Working Knowledge

Work-Based Learning and Education Reform

Thomas R. Bailey, Katherine L. Hughes, David Thornton Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135942359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Based on five years of research in high school and community college programs, this book explores the potential for using work-based learning as part of a broad education reform strategy.

CHAPTER 1
Work-Based Learning and Education Reform

During the 1990s, the United States economy enjoyed an unprecedented period of growth and low unemployment. Although the economy began to cool off at the turn of the century, even during the height of the boom, large sections of the nation’s educational system remained in deep trouble. Increasingly, young people without some post-secondary education could not expect to earn enough money to support a family; yet large numbers of people still failed to finish high school, and another third who earned their school degree did not acquire any additional education (U.S. Department of Education, 2000a). Moreover, many high school graduates did not have high school level skills—hundreds of thousands of students entering post-secondary schools had to take remedial instruction to prepare them for college-level work (U.S. Department of Education, 1999). Beyond these well-known problems, researchers found that most high school students were not engaged in their schooling and made an effort only so that they could get into college (Johnson, Farkas, & Bers, 1997). Learning was often far down their list of priorities. Yet almost all students who finish high school can gain access to some post-secondary institution. Therefore, many students do not see strong incentives for working hard in high school (Rosenbaum, 1997).

As these problems persisted throughout the 1990s, reformers increasingly called for higher expectations and more stringent standards for high school graduation and even promotion from grade to grade. High school students’ participation in occupationally specific courses dropped 14 percent between 1982 and 1994 (U.S. Department of Education, 2000b). On average, high school students earned 4.7 vocational credits in 1982; by 1994, that number had dropped to 4.0. At the same time, however, academic course-taking increased by 23 percent. In some states, examinations that had previously been taken only by the minority of students headed for four-year colleges were made the standard for high school graduation. Increasingly, the success of elementary and secondary education systems was judged on the basis of the performance of their students on tests of academic achievement and on traditional measures such as college-going rates.

The emphasis on high standards leaves open the question of what approach educators will use to achieve those standards. Perhaps the most common response has been to stress and often require all students to take the types of academic courses traditionally used to prepare students for college. Although these are effective for many students, they fail to engage and motivate others. Moreover, even students who successfully negotiate the academic curriculum are often coasting.

Over the last 15 years, some education reformers have argued that integrating experiences outside of the school with classroom learning is an effective approach to engaging students in their studies and helping to prepare them for education and work after high school (Hamilton, 1990; Jobs for the Future, 1994). Often these experiences involve work in private-and public-sector organizations. Reformers make a variety of claims about the educational benefits of this type of work-based learning, and in many cases these have struck a responsive chord.

Dressed in a clean shirt and tie, a young man named José sat at a desk in the first-floor housekeeping office of a nondescript hotel near a busy airport. As a summer intern from a travel and tourism academy in a big city, his job this morning was to answer phone calls from guests and staff, figure out what needed to be done, and delegate the work to the appropriate person. Room attendants called to report that they had finished cleaning rooms, and he entered the information into a computer. Guests notifed him that they needed towels, or soap, or a repairman; he sent someone out. At 9: 20, the phone rang and he answered: “Good morning, housekeeping, this is José.” Hanging up, he wrote a note on a pad just as the housekeeping assistant manager, Ruth, walked in and told him that the rooms on the 14th floor were checked out. He told her that an attendant on that floor wanted her to call back. The phone rang again: “Good morning, housekeeping, this is José…okay.” He informed Ruth that Room 929 wanted matches; she told him they don’t stock matches, and called the bell captain to see if he had any. Another guest called to ask whether they had special equipment for the disabled. Ruth said yes and instructed him to get the room number; he did, and said, “Someone will be there shortly.” The phone rang again, José answered, and informed the assistant manager that the guest who wanted matches was “getting a little hostile.” José bummed some matches from a visitor, and Ruth sent a houseman up to the room to deliver them…. As the morning wore on, José kept answering the phones, handling the room attendant reports, and updating the duty list.

