During the 1990s, public schools and employers in the United States have been remaking the relationship between education and work. The changes are potentially so powerful that one serious book calls them a "revolution" (Olson, 1997). Federal passage of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) was the most important single event in this story so far. We will use the term "school-to-work movement" to stand for the set of complex and varied initiatives launched by local communities, states, and the federal government to create more effective arrangements of school and work for young people.
But STWOA did not start these efforts. The movement began before STWOA and in all likelihood will continue after that law has expired. Part II of this report describes STWOA along with other state and federal laws and foundation grants that contributed energy to this movement.
A central question within this movement is whether school-to-work (STW) efforts are primarily intended for young people whose formal schooling will end before they acquire a bachelor's degree--the so-called "noncollege-bound." The youth apprenticeship demonstrations of the late 1980s were originally focused on helping high school graduates move into stable employment without "floundering" for several years in the job market. Unstable employment and outright joblessness have been chronic problems in the youth labor market, especially for minorities and the poor. Employers of high school graduates have seldom considered students' academic records when making hiring decisions, giving noncollege-bound students little incentive to study, and creating a vicious cycle in which low skills among high school graduates reinforce low expectations among employers. The problem becomes worse to the extent that jobs previously available to high school graduates are requiring higher levels of skill (Murnane & Levy, 1996). The resulting skill mismatch hurts young people and also the economy as a whole, if employers have to move production out of the country as a result. Projections that the number of 18- to 24-year-olds will grow faster than other age groups from 1995 to 2005 (Sum, Fogg, & Fogg, 1997), and newly intensified competition from welfare recipients now obliged to find work, also add urgency to the search for ways to improve the STW transition for young adults.
On the other hand, some STW initiatives also aim to include students intent on competing for admission to selective four-year colleges or universities (Bailey & Merritt, 1997a). Connecting high school academic studies to practical applications related to work may help even high-achieving students to understand theoretical concepts and how they are used. Getting some experience of learning in an applied context can also prepare all students for the world of increasingly rapid economic and social change arising from information technology and globalization, where initial schooling will provide a smaller fraction of the knowledge needed during the course of a lifetime, and new knowledge and skill will have to be acquired continually as part of activity at work, at home, or in civic life.
In practical terms, most college students hold paid jobs, but they can afford to work fewer hours if they can earn higher hourly wages as a result of some practical training and experience in high school. Despite the fact that people with bachelor's degrees earn higher average salaries than people without them, some do not know how they will make a living when they graduate from college, and they might be better prepared for this transition if they had an opportunity to think about career issues while in high school. Students who drop out of college, as many do, also have something to fall back on if they have learned some practical skills in high school.
Conversely, students who go to work full-time after high school, but later decide they would like to go to college, can have that option if they have pursued a high school program that prepares them for both college and careers. Including preparation for college as part of the STW strategy avoids the problem of having to decide which students are college-bound and which are not.
The college and career strategy also avoids stigmatizing STW as a less desirable track. The salary advantage of four-year college graduates reached an all-time high in the 1980s, and has remained high in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, most high school students say they want to go to four-year college. Designating STW as an option for the noncollege-bound will repel many students and their parents. Students who are left in these programs may then be short-changed as a result of built-in low expectations.
The laws and initiatives described in Part II, therefore, spring from different views of what the basic problem is, and prescribe different strategies for addressing it. The following are some of the different STW reform strategies:
Given these competing imperatives, "school-to-work reform" means different things to different people. Some argue that the phrase "school-to-work" is misleading and should be dropped in favor of "school-to-career" or "college and career."
Despite their differences, various branches of the STW movement do share common purposes. One is integrating academic and occupational studies in high school and two-year colleges. Another is using work-based learning (WBL) to apply and extend what students are taught in classrooms. A third is creating clear pathways from high school to postsecondary education, possibly including four-year colleges and universities. Part III of this report will review the current state of efforts to put these goals into practice. Related issues also addressed in Part III are the involvement of employers, and serving young people who have not obtained high school diplomas but are not in school.
The literature reviewed in Part III consists of program descriptions and reports from the field. This literature conveys intentions, design principles, barriers to implementation, and some testimony from participants. It does not tell us whether these efforts have yielded lasting benefits for young people.
Part IV summarizes recent evaluations and research studies that have measured results in terms of performance at school or success in the labor market. This review is limited to studies that have been published since 1993.[1] Because the STW movement is diffuse and somewhat divided, it would not be possible to evaluate the effects of the movement as a whole, nor even of STWOA as a single piece of legislation. A formal evaluation of the STWOA is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. In the first report from that study, Hershey, Hudis, Silverberg, and Haimson (1997) note that, "Many provisions of the STWOA . . . build on ideas already being pursued at the local and state levels before passage of the legislation. . . . It will always be somewhat artificial to try to distinguish the `impact' of the STWOA from the continued progress of pre-STWOA initiatives" (p. 18). Some discrete programs and particular initiatives have yielded new data on results for students, however, and we report those in Part IV. These evaluations do not reveal any major breakthroughs, but some results are positive.
Finally, Part V will briefly reflect on some of the continuing and emerging issues in the STW movement.