Project Director:
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The overall purpose of this project will be to work with individual sites that
are receiving support from the School-to-Work Opportunities (STWO) Act to help
them develop and strengthen their efforts to recruit, secure, and strengthen
employer participation in their school-to-work programs. The sites with which
we will work are all building on past programs such as cooperative education
that have included employer participation and employer provided work-experience
sites. Our project will first examine the past experience that these sites
have had with recruiting and working with employers. We will do this both
through interviews with program personnel and through a telephone survey of
participating and nonparticipating employers. We will then work closely with
the sites to develop their expanded efforts, tracking their programs as they
are put into practice.
A team from the NCRVE site at RAND, led by Cathy Stasz, will also participate
in this project.
By the end of the first year, we will produce brief critical summaries of the
employer participation efforts in New York State and Los Angeles. In the
second year, we will write a preliminary report that will summarize early
findings from the employer survey. At the end of the project we will produce
evaluation reports on the progress of the programs. These will be expanded
into practitioner-oriented briefs that can be used by employers, unions,
local-level educators, and states to help them strengthen their efforts to
involve employers.
Our work will be used first to help the specific efforts of our sites.
Additionally, our final report will be designed to use the lessons and insights
developed in our interactive work with specific programs to help sites
throughout the country. Project outcomes will be further disseminated through
a conference on employer participation planned for the middle of the second
year.
Our primary audience will be the staff and employers involved with the
programs with which we are working. Results will be disseminated to them
through the planned activities and reports of the project. Other audiences of
interest consist of employers and educators elsewhere who are trying to
implement school-to-work programs, as well as state and federal government
personnel overseeing the implementation of the STWO Act. These groups will be
reached through the final report of the project, the practitioner-oriented
briefs, speeches, and presentations at the American Vocational Association
(AVA) convention and to various groups of educators and policymakers, along
with a conference on employer participation planned for the second year. We
will also address other researchers and academics through the publication of
articles and through presentations at conferences such as the American
Education Research Association (AERA).
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