This book explores the potential for using work-based learning as part of a broad education reform strategy. It is our contention that work-based learning, if it is done well, can play an important role in strengthening the educational preparation of many young people. Although students can learn job-specific skills in internships or apprenticeships, these types of experiences can have broader academic and developmental benefits as well. Thus work-based learning can be a productive part of a secondary school education designed explicitly to prepare students for college.

Most adults realize the importance of learning outside of school. Much of what makes them effective, they learned on the job or in the community. And during the last decade, many education reformers have argued that learning in the workplace should be a much more significant part of the country’s basic education system. One of the major educational initiatives of the Clinton administration envisioned a system of internships or other types of work-based learning for a greater number of high school students. Yet despite enthusiasm for the notion of work-based learning, reformers have had difficulty convincing teachers and parents that acquiring experiences in the workplace is an optimal use of educational resources and of students’ time. As reformers in the 1990s worked on increasing the number of internships, they often found that it was easier to find employers willing to take interns than to find interns willing to fill those slots (Hughes, 1998).

Ironically, during the 1990s work-based learning was seen as an integral part of a new and innovative educational strategy, even though internships and apprenticeships have been around for centuries. Moreover, at the same time that some educators and parents see work-based learning as a serious threat to good education, it is accepted as a fundamental aspect of graduate training. And postgraduate education in the U.S. is considered the best in the world. Professionals with no experience (i.e., who have had no work-based learning), regardless of the perceived quality of their education, are not considered skilled workers (Bailey & Merritt, 1997). Indeed, professional education is moving to incorporate more formal work-based learning and more authentic experience earlier in the period of training. Medical training programs are now getting their students into clinical settings earlier and even law schools are questioning the wisdom of the traditional training that gives students no concrete idea about what they will be doing as lawyers. In any case, law students have traditionally understood the importance of summer internships in which they could actually get some experience.

Despite this increased commitment to work-based learning for higher levels of education, work-based learning at the secondary school level has remained a marginal academic strategy. Even vocational education, a program that would seem to be most likely to involve work-based learning, is primarily classroom-based. To be sure, several hundred thousand students every year enroll in cooperative education programs in which they earn credit for work supervised by their schools, but these students are, for the most part, headed directly to work after high school. Thus cooperative education is often associated with traditional vocational instruction for the “non-college bound.” Formal apprenticeships also enroll a few hundred thousand students a year and there is a general perception that apprenticeships, especially in construction, produce highly skilled and effective workers. But these apprentices are often in their mid–20s and many are high school graduates. For the most part, formal apprenticeships are not part of a secondary-level education.

One could argue that in cooperative education, apprenticeships, and professional training, work-based learning is, in effect, a transition strategy for young people who have already chosen their occupational direction. Once someone has chosen to be a doctor or a carpenter, then it makes sense that they should get experience in the actual activities of their chosen profession—that they should be inducted into the “community of practice” associated with that profession (to use a term that has become popular in current discussions of education and learning on the job). The underlying (and usually unarticulated) logic of the current structure of secondary school education is that during the period of study before the young person has chosen a career goal, or at least in the early stages of preparation, students are better served by concentrating primarily on learning academic skills using school-based pedagogy.

Increasingly in the United States, secondary schools must prepare all students to enter at least a two-year college. Young people with no more than a high school degree have very restricted occupational options. Therefore, high school is no longer a place to prepare directly for work. If work-based learning is considered primarily a strategy to prepare students for imminent work, then it would seem to have at most a marginal role in high school. To some extent, an analogous situation is taking place in community colleges in which increasingly programs are expected to at least hold open the door to transfer to a four-year school, even for students who enter the program explicitly aiming at a two-year terminal degree (Morest, forthcoming).

Thus the controversy arises, not so much over the wisdom of work-based learning in the abstract, but rather over when it should take place within the overall trajectory of a young person’s education. Most educators agree that work-based learning can be useful as a last educational step before a young person starts work in a particular occupation. But as the 1990s progressed, work-based learning advocates increasingly argued that the approach was not only a means of transition to work once an occupational direction had been chosen, but rather a strategy for exploring career possibilities and gaining the underlying foundation of knowledge and skills needed by everyone to prepare for adulthood.

