This report focuses on a subset of middle school education that connects with each of the evolving areas introduced above: school-to-work (STW) opportunities in the middle school. Over the past decade, increasing numbers of senior high school educators have provided comprehensive and meaningful STW opportunities for their students. Unfortunately, these STW opportunities may be offered too late in some high school students' studies to have much impact on them. By the ninth or tenth grade, many students have already become turned off to education and have made up their minds to quit school or just comply with minimum requirements for graduation. Other students may not have received much parental and peer encouragement to study and/or do not view schooling as an avenue to future occupational and career success (Kennedy, 1996; Lichtenstein & Blackorby, 1995). In response to these and other concerns, a number of school districts across the United States have created STW opportunities for middle school students. Examples range from including career exploration activities in individual middle school courses to school- and school-district-wide incorporation of STW opportunities in the curriculum.
In some school districts, educators are providing middle school students with meaningful experiential learning related to occupations and careers (Schmidt, Finch, & Moore, 1997). One example is the Ft. Worth, Texas, Public Schools where educators have initiated a large scale middle school effort that, among other things, enables every sixth-grade student to spend a week in the workplace. Students shadow employees working in a variety of business, industry, and public service areas and then link their experiences with subjects they are studying in school. This experience is repeated for every ninth-grade student. Effective STW middle and high school opportunities are thus cumulative rather than isolated, one shot activities. As Newmann and Wehlage (1995, pp. 29-30) indicate, when schools are engaged in "innovations without sustained, long term consistency, it is difficult for even the most gifted teacher to make a positive difference for students." They go on to say, "The task for schools, then, is not simply to offer space and opportunity for individual teachers to teach. It is to organize human, technical, and social resources into an effective collective enterprise."
Although educators are continuing to gain experience at implementing STW
opportunities in the middle school, these activities have largely been
conducted on an
ad-hoc basis with little knowledge about how and why they
should be included in the middle school curriculum as well as the impact they
are designed to have on students. Our report has been designed to address these
concerns and issues. More specifically, within the middle school context, we
sought answers to a series of questions that were posed to middle school
educators who had implemented STW curricula in their schools (Questions 1-5)
and to representatives of selected national associations (Questions 4-6):