Hull, G. (1992). "Their Chances? Slim and None":An Ethnographic Account of the Experiences of Low-Income People of Color in a Vocational Program and at Work (MDS-155). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG SKILLS, SCHOOLING, AND WORK

• The Skills Controversy Revisited
• Reproductive and Democratizing Forces: A Case Study
• Looking for Solutions in Critical Skills

The Skills Controversy Revisited

By now we have traveled a long way from the skills controversy--out of the popular literature on the economic consequences of illiteracy, away from scholarly debates on the nature of literacy and education--and into vocational school, the workplace, and people's lives. Let us now revisit the skills controversy by asking what this study of lived experience has to say about the relationship among skills, schooling, and work. Most strikingly, I found no simple, one-to-one correlation between, on the one hand, being skilled or able to accomplish work, and on the other, doing well in training, getting a job, or keeping it.

Let us recall that the Banking and Finance program had no entry requirements; some students like Jackie had apparently done all right in high school, but others like Alma still had difficulty with reading and writing, and others, recent immigrants from Asia, like Chen, and Latin America, were self-conscious about speaking English, not to mention reading and writing it. Yet Mr. Parker liked to tell us that his students knew most of what they needed before they came into the program; all he had to do was give them some polishing. This polishing partly took the form of practice at telling, proofing, and the ten-key machine, but the emphasis in the program was more on socializing students than building up their bank knowledge or improving their machine calculation skills. Many classes consisted of good-humored admonitions about how to sit, behave, and talk in a corporation, or juicy, down and dirty stories about what it is like to work in the world of high finance--a workplace and a world that at least some students believed they were about to join. The program seemed, then, long on socialization and confidence-building and short on knowledge and skill-training in terms of both banking and literacy.

The short-term nature of the program and its lack of focus on skills and knowledge did not, however, seem to serve most students badly in terms of being able to get a job. In many ways, Mr. Parker was right; many students did only need his "polishing." Some passed Bank of the Pacific's employment-screening proof test the first time around, despite the fact that it required facility with the ten-key machine, visual discrimination, direction following, and problem solving, and all of these under time constraints. Others passed it on a second try, others with coaching, and at least one by cheating. All that separated students from Bank of the Pacific was an interview, which seemed more a formality, or perhaps, a charade, than anything else. Mrs. Lavelle chatted politely with the nervous potential employees who had passed the proof test, asking them why they would like to work at Bank of the Pacific, what their long-term career aspirations were, and whether they could work at night and were interested in part-time. Many students shined in these interviews, trying out approved explanations for spotty job histories and talking corporate talk in just the way Mr. Parker had modeled. Others spoke in monosyllables, very shyly and self-consciously. But Mrs. Lavelle hired people, not wholly on the basis of their performance in the interview, and not wholly on the basis of their test scores, but most often because Mr. Parker advised that they were "ready" or, more rarely, that they really needed a chance. Sometimes I saw his recommendation override an ailing test score or a too reticent or self-deprecating interview. It seemed that the proof test was just a means to eliminate people if the need arose, rather than an instrument useful for matching people's skills with possible jobs, and that Mr. Parker and Mrs. Lavelle both recognized this function and acted accordingly. Indeed, Mr. Parker referred to it as a "process of elimination." It is noteworthy in this context to recall the perception of some workers that the proof test had little or nothing to do with the actual job.

The contradictions surrounding skills continued in the workplace. There I realized that the very thing that many African-American students seemed good at, and one of the things most stressed in the Banking and Finance program--that is, interpersonal skills such as would be required in an interview situation or in a sales-type position--were not required in the proof-center. It didn't matter much how you dressed or presented yourself so long as you got to work on time and were quick and accurate at your work and able, as Alma liked to point out, to keep your mouth shut. As for literacy, some reading was required in the training period, but most people managed it, even recent immigrants like Chen, by taking the manuals home and getting help from others. On the actual job, precious little conventional literacy was needed at all. People read and punched in numbers, and they checked off boxes on forms. The only skills needed on the job (besides a tolerance for stress) were those capabilities for operating the proof machine. Ironically, students did not get much practice in the Banking and Finance program on its one rusty old proof machine (although they did get to practice the ten-key calculator). Such practice may not be so crucial for most students, however, for by all the accounts that we have, those capabilities quickly become routine. I do not mean to downplay the skill required for "unskilled" work--Kusterer (1978) has demonstrated the considerable "working knowledge" that machine operators develop and depend upon. But I do mean to point out that the jobs that students from the Banking and Finance program most frequently got required little knowledge of banking and few social skills--in direct contrast to the emphasis in the program--nor did they require much reading or any writing, which runs counter to the basic skills literature and the widespread claims that American industries are suffering because workers lack advanced literacy skills and high tech competencies.

Finally, the most striking contradiction I uncovered was that being able to do the work of a proof-operator--the deployment of whatever knowledge and skills that this job requires--was not sufficient for staying employed. Put another way, among the group I studied, many of the skilled workers, those who were fast and accurate at proofing, lost their jobs right along with the very few workers who were less skilled, who were not sufficiently fast or accurate. In fact, there was an extremely high rate of turnover at the proof-center for students in Mr. Parker's program. And judging by the regularity with which local banks sent their representatives round to interview a new crop of applicants, the same rate seems to apply to other centers and for other workers. (As this manuscript goes to press in the Fall of 1992, this situation seems to be changing. Managers and workers at several data centers have reported to us recently that proof-operators are holding on to their jobs much longer than has been customary because they cannot find any other work, given the country's poor economy. At the same time, the requirements for the jobs that do exist are being raised because companies can be very selective. And Mr. Parker reports low enrollment in his program for the first time in years, as word gets around that there are few jobs available in local banks.)

I have tried to demonstrate for this vocational program in Banking and Finance and for the job of proofing, that the current popular rhetoric which attempts to blame economic difficulties on unskilled labor and then attempts to remedy the problem with literacy programs and ever proliferating sets of workbooks and computer-aided instruction on basic skills, simply misses the mark. No, it misses the whole target. Something is curiously and deeply wrong here. People enter a training program which emphasizes skills that will not be used on the job, are given an employment test that requires skills that have questionable relevance to work, are hired despite doing poorly on the test and the interview, and lose their jobs even when they are competent at doing the work. The problem is much more complicated than a deficit in skills, and its solution is much more difficult than devising a new skills-building program or providing workplace literacy instruction.

Reproductive and Democratizing Forces:
A Case Study

When I have reported this research to various audiences, I have noticed that it often elicits conflicting responses, surprisingly divergent interpretations and evaluations. On the one hand, here is a program, people will point out, serving a minority population, a population which does not get help elsewhere, which is often ignored and cast aside. The women in this program need to work, the argument goes; they need to pay their rent and take care of their children; they need some autonomy, some relief from their dependence on government assistance and exploitative men. They do not need further schooling at the moment; they do need jobs. A short-term program in Banking and Finance would thus seem to fit the bill. We have a caring instructor who helps his students through personal difficulties with recalcitrant landlords as well as the intricacies of opening and closing the teller window, and of mastering the proof machine. We have a low-pressure, welcoming curriculum, which students can enter and leave at their need. We have hiring done right on campus, with local banks sending their representatives over to interview and test and set up appointments to come to work. And the students get, at least potentially, not just a temporary job, but the chance for advancement, a foot in the door of the corporate world. They get a job of a different kind--not burger turning--but something akin to high finance. They gain self-confidence, believing in themselves for the first time in a long time. And even if they do not work at the bank permanently, even if they do not turn out to be that rarity who moves to teller from proof, to loans from teller, the self-confidence they have developed will serve them well in future jobs. Sure, there are problems with the program. There are things that can be improved. But what we need to do is work on those problems--find a way, for example, to increase job retention and to impress upon students the uncompromisable necessity of arriving at work on time.