Maureen, an intern from a rural New England high school, worked as an assistant to the music teacher in a nearby central school. One morning, Maureen consulted with Mr. P, a substitute teacher, on the agenda for the day in his 5th-and 7th-grade class. Mr. P told Maureen what activities the regular teacher had planned, and asked her some questions about the normal classroom practices. She answered him with confidence. The class got underway a bit late, and the kids were a little restless. Maureen went to the side of the room and flicked the lights several times, getting the kids’ attention. After taking attendance, the teacher informed the class that they would be doing practice and assessment exercises that day. He looked at Maureen to see how they should keep track of the students, and she told him they could write the kids’ names on the board. Mr. P and Maureen then grabbed a pile of assessment forms and handed them out to students. For the next 35 minutes, they worked individually with students, watching them play songs of their choice and evaluating them on hand position, notes, rhythm, and tempo. At one point, Maureen knelt to a student’s level and asked if he wanted to play a duet; he didn’t know what that meant, and she explained, then played a short song with him. The boy smiled broadly. Maureen walked over to a girl who seemed to be struggling a bit with the rhythm and tempo of the music. She meticulously went over the notes with her, demonstrating the beat by clapping and explaining the rhythm. When another pupil played a selection correctly, Maureen smiled and said, “You did very well! You learned a lot today.”

This book is about work-based learning as a basic educational strategy, especially for secondary school students (and to some extent for those in community colleges). We have five broad goals.

The first is to clarify questions surrounding work-based learning and to encourage practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to identify their views and objectives. There has been some controversy about work-based learning, based on a lack of clarity about its purposes. For example, if work-based learning can improve academic skills, then which academic skills are involved? Can work-based learning replace academic classes? If so, how many and which ones? Or should work-based learning be primarily about career exploration, or about general youth development? Advocates have not been clear about exactly what they expect to achieve with work-based learning, exactly what it is for, thus leaving skeptics and others confused.

Second, we want to make the arguments much more systematic and concrete. When work-based learning advocates have identified objectives, they have generally been vague about why they believed that the strategy would achieve those objectives. For example, what type of program design might deliver academic skills as opposed to career exploration? What specific experiences can improve academic skills? Unless those mechanisms are specified, it will be difficult to understand whether work-based learning is effective and to figure out what characteristics lead to effectiveness.

Third, we want to begin to subject the various claims about the benefits of work-based learning to more systematic theoretical and empirical scrutiny. We do this both by reviewing the theoretical and conceptual discussions of the topic, and also by examining work-based learning programs themselves and the experiences of dozens of young people participating in these programs.

Fourth, the book strives to develop a better understanding of what we call work-related pedagogy. This effort will be built on our understanding of the mechanisms through which learning takes place both on the job and in the classroom. We will provide some guidelines that can help program operators find or design high-quality work-based learning experiences, and then enhance students’ learning from those experiences back in school.

Fifth, we also want to focus attention on the cost side of work-based learning. One unique aspect of work-based learning is that it incorporates the workplace into the core educational system. Even if in principle this is a good idea, it requires the cooperation of the employers. We want to understand the extent to which difficulties with recruiting employers will stand in the way of a broad-based, work-based learning system.

What Is Work-Based Learning?

Learning takes place in every workplace, as one saw from the earlier vignettes. This learning can be narrow and employer-specific, or general and applicable to many situations. Our focus is on work-based learning as a specific educational strategy for high school students. The goal of this strategy is to enhance the traditional objectives of schooling—teaching academic skills, preparing students for citizenship and work, and helping them to develop into mature and responsible members of society. Work-based learning comes in many forms.

Full-scale apprenticeships are the most ambitious. Much of the thinking about youth apprenticeship in the U.S. is based on knowledge about the German system, in which two- to four-year apprenticeships start at about age 16, and combine work and classroom instruction that is closely coordinated with the activities on the job (Hamilton, 1989). The U.S. does have about half a million registered apprentices, and the system enjoys a posi tive reputation, but these are usually older students, often high school graduates. As a result, the system is not looked to as a component of secondary school education reform.

