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| Stern, D., Finkelstein, N., Stone, J. R., III, Latting, J., & Dornsife, C. (1994). Research on School-to-Work Programs in the United States (MDS-771). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |
The concept of mentoring is becoming increasingly popular in both the school and the workplace as a means for improving educational and work outcomes. At the moment, there exists a noticeable mentoring movement in which "mentoring" is well on the way to becoming a buzzword--and losing a specific definition which makes it possible to describe and evaluate this approach to education (Freedman & Jaffe, 1992).
Mentoring has been defined, most generally, as a relationship between a young person and an adult in which the adult offers support and guidance as the youth goes through a difficult period, enters a new area of experience, takes on important tasks, or attempts to correct an earlier problem. Mentoring is thought to be useful in particular for providing positive adult contacts for youth who are isolated from adults in their schools, homes, communities, and workplaces (Flaxman, Ascher, & Harrington, 1988).
The new importance of mentoring in youth programs is partly a function of the conditions in which young people increasingly live in America--in urban America, in particular. Widespread family breakdown, erosion of neighborhood ties, and time demands of parent work have created a situation in which few young people have even one significant close relationship with a non-parental adult before actually reaching adulthood (Steinberg, 1991). For inner-city youth, the problem of having positive adult role models is compounded by the relatively higher rates of single-parent homes, the existence of fewer working adults, the strength of youth gangs, and more prevalent substance abuse (Wilson, 1987). Mentorship programs for youth have been designed to help fill this need for positive adult role models, support, and guidance. The issue to be addressed in the following review of research, therefore, is the extent to which mentorship has been able to fill these needs.
Mentoring programs aimed at facilitating the school-to-work transition and related issues such as dropout prevention and the transition from school to college have been implemented by four kinds of organizations (Crockett & Smink, 1991): schools, community organizations, business-education partnerships, and higher-education institutions. The following are examples of some of these programs.
The school-based Norwalk Mentor Program began in 1986 and concentrates its efforts on potential high school dropouts (Weinberger, 1992). The signs used to indicate a high probability of dropping out of school and therefore used as criteria for admission to the program, include single-parent family status, poor school attendance, poor attitude in class, and a family history of substance abuse. The program consists of a number of steps, all of which are undertaken by program staff: (1) Mentors are recruited from the community and screened then (2) undergo an orientation and training program. As part of this phase, selected mentors sign an agreement regarding their responsibilities in the program. (3) Mentors are matched with participating students. (4) Mentors and students meet in weekly sessions on campus. Initially, program staff emphasize informing mentors about activities that are likely to cultivate effective relationships (i.e., "ice-breakers"). (5) The program is evaluated through surveys of mentors and students. (6) All participants mark the year's end with "celebrations and renewal" activities. Program staff, however, do all that they can to ensure that mentor-student relationships do not end at the close of the school year but instead continue in the summer months and into the following year.
Community-based mentoring programs have been in existence for some time in this country. The Big Brothers/Big Sisters programs, for example, which involve mentor-like relationships, have been in existence for ninety years. An example of a program which aims more specifically to smooth the transition from school to work is the Greenville Urban League's Partnership Program Mentorship Component. This program offers minority students in grades ten through twelve the mentorship of an African American professional in the Greenville community. Students are encouraged to meet with mentors in the workplace, both to observe the world of work and to discuss issues. Another example is the Oregon Community Mentorship Program, a statewide effort resulting from Oregon's recent Student Retention Initiative. The goal of the program is to keep students in school and to provide orientation to the world of work. The first step in getting the program operating is to establish local committees of education and business groups, who then proceed to outline a program, select students, recruit mentors, and coordinate the program. Thus, although the mentoring is essentially a statewide effort, each mentor program is geared to the needs of participating communities.
Project Step-Up is an example of a mentoring program initiated through a business-education partnership. The program was begun in 1985 at Aetna Life and Casualty to assist disadvantaged teens in the greater Hartford area make the transition successfully from school to work. Participating students start the program at age 15, having been referred to the program by school personnel. Aetna interviews the students and accepts a percentage of this group. Students begin the program by attending fifteen two-hour classes after school over a five-month period on the Aetna site. Classes cover a range of subjects, including business ethics, business writing, basic math, and computer literacy. Students who complete these courses are guaranteed jobs with Aetna. Once on the job, students are assigned Aetna employees as mentors, who are expected to offer personal counseling, help with homework, and act as role models. Upon graduating from high school, most participating students join Aetna and make the transition to permanent, full-time employment. Other students enroll in a postsecondary institution and are guaranteed summer employment by Aetna.
College- and university-based efforts to assist disadvantaged youth have become more common recently. A 1989 study found over 1,700 mentoring or tutoring programs sponsored by higher education institutions for primary and secondary students across the country (Reisner, 1989). Mentoring is the focus of 17% of these programs; and of these mentoring programs, 27% concentrate on secondary school students (Cahalan & Farris, 1990). There are, therefore, roughly 80 higher education-based mentoring programs for high school students across the country.