The other response starts out at the same place, but proceeds rapidly to a different destination. Again, here we have minority women who need to work, who need to be able to pay their rent and take care of their children, who need some autonomy, some relief from their dependence on government assistance and exploitative men. They end up at Mr. Parker's program in Banking and Finance because they have heard he can get them a job. They imagine jobs in a bank would give them some autonomy. The jobs would provide a "professional" environment, a place where a person can dress up, be respected, and have a little power. They imagine, too, jobs that will pay enough to support them and their children. They proceed through the program appreciatively, most of them genuinely thankful for the attention they have lacked for a long time, most wistfully hopeful about the future. When the banks interview and test, some students are put to work right away--especially those who seem, like their instructor, to buy into the notion that hard work and perseverance will get you your dream. But these new workers go not to a "professional" setting, but to a place their instructor has at times called an electronic sweatshop or a "regimented environment." This place is distant, requiring time and money for a commute. Its schedule is exactly what the women, especially those with children, cannot handle--late night hours when public transportation has stopped. They get low wages, insufficient for living above the poverty line, and no benefits. Is it any surprise, then, that at this workplace most of the women quickly fall by the way? Within six months, they continue their welfare dependence and stay at home with their children. They look back on their banking experience as a kind of visit to a foreign country, just a brief respite in another world. Meanwhile, the community college vocational program continues to feed local banks new crops of hopefuls, and the banks continue to profit from a cheap labor pool. "Why attempt to improve the program?" the more cynical would ask. "It's already accomplishing its purpose."

These conflicting interpretations reflect ideological differences, and both are possible, I would argue, because there is some truth in each. Both capture a part of the whole, but fail to account for all the pieces. What I will try to do here is offer a more comprehensive explanation, one that subsumes both perspectives. In essence, by explaining how a vocational program can continually send students to jobs in banks that many quickly lose, I will provide a case study of the workings of reproductive and democratizing forces, to return to Carnoy and Levin's terms. Rather than focusing on one site where such dramas may be played out, such as the classroom or the community college or the workplace, I will attempt to show how people and structures at multiple levels interact to oppose, support, and, ultimately, as far as most of the students in this study are concerned, to sustain the status quo.

Over the last fifteen years there has, of course, been a great deal of research on the ways in which social inequalities are maintained through schooling (e.g., Apple, 1979; Bowles & Gintis, 1974; Giroux, 1983; McRobbie, 1978; Willis, 1977). However, I am uncomfortable with many accounts of reproduction, or the notion that schools reproduce the social relations needed to sustain our economic system. Some such accounts (see the reviews by Giroux, 1983, and Borman, 1991) seem overly deterministic, too rarely finding a role for human agency or complexity in human behavior and motive and too often offering schooling as a "black box" whose reproductive processes are unavailable for study (e.g., Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bowles & Gintis, 1974). More recent theorizing explores the role of individual agency through resistance--students' attempts, for example, to reject the dominant culture and, therefore, school knowledge by refusing to cooperate in classrooms (see McLaren, 1986; Willis, 1977). More recently still, researchers interested in issues of gender and race have begun to call for and conduct studies which account for the differing experiences of women and minorities (Borman, 1991; Griffin, 1985; Holland & Eisenhart, 1990; Valli, 1986).

In the analysis presented below, rather than assuming reproduction or expecting examples of the same kinds of resistance that have been reported in the literature, I have tried to take an interactive view of social formation, foregrounding, I hope, the complexity of the process. I have tried, following McCarthy and Apple (1988), to examine the lives of a group of students and their teacher in school and at work, and to demonstrate empirically the connections that I have seen between educational and work practices and gender, race, and class relations. The picture that emerges is not one of unopposed reproduction or of flagrant resistance. I see, instead, students who respond to schooling and work in a variety of productive and unproductive ways, and teachers and employers who also simultaneously resist and acquiesce to the demands of the dominant culture.

Teacher as Savior and Seller

I will begin with the most pivotal person in the process, the one on whom all else seemed to turn, Mr. Parker. I spent many hours with this teacher, hearing about his upbringing in Arkansas, his early adulthood in the military, the following years in California as a bank employee and a graduate student, his rise to vice-president status, his move from banking to teaching in a community college vocational program, and his "other job" in real estate. He talked about how he had made it as an African-American male, about his mentors, many of whom were Caucasian women, and about coming to believe he was "different." And he talked about his students, mostly the African-American women, going to great lengths to articulate what he hoped to do for them--how he tried to help them avoid the fate he feared was awaiting most--being single parents and getting by on welfare. He talked about the men he believed were waiting to exploit them and about their having to live in communities scarred by poverty, drugs, and violence. He also talked about the exceptions, the students who had passed through his program and made it, the superstars who were able to advance through the bank into mid-level management or worked happily as full-time tellers during prime-time hours, or used entry-level jobs in banking for a leg up in other corporations, or to put themselves through college.

As I have noted, Mr. Parker was a teacher who engaged his students. He provided a classroom environment that looked away from itself to the jobs that seemed just right around the corner, and students thrived on this real-world immediacy. Drawing on his firsthand experience as a worker and manager in area banks, he embroidered the lectures and labs with tales and homilies from the field, and he caught his students' rapt attention. He also provided instructional "scaffolding," making it possible for students to carry out tasks like "balancing" when they were not quite able, correcting their errors in the most accepting way. All of the instruction he offered was filtered through speech styles that seemed culturally congruent, at least for his African-American students.

I have also observed that much instructional time was given to what seemed to me rather blatant socialization--directions on how to sit, dress, and talk, advice that the best thing to do is "not take offense" when an employer tells you to wash dishes or clean up dog feces, admonitions that the most important rule, when you work in a big corporation, is to "keep your mouth shut." This kind of talk was often accompanied by stories of making it--Mr. Parker's included. You can move up in the bank, if that is what you want to do, he told students. But first you have to get your foot in the door, get yourself a job as a proof-operator or a teller, hang in there past the probation time, then watch the internal job announcements for the next position you might apply for. You have to go to school, too, he warned, but added that the bank will often pay your way. This kind of talk made almost everyone listen because it promised a route to the kind of work life many aspired to--professional work--not McDonald's. I heard over and over again--not a place where it is hot and disorderly and you work for peanuts--but professional work.

Mr. Parker talked about a lot of different jobs that a person could get in a bank. His students got actual practice in the course of the program with only two, telling and proofing, and among the group I studied, they got jobs only as proof-operators. There was, then, a mismatch between these students' aspirations and the employment they found through the Banking and Finance program. Many of the students I talked to looked forward to what they believed would be "professional" jobs. They had worked at McDonald's, as teacher's aides, and as assembly line workers in factories. While in some cases they had enjoyed aspects of these jobs, many now wanted "professional" work and the accouterments of middle class living. As LaReisha put it, "I want to dress up and look cute, go to a work and sit behind a desk, then drive my car home and put my feet up and have a glass of wine and read a book." Mr. Parker distinguished working for the bank from other jobs; he offered it as entry-level work in the corporate world, with added benefits of internal promotion and the possibility of a career. Yet, among the students I studied, students experienced no chance of advancement.

