San Diego provided an ideal setting for this conference on adapting education and training to develop innovative work forces. From the moment conference delegates boarded the renamed vans, it was apparent that this was a city in flux. San Diego is a stunningly beautiful city perched on the California coast, with a deep harbor and an abundance of sun, but participants rapidly discovered that even paradise has its problems: unemployment, industrial restructuring following deep defense cuts, changes in international trade, and immigration pressures. Education is one of the most important weapons San Diego has in its arsenal to tackle these challenges.
Prior to the start of the conference, participants had the opportunity to tour the colleges of the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD). Many European Union (EU) delegates reacted to the tour with great excitement: the San Diego community colleges are living the future. The colleges are already focusing on the future "visions" that the conference set as its themes:
As the conference began, it was clear the conference planners had chosen timely and important themes for both American and European participants. And San Diego proved to be a fertile ground for exploring the issues in a local context.
The first part of the volume begins with a chapter that discusses the European perspective on reforming education and training policy to create an innovative work force. That chapter is followed with three chapters that comprise a case study of the United States' experience in adapting education and training to new challenges. Three perspectives are offered: (1) a federal perspective on the formulation of American education policy, (2) a national view of state system-building, and (3) a local view of one college's experience in responding to the changing educational needs of its community. The second part of the volume presents three pairs of chapters devoted to the three themes of the San Diego conference. Each pair provides an American and European perspective on the subject.
O'Dwyer's paper places the European role in the conference in the context of the EU's overall work force efforts. The most notable developments in Europe have been the Maastricht Treaty, which gives the European Community an explicit, legal role in improving education and training in Europe, and the White Paper entitled Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century. The White Paper expresses the EU's desire to foster employment and social inclusion, while at the same time encouraging a flexible, decentralized economy. Education and training receive great emphasis in the White Paper, particularly the areas of adult training, lifelong learning, and the training of young people who have left compulsory education without any qualifications.
O'Dwyer also highlights several other factors in the EU's recent policymaking in the area of education and training. He covers the contrast between the growing number of EU member states (following the addition of Austria, Finland, and Sweden) and the declining number of EU education and training programs. The EU has tried to consolidate and rationalize its various programs, so as to better serve the needs of the European Community.
Thus, with these policy developments providing context, O'Dwyer provides the explanation for the EU's interest in exploring the San Diego conference's three principal themes. Inclusivity, local leadership, and SMEs all hold the key to successful education and training policy formation in the European Community.
But the central policy goals remain. Recognizing and building on the nation's increasing diversity is crucial to creating an innovative work force. Local leadership is the key to creating effective partnerships among schools, colleges, businesses, and the community. And bringing SMEs into a full partnership with the educational enterprise is vital.
Three chapters examine the American experience in policy innovation at three different levels. The chapter by Augusta Kappner expresses the Clinton administration's national policy goals in reforming American education and training. The second chapter in that section, by Winifred Warnat, stresses the nuts and bolts of building the new system, including the implementation of new federal laws, as well as local and state efforts at reform. The final chapter in the American Case Study section is by Augustine Gallego. It provides an account of how a single local district developed new visions to create an innovative work force. Together, these chapters show the excitement, frustration, and unpredictability of policy reform. Reform is always a reflection of its times, and the 1990s have brought a whole new set of challenges: stagnant wages, loss of faith in the efficacy of "big government," political tastes for shifting policy responsibility from the federal government to the states, and public pressure for a balanced federal budget.
In her chapter, Augusta Kappner discusses the federal policy innovations initiated by the Clinton Administration in its first two years (1992-1994) and passed by the Democratically controlled Congress. Dr. Kappner defines new visions as the new paradigms necessary to revolutionize education and training in response to momentous economic change. Under global pressure, American business has become more fast-moving and now demands flexible production, high skills, and innovative workers. Education and training policy must meet that challenge, principally by creating a more seamless system of education and training. She then enumerates some of the Clinton Administration's efforts to accomplish that, beginning with its expansion of early childhood education. She continues by describing the voluntary occupational skill standards encouraged by the new Goals 2000 Act, and the effort to enhance access to higher education by enabling students to participate in a national service program that provides credit towards college tuition. Vocational education and training have been more fully integrated into the rest of education and training policy in general, thanks to the passage of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act. Kappner concludes her chapter with an observation that the Clinton Administration's new vision of a more seamless, federally influenced system of education and training is now under re-evaluation. The change in political climate has reduced the prominence of federal reform efforts, and the locus for change seems to be shifting to localities and states. But, while at mid-decade the locus and approach may be changing, the economic pressures for nationwide educational change remain keen.
