This report has described the main sources of the STW movement, the status of implementation on several dimensions, and some recent evaluation studies. As STW has gathered momentum, we wonder what will happen next. In their first report on the evaluation of activities under the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, Hershey et al. (1997) pose a set of interesting questions along these lines:
Of course, these questions can be answered only in the future. In Part III, we have discussed the issues related to work-based learning, employer involvement, and the organization of schooling around career themes. We have also described the current state of events related to linking secondary and postsecondary education, and serving out-of-school youth.
In this final section, we limit ourselves to commenting briefly on two issues that seem fundamental. One has to do with the content of education, the other with governance. We will discuss governance first.
Here we see a dilemma having to do with centralized and decentralized control. Some STW advocates stress the importance of building a whole new "system." National performance standards in academic subjects and industry skills are an essential feature of this proposed new STW system, facilitating the flow of people across state lines and between education and work. Ideally, national standards could free local and state decisionmakers to adopt more flexible approaches to teaching and learning, as long as the results met the standards. Even without comprehensive standards, national tests in a few key areas could serve as useful benchmarks.
However, there has been considerable political resistance to the development of standards or tests at the national level--even if they are voluntary. Creation of a national curriculum of the kind that exists in most other industrialized countries would be unthinkable in the United States. Individual teachers, departments, schools, districts, and states all retain significant degrees of autonomy.
Generally, local control has both strong advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that significant innovations can occur in individual classrooms, schools, districts, and states. Local governance also confers a sense that local citizens have more direct control, and this is very important to Americans.
Decentralization has disadvantages, however. One is the inefficiency that results from lack of coordination. For example, it is common for teachers in U.S. schools to spend several weeks or months at the beginning of each school year finding out what each student has learned in previous years. Even if a 3rd-grade class consisted only of students who attended 2nd grade at the same school, differences among the 2nd-grade teachers would produce some heterogeneity among the 3rd-grade students, and that heterogeneity is much greater when students come from other schools, districts, or states.
Another example is scheduling. Some high schools have recently gone to scheduling classes in four daily blocks of 80 or 90 minutes per block. This reduces the amount of time students spend in hallways or settling down at the start of a class period, and, thus, enables more time to be spent on task. Doubling the length of a class period means that courses which would normally extend over a whole year can now be taught in one semester. Because of that, if one school has the new schedule and another school still has the old seven-period schedule, it becomes problematic for students to transfer from one school to another in the middle of the year.
Adoption of standards at the local level creates similar problems. Many schools, districts, and states have recently undertaken to write down what students should know and be able to do at different ages. As long as students and teachers stay in the same system, this is helpful. But as students or teachers move among schools, districts, or states, they must deal with a different set of standards. This is confusing and wasteful.
In addition to the lack of coordination, decentralized control also contributes to inequality. Well-off families can gather in protected enclaves, while the less affluent attend poorer schools. The range of student performance in American schools is greater than in most other countries.
The centralization-decentralization issue seems to be a true dilemma, with good arguments on both sides. All we can say is that the further development of STW will continue to confront it. Purposes, practices, models, systems, and standards will continue to evolve in different directions in different places, while states and perhaps the federal government try to find ways to reduce inefficiency and inequality.
With regard to the content of education, we also see a struggle, but not a stalemate. As we have made clear throughout this report, we agree with the view that the traditional separation between academic and vocational education is becoming obsolete, and that preparation for the learning economy requires some new kind of integrated education. The fact that most other industrialized countries also have been moving in this direction reinforces this view. Where the struggle seems to be taking place, both in the United States and elsewhere, is over the nature of the integration. Is the purpose simply to upgrade and enrich vocational education, creating technical education at higher levels? Or is it to prepare all students both for careers and for higher education eventually if not immediately? On the one hand, upgrading vocational education in a way that limits possibilities for further education, as traditional vocational education has done, runs the risk of short-changing some students. On the other hand, using broad industries or occupations as a practical context in which to learn academic skills and theoretical knowledge runs the risk of neglecting immediate preparation for work.
As indicated in Parts II and III of this report, people involved in the STW movement are well aware of these risks, and are working to reduce them by designing programs more intelligently. Whether the college-and-career approach for all students will converge with the upgraded vocational-technical strategy for non-baccalaureate-bound students, or whether these strategies will take root in different places, or whether one will eventually dominate, will become clear only in the future. But the struggle is now generating much creative effort. The initiatives described in this report seem likely to produce more effective methods for ushering young people into the schooling and working experiences that now constitute a career.