Once I learned the nature of being a proof-operator and understood how unlikely it was that students would even keep their jobs, much less be promoted, the hard question became how Mr. Parker could keep up the charade. How could he keep sending students to work in these banks? Why didn't he fight to overhaul his program to make it more responsible, if not more responsive, rather than dig in to maintain its present form? How could he continue to shell out promises to student after student of a better life through entry-level work in a corporation?

The answers to these questions are complex and elusive, and, in a way, I am happy this is the case, for I think they mirror human complexity, variability, and potential. I spent a lot more time interviewing Mr. Parker--session after session after session for over three years--and I have felt alternately grateful and frustrated that it has been difficult if not impossible to construct a seamless, easily packaged interpretation of his motives and aspirations as a teacher and a person. I have felt grateful because I feel that I am at least not in danger of oversimplifying the issues, and I have been frustrated because I have needed to move toward closure. Among the several sets of lyrics I could set to Mr. Parker's music, I will focus here on how his own personal success story and his background as a former bank employee seem to have influenced the way he conceives of his program in Banking and Finance, his role in it, and his relationships with and responsibility towards his students. I focus on these issues here because they seem to have the most relevance for other vocational teachers drawn from the ranks of business and industry.

It is extremely important to remember that Mr. Parker views himself as having made it: having escaped poverty and the limited options available to an African-American man in the 1950s and early 1960s in Arkansas, having come out west and gone to school, and moved up in banking, eventually becoming a vice-president. I have already said he thought of himself as "different," as someone who was able to choose an alternate path from his contemporaries back in Arkansas. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that a great deal of his sense of self-worth and self-identity is bound up in those choices. Nor is it hard to understand his impulse to start his students down a similar path in the expectation or the hope that a few of them will be different, too. Given his background in banking, and his sense of it as his escape route, we might expect Mr. Parker to glamorize the corporate world.

When I first began talking to Mr. Parker, I heard about many success stories among his former students. And it certainly cannot be denied that over the years there were some success stories: a few students were promoted in the bank, some stayed for a while before moving on, and a multitude at least got their foot in the door. All of these were evidence for Mr. Parker that his program was working. As I continued my interviews with this teacher, the success stories dwindled in number and magnitude, perhaps because I had uncovered the reality of low job retention and perhaps because Mr. Parker became more cognizant in the course of the research of how many of his students actually fell by the way. I sometimes pressed him to consider the low success rate for many students, in particular the African-American women. And when he did, he often combined criticism of the banking system with acceptance of its power and ubiquity. Yes, proofing can be likened to an electronic sweatshop, and, yes, most people get eliminated. But "something's better than nothing." I came to understand that it was not the case that Mr. Parker was totally uncritical of the establishment; it was rather that, as a practical man, he found it more sensible to accept the system and work within it than to set off on the fool's errand of transforming it.

When it came to transforming his own program in Banking and Finance at Gateway College, there were powerful influences on Mr. Parker to maintain the program in its current state. This program was set up to supply entry-level workers to area banks at regular intervals. Thus, students got a bit of all-purpose training--a little hands-on practice with telling, some information on the federal reserve, a little occasional practice on a proof-machine--but not much intensive work on anything, certainly no advanced study, and theory was out of the question. This was the way Mr. Parker had been trained, and this is what the banks preferred. Thus, when administrators at Gateway College suggested a curriculum transformation, the inclusion of more theoretical, transfer-oriented courses, they met with adamant resistance. Mr. Parker and his Advisory Board of local banking people saw no need for such a change. Mr. Parker knew what the banks wanted, and he intended to give it to them. This stance grew, I believe, from a mixture of motives. I have already described Mr. Parker's personal success story: he hoped to pass the torch to other "different" individuals; he had started at the bottom and worked his way up, supplementing his schooling along the way; and others could profit from that route, too. His attitude seemed to grow as well from a desire to please the banks. Mr. Parker's allegiance was certainly with the financial community rather than the community college. He kept apart from the activities of his department, preferring not to engage in interdepartmental politics, and he viewed himself as a practitioner, someone who could make it in the real world of finance, not someone relegated to that mere shadow of life that is reflected in educational institutions.

Thus, Mr. Parker was able, on the one hand, to represent banking as a viable career goal for students, and, on the other, to send them to what he knew would be dead-end jobs for most. He understood, on the basis of his own experience, that a person can move up the ladder if he or she is sufficiently diligent, cooperative, and "different." In addition, his model of success was practice rather than academically oriented. Interestingly, these characteristics and beliefs are probably not too different from those of many vocational teachers drawn from the ranks of business and industry to teach courses in community colleges and high schools.

I think it is important not to lose sight, when assessing Mr. Parker's role in perpetuating the social and economic inequities experienced by his students, of a much bigger picture. To conclude that the whole problem lies with this teacher, to decide that we need simply to get rid of him and abolish his program, to assume that if we did so all would be well, is to look for solutions solely on the microlevel and to ignore linkages to larger social, economic, and political issues and the responsibilities of other players.

Community College as Dream and Dream Deferred

Community colleges have been widely criticized. They've been described as places where lower socioeconomic class students and lower track students are channeled to "cool out" (Clark, 1960). They have been characterized as holding pens where people are kept when there are not enough jobs (Shor, 1980). Their once heralded "transfer" function has been challenged (Brint & Karabel, 1989), and their curriculum, particularly its vocational components, has been castigated as second-rate, the provision of undereducation for the underemployed (Brint & Karabel, 1989; Shor, 1980). My study did not examine the community college per se; I did not seek out administrators, staff, and other teachers for their perspectives on education or the Banking and Finance program in particular, and I did not attempt to understand more globally, or in a top-down way, the history and current mission of Gateway College. Thus, the project was not designed to contribute to (or support or challenge) the revisionist literature cited above. Yet, in the course of my interviews with Mr. Parker and his students, and through my interactions with other faculty members and students over several years of research, I came to understand some of the common experiences that people have at Gateway College. And these understandings shed some light on the interplay of democratizing and reproductive forces at the community college.

The first sign I had that Gateway College was not always responsive to students came when I inquired how students got into the Banking and Finance program. I did not see students making reasoned career choices about banking buttressed by the advice of counselors. Rather, students heard that Mr. Parker could get them a job, and they turned up on his doorstep. Or they were flipping through the college catalogue, saw the courses, and thought some knowledge of banking might shore up their skills in an unstable job market. Once deciding to give banking a try, some students were stymied by a complex registration procedure, and others had to negotiate the college's rules about concurrent enrollment in vocational courses. And once enrolled in Banking and Finance, they found it difficult to dip back into the community college to acquire related requisite skills such as facility in writing and reading. The students and their teacher just did not perceive a mechanism for such coordination. Thus, what usually happened was that a student stayed in Banking and Finance and went on to take a job despite the student's need to acquire more extensive literacy skills, or the student dropped out of Banking and Finance and re-entered some other part of the community college curriculum. Another problem was negotiating financial aid; of the advisors, La Reisha said, "They ain't boo-boo, they ain't nothing. . . . I had to help myself."

The insufficient quality and quantity of advisement and the lack of coordination among programs, as experienced by the students, perhaps contributed to the mismatch we noted before between students' career goals and the occupational paths that were available to them through Banking and Finance. For example, if students had known what kinds of jobs would be available after getting a Banking and Finance certificate, they might have reconsidered that vocational choice. Certainly it was the case that what students perceived as a rigid system of rules governing the course of study a person could enroll in--given the kind of financial aid he or she had--put some constraints on how freely students could move about the college.