Winifred Warnat's chapter, the second American case study, concentrates on how the pieces of federal legislation can fit together to create a true system of education and training for work. That new system is characterized by the integration of vocational and academic education, the introduction of performance standards for programs and students, and the commitment to serve all students. With additional legislation pending, it appears likely that the new system will reflect an increasing emphasis on the consolidation and coordination of federally funded training programs. Dr. Warnat's chapter is also a reminder that the United States has a national, not federal, system of education and training. Through its legislative initiatives and funding, the federal government can lead reform, but the localities and states have considerable autonomy in delivering education and training at the local level. The goal of creating a true nationwide system of education and training for work has not yet been realized in the United States, but some of the building blocks for such a system have finally been enacted. If localities and states are successful in meeting the challenge to forge a comprehensive system, it will bring cohesion and quality to a nation of widely varying practices and programs.
Augustine Gallego's chapter on the SDCCD provides a local illustration of the American experience with vocational education and training reform. Dr. Gallego first takes up the national issue of SMEs and describes SDCCD's efforts to serve those firms through advisory committees, the wide spectrum of "contract training" for firms provided by San Diego's community colleges, and the construction of a Center for Applied Competitive Technologies. Serving SMEs represents an integral part of the college's mission, but it goes beyond that. The focus on SMEs by SDCCD has been a transforming force on the college: Conference visitors saw exciting "incubation" programs and efforts to link these businesses and the college closely together. During this visit to San Diego's community colleges, participants saw a dynamic, committed community college staff and administration--and a proud, high-quality educational "product." Next, Gallego tackles the challenge of inclusivity. San Diego is a remarkably diverse, multicultural community. SDCCD has introduced an innovative program called the Consortium for Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning (CWELL), which is designed to help classroom teachers solicit information from their students to help them adjust their teaching styles to students' learning needs. The hope is that the students will be more engaged, which, in turn, will encourage them to stay in school and complete credentials. On the theme of local leadership, Gallego notes that the greatest local leadership challenge in his area is to build the consortia that can sustain a strong school-to-work program. He concludes his chapter with an endorsement of international opportunities to discuss education and training: Even localities can learn from best practice in other countries. Exemplary programs and practices in those countries can provide an impetus to help San Diego and communities across the country--and the Atlantic--"be their best."
With respect to education, this difference translates into an American approach to education that emphasizes the individual's responsibility to pursue an education and find a good job. If each individual studies and works hard, then the sum of their individual efforts will improve society and the economy. The policy goal in this American setting is how to create education and training opportunities that can attract individuals of diverse backgrounds. In contrast, the European image is one of an education and training system that aims to serve all students, though perhaps through different streams or modes of education. The policy challenge in achieving inclusivity, then, is to avoid excluding individuals from this system because of their background, poor preparation, or lack of information.
The two chapters on inclusivity in this volume mirror this philosophical difference between American and European orientations toward inclusion: Esteban Soriano looks at the American experience with trying to draw all individuals into a productive whole and, in so doing, both celebrate that diversity and improve the economy's bottom line. In contrast, Gerhard Welbers believes that the threats to social cohesion in EU member states is caused by the exclusion of those who drop out of the education and training system.
For years, the United States has been wrestling with how to forge a cohesive society from one of the world's most diverse populations. In the decades following World War II, the federal government enacted legislation to guarantee all individuals equal opportunity in education, employment, and housing. The nation's courts have upheld this effort, and during periods of judicial activism, have even gone beyond the efforts of the executive and legislative branches. But the road to racial and cultural inclusion, called "inclusivity" in this volume, has not been straightforward. Many forces have been at work on America's policymaking concerning equal opportunity, often pushing in opposite directions. Soriano examines some of the recent American experiences with diversity in his chapter. In particular, he documents the efforts of many companies to recognize the economic, as well as the societal, benefits of embracing inclusivity and cultural diversity in their work force development programs.
