The School-To-Work Revolution: How Employers and Educators Are Joining Forces to Prepare Tomorrow's Skilled Workforce

Too many teenagers are graduating today without the business skills that they need to succeed in today's workplace. This is a growing problem for employers who are finding it difficult to find qualified employees for demanding positions. One solution, says Lynn Olsen, a senior editor at Education Week magazine, are School-to-Work programs that offer both a solid academic foundation and on-the-job training. A School-to-Work program starts when businesses become involved in local high-school education at the community level. Some examples of School-to-Work programs currently in practice around the country include the following: · Cooperative learning: the student has a part-time job as a component of vocational education. · Job shadowing and internships: Students visit work sites and follow professionals during the course of their daily routines. Internships provide valuable real-world experience. · Technical preparation: The last two years of high-school is combined with a community college program earning a technical degree. · Career academies: Schools within schools that focus on a particular industry, such as health care or finance. These programs may involve job shadowing or internships. · Career majors: Students are encouraged to explore various careers and then organize their courses around the area that interests them most. · School-based enterprises and service learning projects: Students identify needs in the community and organize projects to address those needs. As a businessperson you can play a role by opening your doors to teachers and students for work-based learning experiences. Encourage and facilitate your staff to become involved. Talk with students, educators and parents about the skills and knowledge needed in the workplace. The benefits to business from involvement in these programs include the following: · Recruitment · Fulfillment of labor demand during shortages · Ability to influence education and ensure that high-school graduates in your area have the skills necessary to enter the workforce. · Ability to teach work ethics · Forum for companies to give back to their communities

Funny how the workforce-preparation issue hasn't caught fire in the United States as it has in so many other industrialized nations. Certainly our nation's prosperity in the years ahead is dependent on the degree to which we educate ourselves to take on the challenges of participating in a globalized economy. As Hedrick Smith's Rethinking America (1995) and now Lynn Olson's The School-to-Work Revolution shows, other countries know this already. Yet we in the United States seem to be asleep at the wheel when it comes to education.We're not talking about getting into a "good" college here, or about trends in standardized test scores among K-12 students. This is about a silo effect that's developed in most of our communities: educators have their agenda, and business and industry have theirs. But rarely does anyone bother to compare the two. That's too bad, because there is plenty of evidence that such willful ignorance of the other guy's concerns is going to have calamitous effects on our economic prospects and our social welfare in the years ahead.Lynn Olson's purpose in writing The School to Work Revolution is to point a way out of the silos. Reporting on pilot projects in the United States and more established programs in Germany and Japan, Olson shows how school-to-work initiatives are facilitating educator/employer alliances that benefit students and their schools, and businesses and their communities.Establishing school-to-work programs takes effort -- lots of curriculum and facilities planning, some serious financial commitments, and a perseverance that may be the scarcest resource of all. But the results can be astonishing, lifting a bored student in an aimless curriculum out of a dead-end career path and motivating him or her to levels of effort and achievement that amaze parents and teachers alike. Olson's book is full of such success stories.Despite these happy results, school administrators don't always jump at the chance to implement school-to-work programs. For one thing, many discount the idea as old-fashioned vocational education dressed up with a new label. As Olson makes clear, this is a misconception. School-to-work is a bridge between what the student learns in the classroom and what the student will need to know in the workplace. (Haven't you ever heard yourself ask, "What are they teaching these kids anyway?" Well, there you have it!). Practically speaking, school-to-work programs are also extremely labor-intensive in terms of staffing. They require lots of contact hours between students and teachers and often between employers and teachers as well. Moreover, school-to-work is also an idiosyncratic business. In most programs students are encouraged to develop their educational plans on the basis of heartfelt career interests, instead of quickly checking off a menu item on a guidance department form -- not necessarily an attractive proposition for an already overworked high-school staff