Career Beginnings is an example of this kind of mentoring program. Organized by the Center for Human Resources at Brandeis University, Career Beginnings is a national program for high school juniors from low-income families who have average attendance and academic records. The program is therefore designed to serve students who have the potential to succeed in school and the workforce but are not doing so. The program operates 25 projects in 22 cities nationally. In all Career Beginnings-sponsored programs, at least half of the participating students must be economically disadvantaged, 80% must be of the first generation in their families to attend college, and 45% must be male. The program itself offers to students the mentorship of an adult and a quality summer job experience, job skills and college application training, and continuing guidance through their senior year and transition from school to college or work.
The programs described in the preceding paragraphs are all explicitly mentoring programs. It is important to note, however, that many mentoring programs exist as components of larger school-to-work efforts. Mentorships are a component of the career academy model in California (Stern, Raby, & Dayton, 1992). Co-op programs such as Oregon's Partnership Project in the retail and manufacturing industries and the National Alliance of Business and Bank of America's Quality Connection banking program also use mentorship as a key program ingredient. In addition, youth apprenticeship programs such as the Youth Apprenticeship Demonstration Project in Broome County, New York, and Boston's Project ProTech generally reflect the view that mentorship is an important feature of an effective school-to-work program.
Although the four types of mentoring programs illustrated above have important differences, stemming primarily from the perspective of the organization that operates the program, each type has in common the fundamental relationship of mentoring and a concern about the transition from school to work. Through mentoring, students are exposed to career education (or at least to postsecondary options), which is thought to help students understand the expectations of employers about the attitudes, preparedness, and skills required for work as well as to give students the chance to see the application of school activities to subsequent life. In addition, many mentoring programs offer youth assistance in obtaining summer and postgraduate jobs (U.S. Department of Education, 1990). At the most basic level, mentoring programs offer to youth the support of an adult, without which the educational and vocational futures of an increasing percentage of youth are in doubt.
The popularity of mentorship in youth-serving programs belies the newness of the use of mentorship in a systematic way in these programs. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is little research evidence to support the intuition and anecdotal evidence of the success of mentoring for youth (Greim, 1992). The evidence that exists is mixed. The Adopt-a-Student program, for example, has been evaluated by several analysts. Stanwyck and Anson (1989) find that students who were assigned mentors were more likely than the comparison group to enroll in a postsecondary institution. Freedman (1991), however, asserts that participants are no more likely to graduate from high school or to be employed subsequently than students without mentors. Similarly, in the case of Career Beginnings, Moloney and Mckaughan (1990) argue that the majority of adults and youths in the program felt good about the mentoring experience and could identify important benefits. Cave and Quint (1990), however, find that participating youth went on to college at only slightly higher rates than the control group.
Additional research indicates that youth and mentors form successful relationships in fewer than half of the matches made in the Campus Partners in Learning mentoring program (Tierney & Branch, 1992). Yet, an evaluation of the Norwalk Mentor Program indicates that almost all mentors (96%) report excellent or good relationships with their students, and 85% feel that the relationship has made a positive impact on the student's life. This evaluation contained less subjective evidence as well: 87% of participating students show improved attendance, and 96% show greater cooperation in class (Weinberger, 1992).
Despite the current lack of conclusive knowledge about whether and how mentor programs work, several analysts have begun to produce "best practice" recommendations for future efforts (see Freedman, 1991; Greim, 1992; Hamilton & Hamilton, 1990; Styles & Morrow). Hamilton and Hamilton (1990), for example, have concluded that
In summary, mentorship programs designed to assist in the school-to-work transition are becoming more popular. These programs enjoy several advantages over other approaches to this issue, including their relatively low cost, the directness of their intervention in the lives of youth, their simplicity, and their flexibility (Freedman, 1991). In addition, on a theoretical level, the need for mentorship programs, particularly for urban youth, has never been higher.
However, on an empirical level, the evidence is mixed. There has not been, as yet, a study that conclusively demonstrates the contribution that mentoring programs are thought to be capable of making. It is worth keeping in mind that mentoring programs create relationships that are but one of many influences on the youth involved (Freedman, 1991). Mentoring, in this sense, is a "modest intervention." Its power to substitute for missing adult figures is limited. Until more extensive research has been conducted, it is important that mentoring programs not be oversold, for such could lead to the diversion of attention from the causes of the problems these programs have been devised to ameliorate in the first place (Flaxman et al., 1988).
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| Stern, D., Finkelstein, N., Stone, J. R., III, Latting, J., & Dornsife, C. (1994). Research on School-to-Work Programs in the United States (MDS-771). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |