At the Siemens Training Center in Lake Mary, Florida, high school student Ryan Bouley pores over his final project of the year: an analog multimeter that allows a technician to measure voltages and currents in an electronic circuit and diagnose potential problems. Ryan had developed a workplan outlining the engineering construction and testing that he and his teammates would perform, the tools they would need, and the occupational safety and environmental procedures they would follow.
Before building the circuit board, Ryan constructed the casing from scratch. Chris Pierce, a Siemens employee who is responsible for training apprentices at this electronics manufacturing plant, gave him a long, flat piece of metal and a blueprint. Ryan used his knowledge of geometry and trigonometry—along with a calculator—to determine where to drill the holes in the metal so that when he bent it, they would line up correctly. He then built the circuit board to industry specifications and tested the equipment using the protocol he had developed. When Ryan finishes the project, Pierce and one of the other students on his team will evaluate his work, using the same exacting standards the manufacturer uses on the factory floor.
At Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon, students in the health-services class have been working on a year-long project to encourage people to donate their organs to hospitals at death. To prepare for the project, the students have visited an eye bank, an immunogenetics lab, a tissue bank, a bone marrow unit, and the cardiac surgery unit at the Oregon Health Sciences Center to learn about how donated organs are used. As a group, the students will decide how to present this information as part of a public-awareness campaign. Each student also is expected to complete an individual research project on a related scientific topic.
At the Procter & Gamble paper plant in Meehoopany, Pennsylvania, a group of high school students conducts a tour of the factory, explaining how each piece of equipment works and how one unit of the plant relates to another. The students wrote the presentation themselves and participated in workshops to hone their presentation skills. They've taken classes to learn teamwork, the features of a high-performance work site, and statistical process control—lessons that they immediately put to work on the factory floor.
School-to-Success
Over the course of a year spent traveling around the United States visiting school-to-work sites, I observed numerous programs like these, where students were learning skills often referred to as the "new basics" or "basics-plus"—skills that are needed for success in today's economy. These skills include the ability to use technology; to communicate ideas and information orally, as well as in writing; to work in groups; to solve problems when answers aren't always self-evident; to understand how systems work; and to collect, analyze, and organize data.
Ryan had to use his knowledge of mathematics to solve a problem that wasn't neatly laid out for him. The students at Roosevelt were learning how the medical system works. The young tour guides at Procter & Gamble had to understand how the plant functions and how to operate its equipment, well enough to explain it to me—a journalist who knew little about the paper industry.
I visited schools where students must combine work-related research with academic knowledge to turn out a finished product (for example, a computer-aided design or a scale model of a house). At these schools—Fenway Middle College High School in Boston, the Paul M. Hodgson Vocational-Technical High School outside Wilmington, Delaware, and the Rindge School of Technical Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts—students must also defend their research and rationale before an audience of teachers, employers, and peers.
Around the country, students in hospitals, banks, travel offices, insurance firms, and manufacturing plants were using technology that simply wasn't available in their local high schools—using it in ways that required them to meet real-world standards of performance. They learned how to use various kinds of software; check computer chips for impurities; take a blood sample; and conduct an electrocardiograph test. They also learned simpler things about the behavior expected at the worksite: that being on time matters, that they must take safety regulations seriously, that it's okay to ask questions to clarify a procedure or to learn more about a problem.
Many programs, such as the Cornell Youth Apprenticeship Project in upstate New York and the Education for Employment Consortium in Kalamazoo, Michigan, rate their students not only on technical skills, but also on social and personal competence. In the Cornell program, for example, mentors regularly assess whether a student "exceeds, meets, or does not meet'' expectations for a range of interpersonal skills, such as adhering to professional norms of conduct, cooperating with others, and taking initiative.
Not all of these new basic skills require learning at the worksite. Some of them also can be taught in classrooms and in the community by changing how and what schools teach. For example, the High Schools That Work consortium, a national organization dedicated to improving the knowledge and skills of career-bound students, studied seven high schools whose young people had greatly improved their academic achievement. It found that compared with students in schools that had just joined the consortium, more of these students reported making oral presentations, being asked to state and defend their opinions or compare ideas, use computers, work in small groups, and use mathematics to solve work-related problems. In science, more students reported using equipment such as stethoscopes, electricity meters, and barometers in science labs.
In a science unit that is part of the Working to Learn curriculum, developed by the Technical Education Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, students learn to perform the same tests for water quality that a professional water tester does. They analyze data drawn from water samples near a local sewage-treatment plant. And, by combining vocational and academic knowledge, they begin to understand why such data are important, how those data are used to monitor and maintain quality, and what the limitations of such tests are.
What Makes School-to-Work Work?
Most of the sites that I visited are lighthouse programs—that is, they have a strong work-site learning component, have been in existence several years, and represent a range of models and geographic locales. They are not necessarily representative of school-to-work efforts nationally. They were all moving in the right direction, however, by combining more traditional academic knowledge with its application. I can't say that every program I observed taught skills well, or that all of their attempts to teach them were of high quality. But those that hit the mark had formally assigned adults who had put significant thought into what skills they wanted the students to learn at the worksite and what academic skills the students should have. And they had designed learning plans and clearly articulated expectations for what the students would achieve.
In every successful site I visited, there was at least one stalwart champion—and most often a group of people—who had decided to make closer collaboration between schools and businesses a priority. Someone had to call people to the table. Depending on the circumstances, key players came from within the high schools, the colleges, or the business community. But somewhere, someone took the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen. Many partnerships transcended school district boundaries because companies operate regionally, but they all had strong community roots. Inevitably, each partnership rested on local relationships and local trust.
Each program also used seed money, above and beyond the school's routine costs of doing business, to get started. These start-up funds served several essential functions. They paid for individuals who could act as coordinators and intermediaries between school systems and businesses. They supported curriculum development and professional development for teachers and work-site mentors. They bought equipment and materials. Perhaps most important, the funds bought time. Few sites that I visited had reached a point where they clearly would survive if these extra start-up funds disappeared.
Most of the sites also had a full-time, or nearly full-time, coordinator. Many had full-time business liaisons or recruiters, who could troubleshoot problems as they arose. All had the active support of the high school principal or superintendent. Many programs, such as the ones in Boston and in Austin, Texas, benefited from broader political allegiances with the mayor's office and others. Intermediary organizations, such as a local chamber of commerce or a community-based group, helped bring large numbers of employers to the table and worked as go-betweens and interpreters for companies, colleges, and schools that were not used to collaborating.
Equally important, these programs set both short-term and long-term goals and regularly and candidly reassessed how they were doing in relation to those benchmarks. All the programs constantly changed and evolved over time.
Typically, the programs relied on an incremental strategy, adding on to their original components to create new ones. Most had expanded by providing a continuum of school-to-work experiences, by branching out into new career fields, or by adding new employers.
The "new basic skills" that such sites are trying to develop are not narrowly defined job skills for students deemed incapable of academic learning. Nor should they be reserved solely for the college-bound. They are the kind of skills needed by all young people, whatever their future.
"I like this better [than my regular academic classes] because it's more hands-on," said Jay Vancuran, one of the students in the Siemens program. "You actually get to see what you're learning. This job teaches you a lot about reality, about real life. It teaches you that everything isn't as easy as it looks, and that you have to achieve your goals. Your goals don't just happen."
That's a useful lesson for all of us.
