If Congress passes legislation consolidating federal funding for vocational education, job training, and adult education, states will be free to combine federal funding with state programs to create more coherent and effective systems. If such legislation is stalled, states have the power to reform the patchwork that now exists, but doing so…

Although most school districts and schools are routinely involved in data collection, they do not typically use the data they collect in a systematic fashion to identify strengths and weaknesses and develop improvement strategies. One reason for the lack of data use is the perception that the data are being collected for someone else's purposes.…

Many people fail to realize the extensiveness and comprehensiveness of federal and state child labor laws. Although the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act did not detail the legal compliance needed by its state-funded agencies, it clearly indicates that federal and state child labor laws will apply to its employment and employment-related…

Work-Based Learning (WBL) has been at the heart of school-to-work initiatives in the 1990s. Local partnerships funded by the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act are placing high priority on developing WBL opportunities for students. However, there is still controversy about whether work really contributes to students' education, and results of…

Community partnerships can increase the effectiveness of school-to-work programs. By working together, each partner organization can work smarter, share important information, build a collective set of resources, and keep its focus on its clients, the youth. Another issue pertaining to the creation of partnerships is change and why businesses…

Two problems confront the school-to-work (STW) transition initiative: the quality of STW transitions and the equity with which those experiences are distributed among different student groups, including those with disabilities. In the past, the goals of equity and quality seemed to conflict. Many persons advocating increases in quality appeared to…

School-to-work programs in postsecondary education have the potential to help young people find their first full-time jobs and acquire a capacity for learning while they work. Data show cooperative education students' wages are neither higher nor lower than those of non-co-op students. However, one evaluation has found the following: co-op…

Although there is no fixed definition of youth apprenticeship, a consensus is emerging on four basic components: student participation, educational content, location of instruction, and credentialing. Except for some recent pilot projects, no youth apprenticeship programs in the United States have all four components, but educators have some…

Despite the proven record of cooperative education (CE) in high school vocational programs and professional college-level programs, several barriers must be overcome before CE can be spread in its current form or used as a model for enlarged school-to-work transition efforts. Among the barriers identified are the following: the diminished status…

Traditionally, outcomes measured by postsecondary vocational education assessment have included labor force participation rates, type of employment, earnings, and employer satisfaction with employees. Today, however, legislators and policymakers are moving more and more toward accountability measures tied to students' educational outcomes, such as…

The case can be made that school-to-work programs can be a college preparatory strategy because they can teach academic skills as well as and possibly even better than more traditional approaches. The skepticism about its potential as a means of preparing students for college is based on misconceptions about its characteristics. Its three basic…

A study adopted a sociocultural perspective to examine work-based learning (WBL) in different types of programs in Los Angeles that served similar populations of mostly minority students. The programs were a transportation career academy, a medical magnet high school, and a school-based enterprise. To understand workplaces as learning…

The emergence of a more learning-intensive economy has begun to change the relationship between education and work. As employers try to promote just-in-time learning and workers move more frequently from one job to another, continual learning at work becomes increasingly important. Four main elements characterize an education system that is likely…

Parnell's 1985 book, "The Neglected Majority," provided a conceptual framework for tech prep initiatives. By the late 1980s, 34 states had established tech prep programs patterned loosely after Parnell's 2+2 Tech Prep Associate Degree model. The federal government became a strong supporter of tech prep through the 1990 Perkins Vocational…