SUMMARY

Education is asked to help society meet a number of economic challenges, such as the perceived need for a workforce with varied skills and equalizing the distribution of talent and wages across the population. During the 1990s policymakers have become increasingly attentive to the relationship between education and economic health and how to best ensure that the United States maintains its economic position relative to other nations. Analyzing this relationship in a manner helpful to policy formulation is a difficult and often controversial task. The fragmented and decentralized nature of our education and training system only adds to the difficulty.

However, while policymakers and scholars may argue over the extent to which our education and training system fails to prepare individuals to participate fully in the new economy, few disagree that improvements are needed. But the locus of responsibility for effecting these improvements is also shifting. In particular, the current political climate favors reducing the federal role and placing more responsibility and fiscal control in the hands of state governments or the private sector. It is thus safe to say that America's education and training policy is in flux. The continuing debates present an opportunity, however, to explore ways in which education might meet the challenge of a new economy.

To take advantage of that opportunity, the National Center for Research in Vocational Education sponsored a policy exercise at Aspen, Colorado, on June 23-25, 1997. For assistance in designing the exercise, the Center turned to RAND, one of its host sites, which had conducted several such exercises. The RAND policy exercises had their origin in "war games" conducted for the Department of Defense--games in which military officers played both sides in computer-simulated battles to gain insight into enemy thinking and successful strategy and tactics. RAND's first post-cold war exercise brought together government officials and academics in a one-sided "game" (i.e., an exercise without opposing teams) to devise drug control strategies and examine their potential consequences in a hypothetical city. Subsequent exercises focused on strategies to reduce violence in high-crime neighborhoods.

The Policy Planning Exercise on Education and the New Economy assembled education researchers, federal and state vocational-education officials, leaders of nonprofit organizations with an interest in this area, and representatives of the business community. Participants were divided into four panels, each constituted to encompass a mix of perspectives. The exercise started off with a dialogue in which participants got to know one another and the experiences and views they brought to the table. The dialogue was loosely structured around a set of questions addressing the relationships among education, work, and the economy and the objectives of education and the challenges facing it today.

In the second day of the exercise, panelists participated in a two-move "seminar game" in which they took on the roles of advisors to the governor of a hypothetical state. Panelists were briefed on the demographics, economy, and educational systems within their "states." In Move 1, participants were given a January 1998 scenario in which federal funds for various education and training programs had been combined (and augmented) into a block grant that their state would now have to allocate. As advisors to the governor, they would have to recommend an allocation. At the end of this move (and of the next two sessions), participants gathered in plenary session to give each panel an opportunity to present its recommendations to the others and to allow the entire group a chance to react.

Move 2 was set in 2002. Panelists were given some updated information on educational attainment, employment levels, and earnings within their state and asked to suggest a redesign of the state's education and training system. Specifically, they were asked to prioritize a list of reforms (e.g., inclusion of work-based education or applied pedagogy, adoption of standards and certifications) and, if they wished, extend the list.

On the final day, panelists were brought back to the present to apply what they'd said and heard in previous sessions to federal policy in the very near term. Participants were requested to draw up their recommendations in the form of a presentation to the U.S. Secretaries of Education and Labor. The exercise concluded with a plenary session in which participants drew overall inferences from what had been discussed over the previous two days and commented on aspects of exercise design.

While the tasks assigned to participants provided a framework to guide discussion, the exercise structure was loose enough to allow panelists to reframe the tasks set for them, which they did. For instance, in Move 1, the panels found it helpful in allocating monies to first make the sort of broad review of goals and strategies that had originally been planned for Move 2. The result of these deliberations was a tendency to direct the hypothesized federal funds to improve K-12 education in preference to adult or postsecondary education, although panelists often cited specific objectives they hoped to achieve with that new K-12 money. Panelists were also unanimous in retaining funding for Pell-like grants, i.e., awards to low-income college students or students seeking training; indeed, there was considerable sentiment for an education and training system in which funds followed individuals rather than institutions. Interestingly, while in designing a system, panelists paid some attention to the rather disparate challenges affecting their hypothetical states, the recommendations of the several groups were more like than different. This suggests that the participants viewed the most important challenges facing workforce education and training as national in scope and character, even though most of the exercise was focused on decisions at the state level.

If there was a central theme to the discussions on system design, it was the importance placed on standards. Exercise participants believed it important to establish standards both for what ought to be learned in school and for what needs to be known to function well in the full range of jobs available. There appeared to be a consensus that achievement of standard-level competence is best assured through assessments whose outcomes have consequences for schools and possibly for students. It was pointed out that statewide (or nationwide) assessments could serve as a way of holding school districts accountable for equity of educational effort. Thus, inner-city parents could be assured that, when their children graduated with A's, they would be viewed by potential employers as competitive with suburban children graduating with A's.

Along with standards and accountability, the most important system design desideratum emerging from the exercise was coordination: better coordination between the academic and vocational education systems, and better coordination between such human resource development systems and the private sector in matching individuals to employer needs. This was not that surprising, given the focus in the early part of the exercise on allocating block grant funds; such grants presuppose a greater state role in coordinating educational programs. There was also considerable sentiment for making true lifelong learning available. This grew out of a recognition that the economy was now changing rapidly enough that many workers would have to be retrained in new skills at some point in their careers. Two of the four panels emphasized the need for a more individually tuned system, one which persons could easily leave and return to, possibly as early as what is now grade 11, drawing on individual accounts, perhaps cofunded by the individuals themselves. Finally, panelists recognized that none of what they recommended could be achieved without the training or retraining of teachers to implement it. A favored approach to the professional development of teachers was to impose the same kind of performance-based certification envisioned for other positions in the new economy.

In keeping with the federal-to-state transfer of allocative discretion assumed by block grants, participants were generally cautious in what they expected of the federal government. They believed the Secretary of Education should use his "bully pulpit" to help frame issues: He might familiarize Americans with the different challenges a globalizing economy poses for the U.S. education and training systems, the need for students to meet higher standards, and the likelihood that some will need to repeat grades. There was little sympathy for mandates from the federal government, but participants did feel that federal officials could work with states to achieve several objectives. They could encourage the establishment of standards, help recruit various stakeholders to actively support standards, or identify ways to coordinate the activities of institutions involved in workforce development. Under the assumption of block grants, panelists seemed to prefer limited investment of federal monies in such activities over large new federally funded programs.