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.

School-Based Enterprise

Growing interest in school-to-work transition and new models of youth apprenticeship have drawn attention to the existence of school-based enterprises (SBEs), which engage students in school-based activities that produce goods or services for sale or use to people other than the students involved. In high schools and two-year colleges, these activities range from Junior Achievement mini-enterprises to students building houses, running restaurants, managing retail stores, repairing and selling cars, raising crops and livestock, staffing child care centers, publishing books and periodicals, conducting studies of environmental quality or energy conservation, reconstructing local historical landmarks, and engaging in small-scale manufacturing (Stern, Stone, Hopkins, McMillion, & Crain, 1994). These activities have most often been associated with vocational education, giving students an opportunity to apply knowledge and skills taught in classes. School-based enterprises in high schools or two-year colleges are analogous to practices at the postgraduate level where law students produce law review journals or doctoral students help run research studies. Teaching hospitals associated with medical schools are school-based enterprises at an advanced level.

As noted above, the 1992 NAVE survey found 19% of secondary schools in the U.S. operating some kind of school-based enterprise (Stern, 1992). This is in spite of the fact that there has never been any federal initiative to promote such activities. In contrast, in the United Kingdom during the 1980s, the government provided start-up funds, teacher training, and curriculum materials to promote "mini-enterprises" in schools (Jamieson, Miller, & Watts, 1988; Williamson, 1989), with the result that approximately 40% of government-supported secondary schools in the U.K. were conducting such activities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. School-based enterprises have also been fostered by national governments in a number of developing countries, partly for the purpose of generating revenues to offset the cost of schools (von Borstel, 1982).

Although a number of American school-based enterprises have been described in the literature, there do not appear to have been any quantitative evaluations of what students have learned from them. For present purposes, therefore, a brief description of a few examples must suffice to illustrate what school-based enterprises do. Other cases are described at greater length in Stern et al. (1994).

The Montgomery County Students Construction Trades Foundation in Montgomery County, Maryland, is an example of school-based enterprise arising out of vocational education (Stern, 1990). Founded by two vocational education teachers at Rockville High School, the foundation has for more than ten years built houses and sold them on the open market. In addition to those students who physically built the houses, students specializing in other areas were also involved. Architecture students competed for the final design of the house, and interior design students designed the interiors. Landscaping students designed the landscape, cabinetmaking students built cabinets, food service students prepared a buffet for the open house, journalism students wrote press releases, accounting students kept records and prepared financial reports, and marketing students designed brochures and provided customer service for potential buyers. This award-winning program is a particularly good example of the hundreds of house-building enterprises in high schools around the country.

Another school enterprise rooted in traditional vocational education is The Marketplace, a student-run seasonal retail store located in a shopping mall in Fairfax County, Virginia (Burgess, 1987). After conducting market research to identify unfilled market niches in the mall, marketing students enlisted the help of building trades students to construct a kiosk out of which business began. Meanwhile, the marketing class organized into merchandising, personnel, management, sales promotion, and financial control departments. Each department performed its respective tasks, and their efforts resulted in a 22 percent profit. Subsequent years proved to be just as successful, and a commercially constructed store replaced the kiosk. Except for the fact that this project is physically located outside the school, it is similar to student-operated stores in numerous high schools, many of which are affiliated with the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA).

Restaurants are another common kind of school-based enterprise connected with vocational education. One program designed to broaden the curricular content of school enterprise beyond vocational subjects was called FEAST, for Food Education and Service Technology. Originally sponsored by the Hotel and Restaurant Foundation of the City College of San Francisco, FEAST delivered a complete curriculum built around the food service industry. (This anticipated the concept of a career academy, described below.) At Kennedy High School in Richmond, California, teachers designed an integrated curriculum, including English, math, and food services. Students ran a restaurant, the school cafeteria, and an after-school catering club. Stern (1984) asked students to compare their school-based work with their experience in jobs outside of school and found that the school-based enterprises gave students "more opportunity to work in teams, to learn skills they think will be valuable in future jobs, and to experience work that is more intrinsically motivating" (p. 422).

While most school-based enterprises have grown out of vocational education, there are some that have emerged from the academic side. Probably the most famous example is Foxfire (Puckett, 1986; Wigginton, 1986). Founded by teacher Eliot Wigginton in an attempt to motivate his English students and make the curriculum more relevant to them, Foxfire began with the production of a magazine about local history and culture, which was sold to the community at large. The magazine was so successful that it led to publication of a series of books and the production of a play by Foxfire, Inc. Profits have been used to support a network of curriculum and teacher development in the Foxfire method.

Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka, Alaska, has also developed an enterprise related to the academic curriculum (Knapp, 1989). In keeping with the school's focus on Pacific Rim studies, Edgecumbe Enterprises involved students in manufacturing smoked fish and marketing it to Pacific Rim countries. Students and teachers made several trips to Japan to analyze the Japanese market firsthand.

Oregon's Sandy Union High School began a program with the specific objective of integrating science and vocational education (Crow, Hutchinson, Gernhart, & Buan, 1987) in addition to promoting local environmental improvement. Taking advantage of a forty-acre woodland nature preserve next to the school, students designed and built a trail system, improved a stream habitat, and made hatching boxes and fish runs. Environmental action projects like this exist in many schools. Although they may not usually be labeled as school-based enterprise, they clearly do engage students in productive activities from which other people benefit.

REAL Enterprises (1989; Baker, 1990) is an organization that carries the idea of local community development several steps further. REAL helps schools become seedbeds for small enterprises started by students, which they then continue as self-employment after they graduate.

In the context of current efforts to improve the school-to-work transition system in the U.S., school-based enterprises represent an alternative to non-school enterprises as a location for work-based learning. Bailey and Merritt (1993) point out that "SBE has the advantage of avoiding the need to recruit and retain employer participants" (p. 50). Since schools create these enterprises mainly for educational purposes, they may also be more hospitable than non-school enterprises to activities that are conducive to students' acquisition of knowledge and skill--for example, job rotation, learning from mistakes, and exposure to all aspects of the enterprise. On the other hand, even though 19% of secondary schools operate some form of school enterprise, most of these currently engage only a small number of students. If school-based enterprises were to become a major component of the school-to-work system, there would have to be state or national initiatives to promote them.

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.