I also observed almost no coordination between the basic skills/remedial program at Gateway College and the program in Banking and Finance. This gap is significant, for it would seem that a natural progression in this college for many students would be basic skills followed by (or offered concurrently with) a vocational program. Again, this lack of coordination surely served students poorly when the time came for screening tests at the bank. I should also note that Mr. Parker was scathingly critical of the basic skills program at Gateway. He claimed that by its very nature the program stigmatized students, branding them as deficient and unworthy. He was also skeptical about the academic aspirations that motivated the program, which he knew was designed more to help students enter the community college degree program than to help them with job skills, and this academic path, you will recall, did not impress Mr. Parker. Therefore, he never sought out or recommended the skills program when his students needed remedial help in reading, writing, or math. We have here a disturbing example, then, of how the structure of a community college can interact with teachers' occupational and academic biases and beliefs to serve students poorly.

During the time period of the study, I did observe one instance in which the administration of the college attempted to intervene actively to reform the program in Banking and Finance. As I have mentioned, this was an attempt to force Mr. Parker to offer theory courses, courses that would fit into a program of study designed more to help students transfer to four-year institutions than to get immediate jobs. One way to understand the difficulty facing students in the Banking and Finance program is to recognize that many of them did need jobs in a hurry. Thus, in some ways, the program did fit the bill, getting students into the workforce quickly. On the other hand, it is easy to see that the few skills students acquired or developed while they were in the program are quite narrow. These skills suit the purposes of local banks for particular jobs, but are not necessarily in the longer-term interests of the students. If students are not able to keep their proof-operator jobs, about all they have left from their experience in the program is a certificate and some self-confidence (which we do not mean to belittle). The interesting question is whether the theory courses the administration proposed would bar the students, who now come to Banking and Finance, from any participation, or whether they would serve the function of broadening their skills and knowledge.

There were a good many reminders that Gateway College was low-budget, that it lacked many of the advantages and accouterments of a university or four-year college. I noticed, for example, the outmoded technology in the Banking and Finance program. I have mentioned the program's ancient, often broken proof-machine that students rarely got to practice on. Yet it was their lack of efficiency on this machine that stymied some students on the job. Mr. Parker seemed to assume that learning to use ten-key machines was a suitable, or more likely, a necessary substitute for practice with the proof-machine. However, my brief observations of workers who were operating these machines suggested that such transfer would not be so automatic. Operating a proof-machine seemed to require a particular kind of "visual literacy"--a particular way of scanning documents for salient information--a skill that would not necessarily flower in a ten-key class such as that provided at Gateway.

There was another technological backwardness that characterized this community college program. The labs on simulated bank-telling had no training with computer terminals. Some students expected to use computers at work--Jackie once commented that you did not have to know much about reading on the job if you could "push it in on those buttons"--but they got no experience with this technology during the Banking and Finance courses, and this despite widely recognized technological changes in banking such as automated tellers. To be sure, most students were not hired as tellers, but, rather, as proof-operators. Students expected jobs as tellers, however, and, perhaps, such employment would have been likelier if they could have claimed some technological expertise. Mr. Parker recognized the backwardness of his program in terms of technology, and said that he had asked for a terminal many times, but was resigned never to receive one. "This is an educational institution," he would explain with a laugh, assuming that this was all he needed to say. I do not know whether Mr. Parker actively petitioned for up-to-date equipment and was repeatedly denied or whether he preferred to keep his distance from the community college by not asking for favors that he would be called upon eventually to return, if only through surface allegiance to his department. I do know that other parts of the college--the basic skills program, for example--had modern computer equipment, even such high-tech gear as video discs. Most importantly, I suspect that the Banking and Finance program was not helped by Mr. Parker's marginal status at Gateway College, whether that status was chosen or imposed.

Gateway College provided students inexpensive and accessible schooling, but it fell short on many counts. A lack of advisement and students' perceptions of the poor quality of the counseling they did get, little coordination among programs, less than collegial relations among instructors in different programs, the alienation experienced by teachers like Mr. Parker, inadequate equipment and resources--all of these things, to a degree, worked against the success of students in our study. I came to think that, for our students, Gateway College was often a place where dreams were deferred, to borrow from Langston Hughes. But this did not happen, however, because individual instructors and staff were willfully unhelpful, but more as a result of habitual patterns of interaction and ways of doing business that were a part of the history of this institution and, I would guess, of others like it.

The Bank As Leg Up or Put Down

I have shown how bank personnel represented entry-level jobs as stepping stones to a career in the corporate world. "The sky's the limit," stated Mrs. Lavelle. Contrarily, I have also illustrated how most students in the cohort I studied were unable to keep their jobs, much less get promoted. In fact, most were fired within six months and usually less. Students were fired for being late, for not making their production quota, and for being left-handed. The reality of the workplace for ninety-eight percent of the students I studied was that they lost their jobs quickly and returned to dependence on welfare or "nonprofessional" and blue-collar work.

I heard stories of former students who had made good, who began as a teller or a proof-operator and worked their way up into loans or management. In fact, a recent article in Gateway College's student newspaper praised Mr. Parker's program and reported that three former students in the last ten years had become vice-presidents. I recognize that some students are able to rise from entry-level positions through the ranks of the bank, but these students are few and far between--they are the exceptions. It is not very likely that a person hired as a proof-operator will move to teller and more "people-oriented" white-collar-like work. As one bank manager pointed out, these jobs are not even in the same building, and the people you hire for one are not usually the people you hire for the other. Proofing requires the capability to work quickly with your hands, while telling requires communication skills; tellers are the face of the organization, and proof-operators, the hands behind the scenes. Ironically, many of the African-American women in Mr. Parker's class possess marvelous communication skills; they displayed them again and again in the simulated-telling exercises and also in the interviews conducted by the banks. Yet, all of these women were sent on jobs to the proof-center.

Perhaps the one way in which employment at the bank does act as a step ladder is for people who need part-time work while they are putting themselves through school. One Chinese student is doing just that, working nights at the proof-center and attending a state college by day. Mrs. Bork told me she welcomed such workers, not minding at all if people went to school at the same time they were working for her or even if they were working another job in addition to proof-operator. The chance to get part-time work at odd hours may be helpful for some workers, but it is a far cry from the career ladder that students are led to believe that jobs as proof-operators might be. Indeed, the eagerness with which the proof-center hires workers who have no intention of staying with the bank long-term, and the disdain with which local managers viewed Gateway College's attempt to add bank management to the current Banking and Finance curriculum, belie the myth of internal promotion for most of Mr. Parker's students.

I think it is significant that the personnel managers we interviewed had all worked their way up in the bank. Mrs. Lavelle started out as a bank teller and Mrs. Bork as a proof-operator. Like Mr. Parker, then, these women represented personal success stories, people for whom the system had worked, people who perceived themselves as having been different, who knew they had worked hard, and who believed that others could follow the same path to success. Mrs. Lavelle tended to represent the bank almost as a benevolent institution, saying it made her feel good to work for a corporation that gave people a chance. Mrs. Bork was more skeptical, recognizing that the bank wanted part-time workers so as to avoid paying benefits, but she also insisted that there were many career opportunities available at Bank of the Pacific for the energetic and ambitious. I think it was partly the truth of their own success stories, then, that allowed personnel managers to represent entry-level jobs as stepping stones to the students in Mr. Parker's program. The experiences of these bank personnel and the teacher thus reinforced each other.

It may also have been the case that moving up through the bank was more likely when Mrs. Bork and Mrs. Lavelle were young trainees than at the current moment, due to changes in work organization and the introduction of new technologies. It is well known that the advent of automatic tellers and the use of other computer technologies have both eliminated some jobs in banking and changed the skills required for many positions. According to Bailey (1990), "increasing computerization is leading to the elimination of a considerable amount of repetitive, routine, manual processing work that in the past supported the production of banking services" (p. 27). At the same time, Bailey reports for banking "a growing need among upper tier workers for high-level, specialized knowledge such as systems analysis, market research, mergers and acquisitions, and management" (p. 29). Additionally, middle-level personnel are taking on a broader set of tasks, especially customer service activities--"providing customers with the various pieces of information necessary to offer the customized mix of services that will best answer their needs" (p. 31). So, banks are looking for more and better educated middle-level workers who have a view of the big picture of banking, rather than for young workers with few skills for entry-level positions who can then move into higher-level positions as they gain knowledge and experience. If these trends that Bailey reports for banking are representative, the very positions that workers like Jackie and Alma are being trained for are ghettoized. It seems extremely unlikely that these workers could advance internally, given that they do not have the skills that are currently valued in banking and that they are being hired to fill jobs that do not reflect the changes that are occurring in the rest of the industry.

Ironically, while many jobs in banks are apparently broadening in scope and skills required, proofing seems to have narrowed. As recently as fifteen years ago, we learned from Mrs. Bork, employees at branch banks shared a number of responsibilities, including telling and proofing. Each branch would, then, have its own proof machine, and workers shared the responsibility of running credits and debits through it. However, in an effort to improve efficiency, the task of proofing was taken from branches and centralized in large centers. And so it is that Jackie and Alma now commute to the city for jobs as proof-operators, jobs that are cut off literally and symbolically from the rest of the banking world. Currently, the job of proofing continues to be simplified, as the number of "pockets" to which debits and credits are sorted is being reduced. And so, rather than requiring an increasingly complex and varied set of capabilities, the job will require somewhat less complicated ones. One only wonders how long it will be before this task is completely automated or is carried out by women in the so-called "third world." (A person knowledgeable about the banking industry once commented to me that we do not need to worry about proofing jobs, since these jobs are surely destined in the near future to be carried out by people in Mexico or other "developing" countries rather than by workers in the United States. To me this comment illustrates a disturbing myopia: Have we no concern for the women in Mexico, Thailand, and Taiwan? And what of the workers in this country whose jobs, as deskilled as they are, are being taken away?) Mrs. Bork thinks human-directed proofing will be around forever, but she may have a blind spot where the expendability of her own specialty is concerned.

The issue of gender is tied to that of the de-skilling of certain jobs. According to Game and Pringle in their study of female workers in Australian banks (1983) and Strober and Arnold (1987) in their comparable study of United States banks, women began to work at what had traditionally been thought of as male jobs during World War II when they were hired as relief tellers. After mechanization had become widespread, they stayed on to operate ledger and proof machines, taking over the most menial and low-paying jobs that were not thought suitable for men. More recently, women have achieved formal equality of opportunity, due in part, Game and Pringle say, to a shortage of males in the workforce. Yet very few women reach management positions, perhaps because, as Bailey argues for American banks, the career ladder for entry-level positions is being dismantled. Game and Pringle do not think it is accidental that when women are allowed to move into an area of banking, the job has become mechanized, or it is no longer considered a step toward advancement. "Gender is fundamental to the way work is organized," they say, "and work is central in the social construction of gender" (p. 14).

Banking used to be considered "genteel" career work, a good job for young people out of high school who were willing to learn the ropes in expectations of internal advancement. Bailey has shown how current changes in technology and work organization are altering career paths and the nature of work. Yet, if Game and Pringle are right, career paths and the nature of work have always differed for men and women in banking. I see some evidence of this in our data, at least indirectly: Few men enrolled in Mr. Parker's program to begin with, and fewer still took the humble job of proof-operator. Ironically, the few men who did take these jobs were disproportionately over-represented in the group that kept them. Such gender issues are further complicated by issues of race. The vast majority of workers at the proof-center were women--Asian and Hispanic women--and this despite the fact that the majority of the students in Mr. Parker's program were African-American women. So here, I think, is a case of women being shuttled into the most stressful, tedious, and dead-end jobs that a corporation can find to offer. But what is worse, even for these poor, undesirable jobs, one race seems to have been selected out.

Let's recall again the proof-operation test that prospective workers had to pass and the arbitrary way the results of that test were applied. "A process of elimination," Mr. Parker would say. I heard from Mrs. Lavelle that students who had language problems--that is, who were not native speakers of English--were inappropriate candidates for teller positions, and from Mrs. Bork, that such people were great for proofing where communication did not matter. (The exception to this was when a bank requested, because of its particular clientele, a speaker of Cantonese or Vietnamese to train as a teller.) Thus, Asian and Hispanic women got proofing jobs. African-American women, on the other hand, either were not selected at the interview level, or quickly lost their jobs once hired. And so we have an example here, not only of the feminization of a low-level job, but of ways in which race in combination with gender narrowed a job pool even further.

I believe that, despite the good intentions of mid-level managers like Mrs. Lavelle and her hopes for career paths in the bank for minority women, the job of proof-operator is simply a low-level, dead-end job that serves a purpose right now for a corporation. Given the banking industry's history of employing women in such positions, and given current changes in what banks appear to want in the employees they intend to hire long-term, the only interpretation open to me is that banks are taking advantage of a readily available, low-cost labor pool culled and briefly polished by a well-intentioned teacher in a "we-aim-to-serve" community college program.

Workers Who Work and Work the System

When I looked to see who was working at the proof-center six months after Mr. Parker's students were hired, it was entirely clear that the Banking and Finance program failed at perhaps its most basic aim, that of getting people into the workforce. The great majority of students lost their jobs within six months. Mr. Parker might rationalize this finding by pointing to attitudinal changes that come from taking part in the program and getting a foot in the door of the banking industry--an increase in self-confidence, for example, a newly found belief that you can do it, you can work at a big corporation and not just a burger stand. I do not wish to discount such benefits, for surely they are positive side-effects, but the fact remains that the door to the proof-center was a revolving one, spinning most students out as quickly as they walked in. Most students enrolled in the Banking and Finance program because they heard it would lead quickly to a job, and so it did, but for most it also led soon thereafter to a pink slip. So, in a programmatic sense, if we look just at the outcomes of this vocational program, we cannot help but be startled by how clearly it failed to accomplish its central purpose.

But let us look now from a different perspective, from that of the participants in the program. For it is certainly the case that students have a part in constructing the outcomes of their training and education. In recent years, as I mentioned earlier, theorists interested in reproduction--in particular Willis (1977)--have noted that some working class students resist in classrooms, refusing in a variety of ways to participate in the education and socialization that they perceive as antithetical, or at best irrelevant, to their own background and interests. Most recently, theorists interested in gender issues have pointed out that some female students resist in less flamboyant ways than did the "lads" in Willis' study, for example, and that many women are also influenced, in contrast to men, by cultures of femininity, greatly foregrounding the importance of romance and marriage in their futures. As a result, it has been claimed, such women tend to have marginalized worker identities, choosing not to invest in or identify with their work lives (Holland & Eisenhart, 1990).

When we examine the activities and conversations of students in Banking and Finance in relation to the early resistance literature, I am surprised at how few of the details overlap. I certainly did not see much overt classroom resistance of the sort documented by Willis (1977) and McLaren (1980), whereby students challenge the teacher or disengage from instruction. Rather, for the most part, I saw students busily engaged in learning how to tell and proof, listening with interest and attention to Mr. Parker's rap on what it is like to be a player in the corporate world or why consumers need to shop around for the best interest rate on car loans. I think the reason for this is that the material circumstances of these students and those in the earlier studies differ greatly. The men and women in Banking and Finance were not middle school or high school children living at home (however reluctantly) under the protective wing and with the financial support (however limited) of parents. They were those students five and ten and twenty years later, with children of their own to support and enough experience with dead-end jobs and an unstable economy to quell most rebellious spirits. Most Banking and Finance students needed jobs badly, and, for the most part, they were ready to listen to Mr. Parker and to hope he could help them.

I saw some overlap between the women in my study and the findings of Holland and Eisenhart (1990), but differences, too. In some ways there was a "culture of femininity" operating. The women I came to know through the Banking and Finance program did value their relationships with men and intended to pursue them, despite Mr. Parker's protestations. Overwhelmingly, they did want to be mothers--indeed, many of them already were, and this role was unquestionably elevated and important. Nonetheless, an overriding concern for most of these women was getting a job to support themselves and their families. Rather than refusing to invest in work or in their identities as workers, these women made eager attempts to do so. In fact, their investment in work is what brought many of them to the program. One of the major differences in the jobs that were promised through Banking and Finance and the jobs most students had held previously was that the bank represented (ostensibly) a career path, a leg up in the corporate world. Many of the women were attracted to this notion of career and professional work.

Perhaps a difference between the women in the present study and those in recent accounts of women and resistance is that the Banking and Finance students had already, in an earlier phase of life, invested in romance ideology and a culture of femininity; at this stage in their lives, material conditions were paramount, and they were primed more for socialization than for resistance. This is not to say that all students followed Mr. Parker's game plan. Indeed, some did not, and it is to a discussion of the variety of ways that students used the Banking and Finance program that I now turn.

Most salient among the group I studied were those women who wanted very much to use banking as a leg up in the corporate world, who hoped for a career. Jackie, for example, wanted to obtain an entry-level career position with the possibility of advancement. She wanted a job that would allow her to become self-sufficient, to provide for her baby. "[Just] trying to get my baby some stuff for Christmas," she once commented on her struggles to keep a previous job. She also wanted to gain the respect that we often assume comes with working in a "professional" environment. No more hot burger stands and surly customers for her. Jackie had a boyfriend, the father of her young child, but she held out little hope that he would provide much assistance beyond a few dollars here and there for diapers for the child. She was on her own, and she knew it, and she was very much work-oriented as a result.

Like Jackie, Alma wanted a career with a future and a pleasant, respectful working environment. Her aspirations did not seem to be driven by circumstances as desperate as Jackie's. Although she relied on public assistance, she was not, as was Jackie, on the verge of being evicted, and her children were older and did not require so much close care as did Jackie's toddler. Mr. Parker believed Alma received money from her former husband, the father of her children, but I have no knowledge of that. I do believe that Alma burned to succeed at a banking job and that this desire was born of wanting to make something of herself, to be good at professional work. She had had little success to speak of previously in the work world, and she yearned to demonstrate to herself and to others like Mr. Parker that she was capable. Of all the students I got to know, Alma seemed most willing to do whatever was necessary, whatever she was told, to get and keep a job.

Both Jackie and Alma, we will recall, got their Banking and Finance certificates. Throughout this process, Alma was exceptionally compliant, following Mr. Parker's advice and guidelines to the letter, seeming to hope against hope that this good behavior would be the potion that could conjure up a job. Jackie, too, attended class regularly and seemed to set about in serious fashion the mastery of simulated telling and machine calculation, though on occasion she was apt to voice friendly skepticism about some of Mr. Parker's ideas. There was the time, for example, when she good-naturedly bantered with Mr. Parker, claiming that it was impossible for her to hold her legs for very long in the ladylike position he considered appropriate posture for an interview. But on the whole, both of these women, and many of the others in the group we studied, seemed to put their trust in Mr. Parker, to comply with the requirements of the program, both academic and social, to look forward to a career in the bank, and to believe they were on the right path to getting it.

The irony here, the sad irony, is that those women who bought most wholeheartedly into the party line of the program were most often disappointed in their expectations. Jackie did get a job, but hardly the professional one she was hoping for. Rather, she received part-time hours, no benefits, and incurred additional expenses in terms of transportation, child care, and food. When Jackie was late because of the complexities of traveling a great distance on public transportation and managing child care, she was fired, and this despite the fact that she was a quick and accurate worker and that, by her own admission, she had found that she liked working in the proof-center. Alma got hired by hook or crook, circumventing the bank's institutional requirement of a screening test. Nonetheless, she could do the work of proof-operator, and she complied willingly with the stringent rules of the workplace. However, she did not fit the profile the bank had created for this job, that of being right-handed, and she was fired, too.

I have similar stories of other women, particularly African-American women. Lauren worked for the same bank as a proof-operator for nearly six months before she was fired because she was too slow (i.e., she was processing fewer than 1200-items per hour). Josephine tells a similar story. Doreen, a European American, was fast enough, but was fired because she had been late to work five times. Each of these women, like Jackie and Alma, seemed to invest in the idea of a career at the bank, rather than engaging in classroom resistance or escaping through romance ideology, yet all of them lost their jobs rather quickly.

None of this is to say that the women regretted taking jobs as proof-operators or did not feel positive about their experiences in the program. Jackie looked back wistfully on her stint in the bank, imagining she might have been able to make ends meet on her part-time salary, measuring her work at the proof-machine in a cool, guarded environment quite favorably against the noisy and uncomfortable conditions of fast food emporiums. Alma described her feelings of pride in "mastering the machine." Lauren spoke of her brief time as a proof-operator almost as a tourist back from a trip to a foreign culture; she was full of wonder at this glimpse into the workings of a big corporation as well as consternation at the strictness of shop floor rules. Virtually everyone felt, at the end of the program and their jobs, that Mr. Parker had done more for them, had taken a more personal and pragmatic interest in their needs, than many teachers in the past. These positive evaluations by the participants themselves have to temper somewhat the harsher views of those who look at the program from the outside and see there only failure and exploitation.

The next response to the program that I will describe was a more measured one. Students like Koyendi and Chen both took jobs at the proof-center, and Chen still works there. But these students appeared not to buy into the notion of a career in banking so completely. Koyendi, for example, came to Banking and Finance simply because he needed work, being in rather desperate straits financially. We will recall that Koyendi wanted to be a musician and songwriter, and he dressed and looked the part. Banking was just a stopgap, a way to tide himself and his mother over hard financial times, not a career. Koyendi scoffed at his former coworkers at McDonald's who naively hoped to move up a nonexistent corporate ladder, and this skepticism perhaps informed his view of being a proof-operator, too.