But at the same time that companies and educational institutions are making progress grappling with diversity, national policy has been changing, even reversing itself, and casting off confusing signals concerning the government's approach to equal opportunity. After Congress attained its Republican majority in November 1994, the Senate Majority Leader suggested that affirmative action clauses in federal programs should be repealed. Not long after that, the governor of the state of California decreed that state agencies should not practice affirmative action in hiring or contract law. There have also been efforts to end affirmative action in the California public university system. And in June of 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling on an affirmative action program case that narrowed the latitude for employers and others to choose people with special attention to increasing the diversity of their work force. In its ruling, the Supreme Court said, "we hold today that all racial classifications . . . are constitutional only if they are narrowly tailored measures that further compelling government interests."
The attack on affirmative action has been based on the logic that the U.S. Constitution should be "colorblind" and therefore not make any special legal distinctions between races or cultures. In contrast, supporters of affirmative action have tended to argue that discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender continues to take place, and that the country is still a long way indeed from ever being "colorblind" in its economic and social behavior. This dilemma between equal treatment under the law and affirmative action provides the backdrop for the American discussion of inclusivity in education and training. And that discussion will probably continue for many years to come.
Despite some similar legal and political controversies about discrimination, European nations have tended to take a less aggressive, less statutory approach to equal opportunity than the United States. This is true especially with respect to racial inclusivity. Whereas the United States has had federal laws combating racial discrimination for years, most European nations have only banned employment discrimination based on gender. Only Britain has extended that policy to race (Stevenson, 1995).
The EU also has been wrestling with affirmative action in its policies. In October 1995, the European Court of Justice, which applies the European Union's legal directives to cases in individual member states, ruled that an affirmative action program for women in Bremen, Germany, exceeded the EU's 1976 directive requiring equal treatment for women in employment.
For remedies to discrimination, most members of the European Community have preferred to emphasize education and training programs for women and minorities rather than hiring quotas or strict monitoring of employers' compliance. As Gerhard Welbers recounts in his chapter, countries like Germany have been wrestling with how best to serve the disadvantaged in order to prevent them from being excluded from the system. They have devised programs that attempt to retain disadvantaged people within the system by combining education, training, job placement, guidance, and support. This approach to inclusivity has been a comprehensive one: Cologne, for example, has created a standing working group, called an Innovation Circle, to bring together representatives of many agencies and institutions that provide pieces of the support system for disadvantaged young people. Other EU member states--Britain, Spain, France, and Ireland--have been creating similar programs to retain disadvantaged students within their education and training systems. And two new EU education and training initiatives, SOCRATES and LEONARDO DA VINCI, provide European-wide emphasis on serving the disadvantaged within the member states' education and training systems.
Thus, education and training programs have been viewed as potent weapons for encouraging equality in both the U.S. and the EU. European educators face somewhat different challenges than their American counterparts. At mid-decade, the American government's aggressive intervention in labor markets on behalf of women and ethnic minorities appears to have slowed down. The progress toward equal opportunity and inclusivity will now have to come more from the bottom, from the individual firm's recognition of the bottom-line appeal of inclusivity. And in Europe, where high unemployment and concerns about immigration have muted support for more aggressive affirmative action programs, particularly in employment policy, progress will also probably be slow and cautious.
For both countries, then, education and training policy will be a prime weapon in future progress toward an equal society.
In many countries in the European Community, local leaders play a critical role in shaping and executing education policy. Businesspeople, union leaders, teachers, and others have been working together for years to agree on standards, curriculum, and the provision of training. Many of the relationships have been formalized and, in fact, represent statutory obligations.
Richard Walther taps into the European tradition of collectivism to draw a distinction between local leadership in the U.S. and in the EU. He notes that economic performance rests not just on the capacity of individuals, but also on the contributions of associations and groups acting together to achieve common ends. Walther sees cooperation among local partners as an essential part of European local leadership.
In the United States, where education policy is more decentralized, local leadership is the key to creating and implementing education policy in the community. As Robert Poczik notes in his chapter on the challenges to local leaders in developing school-to-work programs, the hallmark of many successful local programs is an exceptional local leader who possesses the vision and necessary skills. Charismatic leaders emerge--from government, from educational institutions, or business--and they lead their communities forward and initiate new education and training ventures. Together with parents and students, they create a contagious spirit of excitement and possibility. They form groups and consortia that work together, apply for funding and grants, and create new ways of preparing young people for working lives in their community.
This picture of local leadership, however, points up some of the key generalizations that can be made about the importance of local leadership to the reform of education and training in the United States. First, and perhaps foremost, education policy reform is incredibly labor intensive at the local level. The federal government generally does not dictate the way that education is structured and delivered at the local level, and they provide only a small fraction of the funding. Consequently, local areas have considerable autonomy in conducting education and training, especially in the emerging area of school-to-work. But along with the autonomy comes a heavy responsibility: Localities must construct school-to-work programs almost from the ground up, and cooperative structures among schools, colleges, and businesses must be forged one link at a time. Each firm must be recruited individually, and their level of interest and involvement must be teased out. There are few existing regulatory or curricular frameworks to serve as models.
While local leadership in the United States and Europe often possesses unique and undefinable characteristics that make for successful education policy reform, there are also economic and political forces that influence local actors' behavior. These include the strength of the local labor market, the political influence on the regulatory framework for education and training, and the influence of funding sources on local leaders. These forces provide some of the theoretical underpinnings for explaining the link between local leadership and creating an innovative work force.
Politics also exert some predictable influences on local leadership. The political system establishes the regulatory framework under which education and training takes place. Those regulations provide a critical constraint on individual local officials' behavior and policymaking. Sometimes they even set performance standards that local officials must meet, or suffer the consequences. Electoral politics play a role, too. At election time, voters communicate the direction and intensity of their demands for educational services from government. Local elected officials must respond to those concerns or risk losing their jobs.
There is also the influence of money on local leadership. If the U.S. Congress or EU create a program with ample funding attached to it, state officials or member nations may be more likely to respond to the initiative and implement it locally. The more financially pressed a state is in the United States or the more strapped an EU member state, the more likely it will be that they will respond to the carrot dangled before them and change their training system to accomplish the U.S. or EU objectives.
As discussion at the San Diego conference indicated, however, local leadership cannot operate in a vacuum. The most successful examples of local leadership strike a balance between independence and interdependence with other levels of government. If local authorities can respond flexibly to the economic and political needs of their community, they can create education and training policies that serve local interests. At the same time, though, those authorities must work with upper tiers of government to help the nation respond to more global changes in demand for workers and for employers' goods and services. As nations' labor markets and product markets become more integrated, localities must exploit the economic information and funding that flow downward from the national, and in the case of the EU, supernational, levels of government.
Looking forward into the future world of education and work in America, Poczik provides a challenging new vision for local leadership in reforming education and training for a changing world. He argues that the central challenge to local leadership is to help forge new partnerships that bridge the gap between education and work. Local leaders must create a "learning enterprise" that blurs the concepts of "school" and "work." Workers continuously learn while at work, and students become "learner-workers" who learn by leaving the confines of the school building and learning at work sites. Such an approach would require unprecedented levels of local cooperation among educators and employers. In contrast to past practice in the United States, all the concerned parties, including employers, educators, teachers' unions, parents, and students, would need to be involved at all stages. They would be involved in planning, curriculum development, and the setting of objectives.
Poczik also expresses some additional challenges for local leadership. Vocational and academic education need to be smoothly integrated. Different levels of education--for example, high school and college--need to be seamlessly connected in order to provide clear and coherent education pathways for young people. Local leaders must be able to work with other levels of government to accomplish national educational innovation.
Offering a European perspective, Richard Walther first examines two kinds of European-wide programs initiated by the European Union. The programs focus on setting up local partnerships and encouraging local leadership. The first type, run by the European Social Fund, is designed to spur economic development in declining industrial regions and poor rural areas. Training is stressed as an important key to economic development. The other type, called "community action programs" by Walther, include such EU initiatives as COMETT and FORCE. Both were designed by the EU to help encourage the formation of local partnerships to accomplish important training goals. The COMETT program connects universities and industries, using the vehicle of training to introduce the technologies developed in a research context to a commercial setting. The local partnerships formed to accomplish that goal are called "University Enterprise Training Partnerships." The FORCE Program set up consortia of firms to share training facilities and improve training of local workers. In this case, the resulting local partnerships are called "regional continuing training consortia." These consortia have helped to reinforce and expand existing regional partnerships in member states.
After a discussion of EU initiatives, Walther discusses three examples of local partnerships in individual member states. The first, the German "learning region," is an effort to tap the innovation potential of SMEs, and to improve economic development by improving the connections between companies, training providers, social partners, and the public authorities. The second, Britain's Training and Enterprise Councils, aims to bring together local employers, trainers, and local government in order to raise the quality and economic usefulness of training. Walther's final example concerns the Italian experience with "contractual entities." These agreements have led to the formation of local training partnerships distinguished by the active role played by trade unions.
Like the U.S., the EU is concerned that local partnerships have real economic value. Walther notes that in pursuit of that goal, the EU is looking for expertly conceived, market-sensitive training partnerships. The EU has stressed that these partnerships should also help to connect initial and further training. Since some of the partnership programs have been operating since the mid-1980s, the EU now has a body of experience from which to draw: Both COMETT and FORCE, for example, have spawned hundreds of local partnerships.
In this world of increasingly global competition, the ultimate test of these local partnerships' effectiveness is therefore an international one. Walther concludes his chapter with the observation that cross-national comparisons--such as the ones facilitated by the U.S.-EU conference in San Diego--provide an excellent opportunity to test the strengths and weaknesses of local partnerships in different countries.
Despite all the popular discussion of the burgeoning small business sector, the data suggests a more cautious and complicated conclusion about the economic role of SMEs. The first step in analyzing the data is to look at levels or "stocks" of employees in small business and self-employment. While workers in small business and self-employment comprise a significant fraction of the labor force in both the United States and in European nations, the EU has a higher proportion of its labor force working in those categories than does the United States. According to 1990 Eurostat data, among European workers, 24.3 percent are in firms with less than ten employees, versus 12.0 percent of American workers. Another 9.1 percent of European workers work in slightly larger firms, with 10-19 employees, versus 8.0 percent of American workers.
The second step in analyzing the data is to focus on rates of change: If SMEs are indeed generating the bulk of new jobs in the economy, they should be a major focus of policymakers and educators' energies.
Recent analysis of American data by Davis, Haltiwanger, and Schuh (1993) suggests that the claims made about small business job creation are somewhat overstated: They represent a significant, though not especially fast-growing, source of jobs in the United States. They conclude that large firms create many more jobs than small business. This is because large firms provide the bulk of the job base. (A large fraction of American workers still work for large employers: 46.6 percent compared to Europe's 31.4 percent. 2) But it is also due to the fact that while small firms have a high rate of job creation, they also have a high rate of job destruction, so that their "net" rate of job creation (i.e., the rate of job creation minus the rate of job destruction) is actually lower than large firms' net rate of job creation.
Davis et al.'s (1993) work has several qualifications, but, most importantly, it applies to the manufacturing sector only. Given that data shows that the American economy has been experiencing large "sectoral shifts" in jobs, away from sectors like manufacturing toward the service sector, conclusions based solely on manufacturing sector data understate the role of SMEs in the entire American economy.
Self-employment is also high in the United States and in Europe: In America, self-employment accounts for one out of every eleven workers (Bregger, 1996, p. 8). This is a decline from previous decades, but again, sectoral shifts explain much of the change: Self-employment in agriculture has declined precipitously, but it has increased slightly in other sectors. In EU member states it has increased from just over six percent to nine percent of the service sector jobs between 1979 and 1987. Furthermore, overall self-employment rose by around two percent a year from 1986 to 1990. However, between 1990 and 1994, self-employment fell about one percent a year. Eurostat attributes this to the improving labor market, which allowed people to move back into waged employment (European Commission, 1995, pp. 166-167). They conclude that "It would appear from the evidence available that the trend towards self-employment, though small, is not a transitory phenomenon and is likely to continue."
So, while the share of workers in small business and self-employment in the overall economies of the United States and Europe has been relatively stable over the years, this aggregate stability masks tremendous changes in particular industrial sectors. Since many of the fast-growing sectors (such as the service sector) are populated by many SMEs, the need to reform the curriculum and delivery mechanisms for school-to-work is a pressing concern.
