Shaping America's Workforce for the New Millennium

Corporate America and the federal government struggled through the 1980s and early 1990s to find reasons for America's decline as a leading competitor in a global free market economy. Commissioned studies pointed to national trade deficits and cheap foreign labor as factors, but also suggested career education programs in U.S. public schools were responsible for sending poorly trained workers to entry-level positions in a competitive job market. Recent improvements in workforce quality can be attributed to revamped public school career education curricula and the School-to-Work (STW) Opportunities Act, which became federal law on May 6, 1994. Since then, the government's commitment to improved training for high school students has been substantial. Seven hundred million dollars were appropriated to STW as seed money during its early years. The Institute on Education and the Economy, which monitors the impact of trends in education on business, suggested in 1998 that School-to-Work legislation was spurred by a national concern that America's students were not being adequately prepared for rapidly changing workplaces (p. 1). Its report cited 15 years of research about how students learn and how teaching relates to the workplace and concluded that many high school graduates spent their early years moving from one low-paying job to another. STW is a comprehensive effort to change the focus of training primarily for high school students seeking jobs in America's business sector. Twenty-seven states currently have School-to-Work programs in place. The initiative links education reform to economic development through three components. The first, which addresses School-Based Learning, was designed to provide career awareness and exploration through counseling at the earliest possible age, but no later than the 7th grade. Students are challenged to identify their interests and consider career options. Participants must select a career major no later than the beginning of the 11th grade. School-Based Learning's focus is curriculum and instruction that integrates academic and vocational learning. Its success depends upon scheduled evaluations with students to identify their academic strengths and weaknesses and any need for additional efforts to master core vocational skills. Work-Based Learning, the second component, offers a planned program of job training and experiences that have been coordinated with School-Based Learning. This provision requires schools to depart from traditional tracking of college-bound and non-college-bound students. One of STW's premises is that all high school pupils need both academic and workplace skills for productive careers. Work-Based Learning allows students to earn a Skill Certificate, which identifies its holder as having mastered core content and standards related to a specific occupation. STW's third component, Connecting Activities, is its most crucial. It matches students with work-based opportunities and a site mentor who serves as liaison among the student, employer, school, and parents. It also provides assistance with job searches or additional training for pupils who complete the program. While the School-to-Work Opportunities Act provides a framework for career training program improvements that have been needed since the mid-1970s, other challenges remain. As an example, in-school evaluations of students must become more authentic and less paper-and-pencil oriented. Linda Darling-Hammond (1999) endorses authentic assessments because they are performance based (and) engage students in `real-world' tasks and evaluate them according to criteria that are important for actual in a field of work (p. 382). Learning occurs through written products, construction of models, special projects, videotaped performances, or other demonstrable evidence that students have mastered content in a hands-on fashion. …