I must confess that I considered Koyendi the least likely of all the students to succeed at proofing, since his goals were quite different, his appearance clashed with Mr. Parker's standards, and he seemed very young and inexperienced. Yet, Koyendi came to classes dutifully, accepted Mr. Parker's offer of corporate-type clothing, passed the proof test, and accepted a job immediately. On one of my visits to the proof-center, I saw Koyendi in a training class, "appropriately" attired and coifed. I heard no reports of any difficulty at work, but much admiration from former coworkers who had noticed his tenacity and success. While working at the proof-center, Koyendi grew back his ponytail and looked for other jobs, and perhaps he found one, since I heard after a little over a year that he had left the bank. Koyendi is an example, then, of a worker who used the proof- center as a stepping stone of sorts. He fit the profile that Mrs. Bork seemed to value, that of a worker who had something going on the side--perhaps another job, hopes for another career, or the need to make some extra money--and who therefore was willing to accept part-time hours with little chance of advancement.

Chen fit this profile, too, I suspect, although I have less information about him because of our language barriers. Chen apparently wanted a different career path, one leading to an associate's degree from the community college and a transfer to a four-year college. He wanted a degree in business, not a certificate; thus, he, too, viewed the banking program as a brief detour, but a financially helpful and educationally relevant one. We will recall, too, that as far as these temporary jobs went, given his preference, Chen wanted a position at telling rather than proofing, but there was little hope of that due to his communication problems. I saw no resistance from Chen in Mr. Parker's class, only cooperation, and I heard from Mr. Parker that Chen was quite grateful for the job and the extra money he was able to make through incentive pay. As far as I know, Chen is still at the bank, although I have heard rumors that he is taking classes part-time at a local college. This student, too, seems to have had lower short-term expectations than some of the women--he wanted not a career in banking but a chance to save money, gain relevant experience, and work toward an advanced degree--and in these more modest goals he was apparently successful.

A third and related category of student is represented by Vivian, the inquisitive, the older woman who wanted to learn rather than train. Again, this female student had long ago gone through the romance stage; her eyes were now on the different prize of education and soaking up knowledge for its own sake, rather than subordinating school and work to romance or subordinating education to work. She had few intentions, apparently, of actually taking a job in a bank, but considered a knowledge of finance a useful thing to have in terms of home loans and other personal goals. It was a bit ironic, then, that Vivian served as Mr. Parker's teaching assistant, wading through two semesters of Banking and Finance only to refuse to take the final plunge--Bank of the Pacific's testing and interview sessions. Whether her educational goals or her insecurity about being too slow a worker were the reasons, or both, Vivian turned the Banking and Finance program to her own purposes. In this way she resembled Koyendi and Chen.

Finally, LaReisha represents the student who, in Mr. Parker's words, is "working the system." We will recall that at the time of our study, LaReisha was making something of a career out of going to community college, taking vocational courses, and receiving public assistance funds. Early on she described to me the imagined benefits of a job in banking: She said she wanted to have a job that would allow her to own her own car, dress up and look cute, go to work and sit behind a desk, then return home and put her feet up, read a book, and have a glass of wine. "She's just like you and me," Mr. Parker commented on hearing this description. "She wants the things any middle-class person wants." LaReisha was among the best students in Mr. Parker's program, catching on to telling, proofing, and machine calculation in a flash. She is still something of a legend in the program because she passed, not only Bank of the Pacific's proof test, but the much feared and rumored impassable screening test of Western Bank, too.

Yet she refused the offer of both jobs, despite her aspirations to a middle-class life style. LaReisha appears to have realized, or she became willing to articulate, that working as a proof-operator was not exactly a bed of roses, not the beginning of corporate life, professional work, and attendant benefits. She had figured out a way to succeed on her own terms, by what Mr. Parker called "working the system," having rejected the myth of advancement through hard work: "It's who you know," she once told us. Of all the students in the study, then, LaReisha was the most openly resistant to Mr. Parker and the values of the program. Her resistance was not flamboyant or mean-spirited--she remained on fond terms and in contact with Mr. Parker after the program ended--and its source was not romance ideology--LaReisha had a boyfriend, but no interest in supporting him. The irony I mentioned before compounds, however, for she was also one of the most successful. Although she refused the bank jobs, she was able to land, on her own, one job with the local public transportation system as a bus driver, and another supplementary position as a driver at a car rental agency. At this point in her life she seemed to have a healthy opinion of herself and her educational experiences, too, telling me and another former student, "Everything I know is a skill."

To summarize, the students in this study did not fit so neatly into categories developed in reproduction and resistance literature; their responses to the Banking and Finance program were more complex and were influenced rather heavily by the material conditions that at present put powerful constraints on their lives. Cultures of femininity, as well as active classroom resistance, were subordinate to these students' needs for employment. Although the program clearly failed the students in its most overt function, helping them to both become and remain employed, it was not a failure from the perspective of most of the students, who judged it positively, at least during the timeframe of this research. (As we have continued to interview the participants in the study and follow their work lives beyond their jobs in banks, we have noticed that some students have tended to become more critical of the program as time passes.) Moreover, some students shaped the program to their own interests, rather than bending their needs to fit its outlines.

Looking for Solutions in Critical Skills

Well into the research I began to ask Mr. Parker what he thought might be done to improve his Banking and Finance program. Perhaps surprisingly, and perhaps not so, he mentioned the inclusion of instruction on reading and writing. Mr. Parker had consistently told me that he did not teach reading and writing, that literacy was not his bailiwick. But he had also become increasingly aware, as we examined the screening tests instituted by area banks, that some of his students were being shut out because they had had little practice with the literacies associated with such test-taking events. He also began to think more seriously about the limited possibilities his students currently had of advancing from proofing to other bank jobs if those jobs required literacy or some certification thereof.

I argued earlier that, contrary to much popular literature, a lack of "basic skills" was not a sufficient explanation for the difficulties that students experienced in succeeding at and holding on to their jobs as proof-operators. It follows that literacy instruction will not be a total solution to these difficulties, and I do not suggest it as such. In the conclusion to this report I will offer a set of recommendations, some involving literacy and many focusing on other issues. But due to the centrality of literacy in current debates over work and schooling, and because I recognize that some literacy practices are more empowering than others, and also because, like Mr. Parker, I see students being held back because they are not familiar with certain reading and writing activities, I want to focus now on the role that literacy instruction might play in a vocational program like Banking and Finance.

Within communities of literacy teachers and researchers, it is often acknowledged, if not discussed in exactly these terms, that literacy is multiple, that reading and writing are not generic psychological skills but, rather, are social practices (Gee, 1989; Heath, 1983; Reder, 1987; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1984). A simple example of this is the fact that there are different kinds of literacies and possessing one kind does not mean you possess all the others. A person might be quite adept at reading racing forms, for example, but do poorly on a test of reading comprehension. Studying the Bible in Sunday School carries with it certain understandings of text, author, and interpretation, which are understandings, however, that would serve one poorly in a literary analysis of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Writing a legal brief means being party to a special set of conventions, commonplaces, and modes of argument; being able to compose advertising copy means being literate in a different way. It follows that, just as there are different literacies, there are also different pedagogies and sets of instructional practices that are associated with various school-based literacies, and these notions of literacy and the practices associated with them can be more or less productive (Lankshear with Lawler, 1987). Here is where we must be careful.

To decide, as Mr. Parker may have done, that literacy is a good thing, a necessary addition to a vocational program, is not to decide what version of literacy might be taught. In the popular literature on workplace literacy that I mentioned at the beginning of this report, there is little if any recognition that literacy is multiple, that there are more and less productive ways of representing literacy and introducing literacy practices to the classroom. Instead, it is presumed sufficient to champion literacy, to decry illiteracy, and to leave the rest--what will count as literacy and as valued literacy practice--unspoken and uncontested.

