STW for All because it would fail if it were perceived as only for non-college bound. Z43\doc\web\2000\07\stwall.txt Industry-Based Education: A New Approach for School-to-Work Transition E. Gareth Hoachiander MPR Associates, Inc. Berkeley. California School-to-Work What Does Research Say? One of six papers commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, on School-to-Work US IS #1 IN COLLEGE PREP The United States does a good job, probably better than any other country in the world, preparing many students for 4-year colleges and universities. But for the three-fourths of high school students who may never finish or even attempt to earn a bachelor’s degree, the pathways to goodpaying, sustained employment are meandering, poorly marked, and replete with dead ends and wrong turns.’ The School-to-Work Opportunities Act challenges states to change this state of affairs. STW IS FOR ALL BECAUSE NOBODY WOULD WANT IT IF THEY KNEW IT WASN'T FOR THE COLLEGE BOUND The School-to-Work Opportunities Act began as an initiative for the noncollege bound, especially the 40 to 50 percent of high school students who never enter any form of postsecondary education or formal training. Unquestionably, this group fares least well in the labor market. However, to create a program defined primirily for those who do not go to college is to doom it from the outset. Part of the problem, of course, is the stigma such a limited program would almost certainly acquire. Introduction ******************************************************************* The United States does a good job, probably better than any other country in the world, preparing many students for 4-year colleges and universities. ******************************************************************** But for the three-fourths of high school students who may never finish or even attempt to earn a bachelor’s degree, the pathways to goodpaying, sustained employment are meandering, poorly marked, and replete with dead ends and wrong turns.’ The School-to-Work Opportunities Act challenges states to change this state of affairs. It encourages them to fashion a new system of school-to-work transition from the hodgepodge of programs and agencies spawned by the federal and state governments over the past 70 years. Traditionally in the United States, vocational education has shouldered responsibility for the workforce preparation of high school students, especially those not pursuing a college education. Until about 1970, vocational programs mainly provided training for entry-level positions in agriculture, business, trade, and industry. During the past 20 years, vocational education has grown substantially in 2-year community colleges and private proprietary schools, leading to a growing emphasis on health and technical occupations. However, the focus has remained pie-baccalaureate. Moreover, until the recent push for developing tech-prep programs spanning the last two years of high school and the first two yeais of community college, connections between secondary and postsecondary vocational education programs were loose to nonexistent. Consequentiy, many students enrolled in postsecondary institutions failed to pursue a coherent program of study, and relatively few of them attained 2-year degrees or certi.ficates. Americans are extraordinarily ambivalent about vocational education. On the one hand, vocational education has enjoyed strong, long-standing federal support. Since the passage of the SmithHughes Act in 1917, poicymakers have expected great things of vocational education—from assimilating immigrant youth to reducing dropout rates to creating new employment opportunities for displaced workers, women re-entering the workforce, and other students with a variety of special needs. On the other hand, many parents view vocational education with suspicion; they see it as a high school dumping ground that cuts off college opportunities and relegates their children to a future of low-paying, dead-end jobs. Many educators also view vocational education as second rate, and the agendas of national and state school-reform efforts during the 1980s generally ignored vocational education. Indeed. the widespread adoption of increased academic requirements limited students’ opportunities to participate in vocational education. Some observers viewed this decline with concern and argued that vocational education could contribute much to new conceptions of secondary and postsecondary education. Most champions of education reform, however, had little interest in vocational education, and some even welcomed its decline and predicted it would soon disappear from the high school curriculum. The evolution of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act reflects this ambivalence. An early draft of the legislation sought to replace the existing vocational education enterprise and substitute a new, but ill-defined, system of youth apprenticeship. As the legislation evolved, its focus broadened to include cooperative education and tech-prep programs. It also adopted one of the primary goals of the 1990 Carl Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act—the integration of vocational and academic curricula. Nevertheless, many supporters of school-to-work programs continue to harbor a basic distrust of vocational education, doubting it has much to contribute to a 21st century system of workforce preparation. Despite this ambivalence, fashioning a successful, wide-reaching system of school-to-work transition depends on finding a strategy for building on the existing vocational education enterprise. 