Internships are usually a much less ambitious and much less well-defined form of work-based learning. Typically, students spend from a few weeks to many months in a position that may be paid or unpaid. The learning intensity and the links to school curricula vary widely. In some cases, positions are chosen to match the in-school curriculum; in some cases, the links are made through a seminar in school in which students discuss their experiences on the job; and in other cases, there is very little connection between the internship and schooling.

Cooperative education placements, which involve several hundred thousand high school students, are a form of internship. Traditionally these have been for students in vocational education programs designed to place them in employment immediately after high school. Co-op programs have been the foundation of many of the recent work-based learning initiatives, with program operators trying to broaden their educational objectives (Urquiola et al., 1997).

A variety of other forms of experienced-based learning are also common and indeed have been popular for many years. These include service-learning; volunteer work; 4–H and other agricultural-oriented programs, such as Future Farmers of America; and a variety of clubs and extracurricular activities such as Vocational Industrial Clubs of America. Although these programs have loyal and enthusiastic supporters, for the most part they have not been incorporated into the work-based, learning-oriented, education-reform initiatives of the last 15 years. One exception to this may be service-learning. Schools are increasingly promoting community service to students and linking it to classroom activities, in the belief that such experiences can improve student education and personal development (Eyler & Giles, 1999; Kleiner & Chapman, 2000).

In the basement of a major urban hospital, the physical therapy clinic occupied a large, open room lined with parallel bars, wheelchairs, and faux staircases. One Wednesday morning, Rob, a student in a medical careers academy, got out the equipment that would be needed for several patients waiting near the door. A therapist, B, finished getting an elderly man started, then joined Rob in helping a female patient walk up and down the hall using a walker. After one pass she took a break, and Rob went over to the bulletin board to arrange name labels on a chart that tracked the appointments and arrivals of the patients. B and Rob went back to the woman patient, who complained that she needed oxygen; they hooked her up to a tank and walked her up and down the hall again. D, the PT manager, instructed a therapist on the care plan for each patient, and Rob helped him out. He walked behind a frail patient as T, another therapist, guided her through the parallel bars, ready to catch her if she should fall. D directed B and Rob to walk a particular patient 50 feet and then come back; she explained that there were distance markers on the ceiling. An elderly woman also waiting in the exit line announced that she had to go to the bathroom; she repeated the statement, but no staff responded. Rob went over and said he was sorry that transport was slow in picking her up—but he did not take her, believing it was not his place. Later, he admitted feeling uncomfortable about the woman’s situation and the staff’s lack of response.

According to a 1992 national survey of public secondary schools, almost 20 percent of such schools sponsor at least one school-based enterprise, another form of work-based learning (Stern, 1992). In school-based enterprises, groups of students, under the supervision of a teacher or adult adviser, organize and staff businesses or services within the school itself. (See Stern et al, 1994, for a book-length discussion of SBEs.) They may run a school store, provide printing and duplicating services, or make and sell garments. One advantage of a school-based enterprise is that the activities are under the complete control of the school itself. At the same time, there may be only limited scope for these activities and schools are often reluctant to compete with local businesses. Virtual enterprises elimin...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: WORK-BASED LEARNING AND EDUCATION REFORM
• CHAPTER 2: THE QUESTIONS AND THE APPROACH
• CHAPTER 3: STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN AND USE OF WORK-BASED LEARNING
• CHAPTER 4: EMPLOYER INVOLVEMENT IN WORK-BASED LEARNING
• CHAPTER 5: WORK-BASED LEARNING AND ACADEMIC SKILLS
• CHAPTER 6: LEARNING SKILLS AND CAREERS THROUGH WORK-BASED LEARNING
• CHAPTER 7: LEARNING SKILLS AND CAREERS THROUGH WORK-BASED LEARNING
• CHAPTER 8: NEW MODES OF THOUGHT
• CHAPTER 9: PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES FOR WORK-BASED LEARNING
• CHAPTER 10: PEDAGOGY IN THE CLASSROOM TO SUPPORT WORK-BASED LEARNING
• CHAPTER 11: CONCLUSIONS
• APPENDIX: GUIDELINES FOR CONDUCTING ETHNOGRAPHY IN RESEARCH ON WORK-BASED LEARNING
• REFERENCES