Job-Training Stations in High Schools

This research examines the development and use of job-training stations at the high school level. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background of public-school-and-business cooperation in various areas of vocational and/or distributive education, and then discuss ways in which the structure of distributive education has shifted in recent years, with a view toward forecasting possible lines of future development.

In 1985, when the high-technology revolution was hitting the mass market, some futurists projected that public education would increasingly form working partnerships with private-sector industries to train students for jobs. Some 25% of the nation's high school graduates were in the ranks of the unemployed, "due in part, we feel, to the students' lack of knowledge of specific job skills" (Cetron, Soriano, & Gayle, 1985, p. 7). School-guided part-time work in conjunction with a broadened curriculum, beginning as early as the eighth grade, was seen as a strategy for combining concepts and practical on-the-job training:

What better way to master an idea than to use it in a real-world situation where students can see a purpose for learning it? The actual application of ideas to concrete situations will sharpen their desire to learn and guide them toward suitable careers (Cetron, Soriano, & Gayle, 1985, pp. 7-8).

In recent years, something of the vision of 1985 has begun to take shape in American public education. However, there has historically been a

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aining to the demands of the workplace (Dept. of Education, 2000). The creation of the National Skill Standards Board (NSSB) came out Goals 2000: Educate America Act (Title V is also known as the National Skill Standards Act), was intended to systematize curricular guidelines in ways that would help achieve the goal of matching skill requirements with instruction. Demetrakakes (1998, p. 18) cites congressional testimony by one vocational-education scholar who noted that "classical" vocational education "is too divorced from mainstream education, and tied too closely to specific occupations." That same scholar (Hoachlander, 1992) elsewhere advocates more integration between businesses, which could offer real-world problems to students who are in any case looking for practical relevance to their educational efforts. Three national-scope private-sector institutions appear to account for the institutional structure of vocational education at the high school level: Junior Achievement (JA), which also targets students in elementary and junior high schools; DECA, which stands for Distributive Education Clubs of America, is an association of marketing (i.e., DE) students; and the National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE), which

Category: Business - J