When we do examine the literacies most often associated with basic skills programs, remedial education, and literacy training for adults, we find an astonishingly resistant and, I believe, unhealthy strain, one that continues to ward off attacks from a variety of quarters. Bartholomae (1979) called this strain "basic skills" and developed an alternative to it for remedial college writers (Bartholomae & Petrosky, 1986; see also Rose, 1983). Grubb, Kalman, Castellano, and Brown (1990) critiqued what they labeled "skills and drills" instruction--which they found to be overwhelmingly characteristic of vocational and job training programs for adults--in light of instructional principles drawn from "good practice" literature in adult education. Giroux (1988) identified a perspective on writing instruction which he called the "technocratic school," and argued that such instruction needs to be replaced by a pedagogy which links writing, learning, and critical thinking--an approach to literacy that we dubbed "critical skills" earlier in this report.

Although there are differences among the various critiques and differences, too, in the various manifestations of basic skills literacy, I feel on steady ground in making certain generalizations about this kind of literacy and the sorts of instruction associated with it. (I am indebted to Grubb et al. (1990) for the form and substance of this argument. Most of the points I make here in brief are developed and illustrated in their paper.) Basic skills literacy is typically driven by an overly zealous subscription to rules and correctness and a focus on product to the exclusion of process. It tends to represent complex competencies such as reading or writing as componential, as separable into discrete units which can be taught one by one. It values individualized learning, the pace of which is governed by tests and assessments. And it treats reading and writing as neutral, technical skills, equally available and empowering, both educationally and economically. Alternatives to basic skills, on the other hand, foreground the active construction of meaning over the mastery of forms and correctness. They treat reading and writing as activities which must be practiced holistically. They emphasize the considerable extent to which literacy draws its life from the social through interaction and membership in community. And they view literacy as deeply and permanently ideological rather than politically separate or culture free.

In addition to theoretical arguments which support alternatives to basic skills (see Street, 1984), there are practical ones. As Grubb et al. (1990) point out, basic skills literacy has been a staple in K to 12 education, particularly for students in remedial or vocational tracks, but there is little evidence of its effectiveness. Judging from the large number of adults who surface in job training programs, welfare-to-work programs, and remedial courses in the community college and four-year college--all needing "basic" instruction in reading, writing, and math--whatever approach is being used in middle school and high school must not be working very well. I see, then, many good reasons to steer clear of basic skills, traditionally defined, when considering what literacies to promote in Mr. Parker's vocational program in Banking and Finance.

One recent and much-touted alternative to basic skills in a vocational program is the so called "functional context" approach, whereby instructional materials on reading, writing, and math are derived from job-related literacy materials (e.g., see Sticht Armstrong, Hickey, & Caylor, 1987, and Mikulecky & Philippi, 1990, who collaborated with the American Bankers Association to put together a set of workbooks, commercially available, designed to address basic skills problems in banking following a functional context approach). The reasoning is that, not only will adults be more motivated when their schooling is based on work-related, presumably relevant materials, but they will be better able to learn since the texts will be based on things they already know about, and moreover, what they learn will actually be applicable to work and therefore pleasing to the employer. The functional context approach is surely a potential improvement upon skills and drills approaches, but we should be careful not to reify this approach, to make it our "new orthodoxy" (Schultz, 1992). Only a little probing reveals that there is no inherent magic in job-related materials. Sometimes, as Gowen (1990) has demonstrated, the very fact that literacy materials are job-related is enough to alienate disaffected workers. And as Grubb et al. (1990) have pointed out, job-related literacy materials are just as susceptible as other kinds of "content" to a basic skills approach.

What is needed is an alternative to basic skills instruction which does not neglect job-related literacies, but also goes a considerable distance beyond them to incorporate the characteristics mentioned above. There would be good reason, for example, for Mr. Parker to teach his students about test-taking and the bank's screening tests, for otherwise the literacies required in these situations would undoubtedly act as gatekeepers for some students. There is a need, as well, to introduce students to the kinds of reading required to complete the several weeks of on-the-job training required during the probationary period of being a proof-operator. I suspect that students could also do with more practice with the peculiar kind of document literacy needed to speedily process debits and credits through a proof-machine. But instruction in only these kinds of job-related literacies would shortchange students, denying them, for example, the writing skills that seem to be expected for advancement, or the literacies that would contribute to the accomplishment of personal goals, or those literacy practices collected under the rubric of "critical skills."

The most radical alternative to basic skills, and the one that is usually absent from even the most progressive of adult programs, is the "critical skills" perspective. The notion behind critical literacy and critical pedagogy is that, not only will students learn to decode or inscribe texts, they will learn to assess those texts, to read their "world" as Freire would say, in an attempt to understand the relations of power and domination that underlie and inform and create them, and ultimately to act to change them. (My notions of critical literacy and critical pedagogy are based on my reading of Giroux [1983, 1988, 1991]; Giroux & McLaren [1989]; Freire [1968]; Freire & Macedo [1987]; and Shor [1989].) Mr. Parker's students would not just learn how to take the bank's proof tests, they would inquire as to why it is that banks have suddenly, at the present moment, reinstituted such requirements after a ten-year hiatus. Students would not just learn to operate a proof-machine or to do telling, they would consider how it came to be that most of the people hired as proof-operators and tellers nowadays are women, women of color, and how it is that proofing came to be a centralized activity rather than one shared by numerous employees at local branch banks. Students would not just dream of and work toward advancement and a career within the bank, they would research the likelihood and conditions of such progress. Students would not just accept the designation of part-time employee, they would question why it is that proof-centers will only hire them as hourlies. And they would ask how banks make their money and how they spend it.

All of these activities would take place in a language-rich environment, where students would read and write a variety of types of texts in interaction and collaboration with each other. Mr. Parker will tell you that such activities can take place apart from reading and writing, and he is right to an extent. But the point is that reading and writing would occur in this alternative pedagogy as an integral part of the larger critique, a reading of the world. Reading and writing in this fashion would be a step toward what Flower (in preparation) has called "literate action." Students would, through literacy and language activities, construct meaning about their world. This kind of meaning-making, this kind of literate action, just might provide the basis for either action upon the world or, at the very least, an informed understanding of one's position in it, the reflective position from which vantage one could eventually work for change.

Reading and writing activities as sketched here--as critical literacy or literate action--thus would have an important role to play in helping us escape the conundrum of involuntary inaction or unproductive and ineffective action which seems to follow from theories of reproduction and resistance. Here is a space, it would seem, where individual agency can develop and flourish, where students and teachers alike can operate as what Giroux (1988) has termed "transformative intellectuals."

I support the notion of critical literacy and see it as a necessary grounding for "functional context" reading and writing activities, as well as for other alternatives to basic skills. What perplexes me is how to make this approach viable for students in such difficult straits as those in the Banking and Finance program. I do not want to underestimate the power of a change in critical consciousness such as could occur as a result of a "critical" banking and finance curriculum. But right beside this change in consciousness, or close on its heels, must come a change in material circumstances. It is most unjust to put the entire burden for social change on the shoulders of those who are already overburdened--to expect, for example, that women empowered by critical literacy will suddenly be able to cope with child care and transportation difficulties or to live on a part-time proof-operator's salary. In my view, this is offering literacy, even critical literacy, as a solution to problems that it cannot solve (cf. Horsman, 1990).

Hull, G. (1992). "Their Chances? Slim and None":An Ethnographic Account of the Experiences of Low-Income People of Color in a Vocational Program and at Work (MDS-155). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.