A few years ago, when I was a member of a group advising on redesign of a school campus, I talked with a staff member of the campus planning firm responsible for the project. She said that after earning a college degree with high marks, she didn't know what she wanted to do, so she decided to enroll in a prestigious school of architecture. When she foundered in her professional studies, she dropped out and took a job as a carpenter's apprentice. Measuring lumber and pounding nails gave her a feeling for the concrete realities of construction. After a year, she re-entered the school of architecture, graduated, and is now a success in her chosen career.
I have thought of her story many times because it is an apt parable for the way our society separates academic education from its meaningful application. John Abbott (p. 6) observes that this separation, which has taken place very recently in human development, is especially unfortunate because much of what young people need to learn cannot be taught well, if at all, in classrooms.
The authors for this issue of Educational Leadership are determined to improve student learning by establishing a closer relationship between the school curriculum and the broader community, including the world of work. In his depiction of partnerships sponsored by the Institute for Responsive Education, Scott Thompson (p. 17) illuminates two aspects of this effort: bringing aspects of the community into the school, and using community sites as extensions of the classroom.
An impressive example of seeing the community as classroom is the Bluebonnet Applied Learning Academy, a small public school in Fort Worth, Texas. Paula Miller and her co-authors (p. 22) tell how they arrange for middle school students of all ability levels to work with adults—botanists, dramatists, and foreign visitors—from the nearby urban community.
Tomorrow's adults must be able to work with others to help solve practical problems, and community projects are a wonderful way for students to develop such skills. But success in our technological society requires other abilities as well.
Willard Daggett (p. 46) worries that, although today's workplace requires very different skills, the curriculums of most high schools focus, as they did in the 1950s, on building intellectual capacity and transmitting culture. Daggett says these continue to be important (education certainly has purposes other than preparation for work) but argues that today's students also need technical skills that were unknown a few decades ago. Especially needed in U.S. English, mathematics, and science courses, Daggett says, is more emphasis on technical reading and writing.
Sorting out what students need to know, and providing for the kinds of experiences that will enable them to learn it, is a continuing challenge for educators. Equally demanding is assessing what students have learned and providing useful information about their accomplishments to employers and institutions of higher education.
In that connection, Robert Rothman (p. 41) reports progress in Washington state and elsewhere of a highly promising development: the campaign to establish a Certificate of Initial Mastery. Responsible use of such a certificate, based on standards assessed through suitable performance tasks, should give students a greater sense of purpose and bridge the gap between academic learning and its application. Perhaps in the future students will not have to wait until after their formal education to find a match between their schooling and their careers.