0f 1980 high school seniors enrolled in public 2-year instiattions, 16.6 percent had earned an associate’s degree by 1984, and 3.5 percent had earned a certificate. See E. Gareth Hoachiander. Phillip Kaufman, Karen Levesque, and James Houser, Vocational Education in the United States: 1969—1990 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, table 5, 111, April 1992. for hands-on experience on the job. Admittedly, this is a learning strategy that has not been widely used in the United States, but there are other existing examples in addition to youth apprenticeship or its adult apprenticeship counterpart that have been in practice nationwide, Cooperative education, for example. which annually enrolls about 500.000 students, has long stressed the integration of school and work. However, co-op programs tend to be shorter, about 1 year, in contrast to the model youth apprenticeship programs that span up to 4 years. Additionally, the programs of several professional schools—mosi notably, medicine, dentistry, and architecture—build curriculum around integrated classroom and work experience, with the latter consisting of both meal and simulated work situations for students. For that matter, the laboratory experience that is an essential part of most top-flight science curricula employs some of the same learning theory, although many science labs fail miserably to make clear connections to real-world applications. The third principle of the school-to-work opportunities initiative is clear articulation with the full range of postsecondary opportunities. At a minimum, participation in work-based preparation in high school should not foreclose any opportunities to pursue postsecondary education. Ideally, it should enhance posisecondary opportunities and provide some well-defined alternatives to the traditional academic curriculum that has provided the only avenue to the baccalaureate degree and beyond. This principle does not mean all students must or should pursue postsecondary education. It simply means one’s curriculum choices in high school should not severely constraln one’s opportunities later on. The fourth principle of the school-to-work legislation is it should expand educational and work opportunities for all students. STW BEGAN FOR NON-COLLEGE BUT NOW IS VOC-ED FOR ALL The School-to-Work Opportunities Act began as an initiative for the noncollege bound, especially the 40 to 50 percent of high school students who never enter any form of postsecondary education or formal training. Unquestionably, this group fares least well in the labor market. However, to create a program defined primirily for those who do not go to college is to doom it from the outset. Part of the problem, of course, is the stigma such a limited program would almost certainly acquire. More practically, almost all high school students aspire to college. While more than half will not realize these aspirations, they do mx decide prospectively to lower their expectations and opt for something else. Therefore, a program for the noncollege bound is simply not one that very many high school students would choose. Ironically, the most effective strategy for better serving noncollege-bound students lies in not developing a program specifically aimed at this group. There are some formidable challenges to developing and implementing a system of school-towork transition that adheres to these four principles. First, and probably foremost, there is currently no well-developed curriculum framework that would permit its use on a large scale. What are the programs of study that youth would pursue? What are the respective roles and responsibilities of educational institutIons and employers? How will the knowledge and skill content of these programs be determined and kept up-to-dare? What is the appropriate mix of classroom instruction and work experience, and how will the necessary coordination be accomplished? How will responsibilities between secondary and postsecondary institutions be divided and effective articulation accomplished? Little attention has been paid to answering these questions. And these issues are not mere details. Rather, they art central to defining and implementing a large-scale system of reform. EUROPEANS TRACK BETWEEN VOC-TECH AND COLLEGE PREP One could, of course, try to force students to choose early on between an academic curriculum preparing than for 4-year college and university and a vocational—technical curriculum preparing them for morE immediate entry into the work force. This practice is essentially the model used in many European countries that rely on examinations to sort students early in their education careers. American education reformers have recently proposed variations of this model. See, for example, Commission on SkilLs of the American Workforce, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages (Rochester, NY: National Center on Education and the Economy, 1990). Oregon is in the process of adopting and implementing changes to its secondary education system that would transform it into a two-track system. But these proposals in America come at a time when the European practices are being increasingly challenged by parents and students wanting greater access to 1ondary education.