not required to undertake training in instruction; the criteria for employment often neglect pedagogical expertise; and most individuals without training in instruction, including most individuals recruited from industry, are likely to teach the way they were taught, again leading in most cases to ineffective instructional methods. Although revising an instructor's approach to teaching can be difficult (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, Ch. 10), we see no way of avoiding this task if the promises of connecting activities are to be realized.
  
  
• The co-op seminar (and potentially other connecting activities) can have multiple purposes. While the main purpose might be that of allowing students to see how classroom instruction is applied in work, the other purposes associated with LaGuardia's efforts--career exploration, and the analysis of large social and humanistic issues connected to employment--are powerful, too, and may in fact be even more valuable aspects for individuals like high school students who are confronting occupational choices. While individual instructors and students will emphasize different purposes in different ways, the varying needs of students can be better served if a program retains a multiplicity of purposes rather than imposing a single conception.
  
  
• Above all, it has been discouraging to find that work-based activities and classroom-based instruction are so independent, even in institutions like LaGuardia and the Cincinnati colleges with the longest commitment to co-op education. At LaGuardia, this division exists in the lack of communication between the co-op program and the "regular" programs; at the Cincinnati colleges it can be seen as a potential rivalry between the co-op programs and academic instruction, particularly in one institution that is changing from a technical institute to a comprehensive community college. The divide is evidently so deep that a commitment to work-based learning is not enough to lead to a real integration of the two. A continued separation in STW programs is, of course, detrimental to students, who then have to figure out for themselves the commonalties in the two forms of learning. More seriously, over the long run such a separation threatens the very existence of work-based learning, since instructors uncommitted to work-based learning will vote against it at the first sign of fiscal distress. The most discouraging aspect of the LaGuardia program is that, although it is a "co-op college" and has refined its co-op programs continuously, the current fiscal crisis is still a threat to co-op. It has been difficult over the years to maintain the culture of a "co-op college," particularly with the instability associated with the growth of new faculty and of part-time instructors with little time or resources to improve their teaching abilities.

The only way in which STW programs can find a permanent place in schools and colleges, then, is for the work-based component to become so central to the educational purposes of the institutions that it becomes as unthinkable to give it up as it would be to abandon math, English, or science. The School-to-Work Opportunities Act provides both the impetus and resources to accomplish this--in ways that can redress the century-old inadequacies of providing school-based preparation alone.

[19] See also the discussion of quality control mechanisms in the Cincinnati co-op programs and their contribution to creating a "high-quality equilibrium" in Grubb and Villeneuve (1995) and Villeneuve and Grubb (1996).