As Diana Walter points out in her chapter, small businesses in the United States have a long list of reasons for not participating in school-to-work programs: They may not be able to afford to finance training positions, may be wary of government intervention and paperwork, may have a narrower range of skills to teach, and may not be able to spare workers to serve as supervisors and mentors.
Educators have an equally long list of reasons for favoring large over small employers in recruiting school-to-work partners: If schools work with SMEs, it is hard to "go to scale," to place more than one or two students in any one place, to provide effective educational supervision across many small sites, and to assure that students are exposed to a wide spectrum of jobs.
In her chapter, Walter discusses some strategies that her region has used to increase SME participation in school-to-work programs: consortia of small businesses, information dissemination via community organizations, and "peer pressure" on small employers to participate (from small and large local employers). She also cites the importance of streamlining the rules and paperwork for participation, and agreeing to have students perform meaningful work for the employer during their placement.
The European challenge with respect to SMEs is somewhat different than the U.S., a point Bernhard Buck makes in his chapter on SMEs and the German system of vocational education and training (VET). Given the already existing structures of work-based learning in Germany, the challenge rests less in creating new work-based learning programs for SMEs than in adapting the existing VET structures to serve the different needs of smaller employers. In Germany, the VET system was developed to train people for rationalized "production," typically in large industrial firms. Now, however, German employers face very different demands. Production must be more tailored to the needs of the customer, and it depends on the individual worker being able to adapt to changing situations.
SMEs have been at the forefront of this move towards adaptation and specialized production. As SMEs have increased in importance within the German economy, Buck questions whether the existing VET system can meet their needs. He also asks how SMEs can help influence the evolution of the VET system to satisfy their wider and varying skill requirements.
Unfortunately, as Buck points out, the VET system has remained very traditional and, in some areas, it persists in preparing young people for working situations that no longer exist. The result has been a rising level of unemployment for school completers in the trades, and a migration of young people out of the VET system into higher education. Buck outlines a possible survival strategy for VET: Emphasize the quality of VET, and integrate initial preparation with "further" VET for lifelong learning. Buck also advocates adjusting the curriculum to provide broader training, and instilling new skills appropriate for SMEs such as the "situation-oriented ability to act."
While the more active participation of SMEs in VET would be beneficial, the author identifies one of the same impediments that Walter cites in her chapter--the perception among SMEs, perhaps inaccurate, of the expense of providing workplace training. He also cites one of the same remedies--peer pressure from large firms who are already convinced of the effectiveness of workplace training and VET.
As both Walter and Buck point out, SMEs hold great potential for providing the necessary "quantity and diversity" of work-based learning experiences, and for contributing to the economic development of their community. But there are no quick fixes. The simultaneous task of involving SMEs in work-based learning, while at the same time learning the lessons of flexibility and adaptation from them, is one of the major educational challenges in the U.S. and Europe.
The recognition that every young person needs to be equipped for a high-skill economy has directed these nations toward inclusivity in their education and training systems. The road is bumpy, but the need is great.
The complex ballet of local leadership and central direction is common to both sides of the Atlantic, with recognition that future economic trends will force an even greater test of local leadership's mettle and flexibility.
And finally, the challenge of bringing the dynamic SME sector into the curriculum, into the classroom, and into the system has developed into a shared educational emphasis for the U.S. and the EU.
Thus, the U.S. and EU emerge from this examination of each other's practices with a greater awareness of the common goals--and obstacles--they face in the years ahead. They will enter the next stage of cooperation with greater knowledge and understanding and, thanks to the memorable San Diego conference and site visit, with greater enthusiasm.
2 Eurostat. (1995). Enterprises in Europe (Descriptive Analysis), Third Report. This Europe vs. United States breakdown by enterprise excludes class 0 (self-employed workers), though the country-by-country comparisons do include them.
Davis, S., Haltiwanger, J., & Schuh, S. (1993). Small business and job creation: Dissecting the myth and reassessing the facts (Working Paper No. 4492). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
European Commission, Directorate Generale Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs. (1995, July). Employment in Europe 1995 (Document No. 396). Brussels: Author.
Stevenson, R. (1995, November 26). Job discrimination in Europe: Affirmative laissez faire. The New York Times, sec. 1, p. 10, col. 3.
