A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

An important assumption is that some form of clustering of occupations and industries is a prerequisite for standards to become powerful tools in education reform and to strengthen the workforce development systems in our country. This assumption has taken many forms. For example; 1) the legislation required the first task of NSSB to establish broad occupational clusters for which skill standards will be developed; and, 2) states could not receive STW implementation grants without developing strategies to establish career majors/clusters and programs of study. Clearly the writers of these "systemic change"pieces of legislation envisioned that gaining a common approach about how to organize industry and occupational clusters would go a long way to improve the current state of affairs.

The education enterprise, particularly those involved in the initial preparation of students, would have to be considered a major customer, if not the major customer of occupational clusters. They have been using some form of clustering for over a hundred years to help organize their work. At the postsecondary level, professional schools represent the most obvious example of usage. The National Center for Education Statistics has historically published facts about all educational institutions around clusters through the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP).

MPR (1996) points out that clustering schema which recognizes the range of standards contained in the definition section above, can help build the bridges between the needs of education institutions and the private needs of the workplace (See Figure 1).

Figure 1
Skill Standard Continuum
Examples from the Health Industry

Source: MPR Associates, 1995, School-to-Work Glossary of Terms, Berkley: Author

MPR views the intersections among the three skill clusters (Figure 2) as helpful in designing clustering schema as well as organizing programs of study and instructional materials. This taxonomy can also help focus the work of national voluntary skill standard partnerships and their work with education institutions. This taxonomy presumes that students at a minimum exit high school with solid academic and general workforce preparation skills.

It must be recognized that a single source of information does not exist about potential career pathways and the needed material for development of more coherent programs of study based upon the proposed industry and occupational family. It is too early in the process of developing a national voluntary system for anyone to make such a claim. But this does not mean the current industry and occupational standards information cannot inform the effort to develop programs of study with work-based and contextual learning experiences included within some occupational/industry clusters.

Research supports the value for following this path. Active student involvement in collaborative learning, internships, meaningful work-study brings student greater learning effectiveness and students learn more from a coherent and developmental sequence of courses (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1995).

Establishing Clusters

In an economy as complex and dynamic as the United States' there is no perfect occupational and industry clustering approach. Grey areas will exist. NSSB selected sixteen economic sectors at the end of 1996 after gathering information and several hearings. (See Attachment B). NSSB sought a balance between industrial sectors with which employers identify and occupations sectors about which educators and individuals must address -- thus the term and grouping of economic sectors emerged. These sectors are not set in concrete and may change as experience is gained. The number of partnerships per sector has not yet been decided. There may be only one for each sector. They plan to add sectors each year. The current plans are to begin work with three sectors in 1997: wholesale/retail sales; manufacturing/installation repair; and business and administrative services. Projections are that all 16 sectors would have recognized voluntary partnerships by the end of the century.

The education enterprise has different needs than those of industry when considering the utility of clustering. The significance of these differences are reflected in the work of the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (NOICC). It has responsibility for cross-walking information about the labor market and the education system. It drafted a set of broad clusters that group both occupations and educational programs (close to but not exactly the same as adopted by NSSB) . A unique feature of this effort to develop occupation/career clusters is that it has been based on a simultaneous consideration of occupations and educational programs and their interrelationships, rather than simply looking at one or the other separately. The salience of knowledge between and among the various occupations is captured in this clustering system. Rather than producing a single set of broad clusters, NOICC created a hierarchy of four levels:

1. The most detailed level is that of the some 700 occupations in the OES and over 1,000 programs from the CIP;

2. The next level groups the occupations and programs into 240 units of analysis;

3. At the next level of the hierarchy are 42 broad clusters;

4. At the broadest level there are 15 superclusters. (See Attachment C). (NOICC, 1995).

This classification schema has an obvious advantage in that it provides a road-map with utility for all education levels and training institutions. From such a road map it is possible to develop programs of study that move from the general to the specific. The relationship to industry clusters are implicit rather than explicit.

States Response to Career Majors

Career majors are considered a key organizing tool for the STW efforts and are being established by the states, albeit with mixed messages emerging. The legislative definition of career majors is: a coherent sequence of courses or field of study that prepares a student for a first job and among other things ensures that:

• integration occurs between academic and occupational learning, school-based and work-based learning,

• linkages are established between secondary schools and postsecondary institutions;

• students are prepared for employment in a broad occupational cluster or industry sector; and,

• students receive a skill certificate (STWOA).

The term skill certificate is defined as a portable, industry recognized credential issued by a state approved STW program. The legislation requires that state issued skill certificates should be at least as challenging as skill standards endorsed by the NSSB.

To establish career majors, some states choose occupational clusters long used by vocational educators. Other states have designated broad career major areas that are being used primarily at the secondary level but there is not yet substantial evidence that these broad areas have been adopted by the postsecondary education level in any meaningful way. Other states have designated industry-specific occupations as career majors, yet others have combined occupations and industry specific focus areas. (See Attachment D).

Within the K-12 public education system, the adoption of career majors as a core strategy for education reform has run into several stumbling blocks, some of which have become politically divisive. Several conservative national organizations view the idea of establishing career majors as potential negative "mind control" over students. For others, the terminology means promoting a tracking system that would eventually hurt students' ability to gain further education. For others, more familiar with the challenges of allowing some time in the high school years for occupation specific training, the cluster idea suggests a different type of problem. They look to a continuing decrease in occupation specific program participation at the high school level as a negative impact on students ability to find meaningful work (Border and Losh,1996).

MPR (1996) found, in a case study of four states, that as the states are building cluster based skill standards systems positive reverberations are taking place. It has generated allies within the employer community, produced a commitment of resources from the private sector, injected a real-world perspective into the standards process, helped to establish state benchmarks of quality programs, and has begun to align curriculum and assessment of students' knowledge and skills learned.

However, MPR found that language matters as it relates to the definition of career majors/clusters. Sometimes it is minor difference in semantics but at other times the same terms mean radically different things. For example, MPR found that in one state the term cluster describes a group of related occupations within a specific industry, such as Secondary Wood Products (an important industry for them) that would correspond with a narrower industry/occupational cluster in other states. In other cases, standards are defined for a specific set of only entry-level occupations and do not yet address career ladder opportunities either within the occupation or within industries. The lack of a common framework for understanding the meaning and use of career majors/clusters is hindering progress. It makes it difficult to share best practices, impedes the development of coherent programs of study, contributes to the lack of an infrastructure for developing curriculum and instruction, and most to the integration of academic and occupational related curriculum.

A comparative review of the implementation plans of the ten states that have been awarded both STW and One-Stop implementation grants was undertaken. A key part of the analysis was assess how career majors/clusters were being used to promote systemic change. It is clear, that currently, the use of career clusters or occupational clusters has not yet matured to the point they are a significant link among the various parts of the workforce/economic development system. Clusters are not being used by labor market support system as a way to organize information services. There is no mention that any special link to training or information about clusters and career pathways will be made available to the customers of one-stop centers (Kaufmann and Wills,1996).

There is little evidence that the states will any time soon simply adopt the sixteen economic sectors recently identified by the NSSB. Conversations with state officials suggest they are taking a "wait and see" stance. Some are waiting for more detail about what is "inside" the proposed broad sectors. Some are waiting for the response from industry. As one seasoned observer, noted, educators respond to industry when there is a clear and consistent message coming from national and local employer leadership.

In hindsight, a substantial miscue occurred in some of the STWOA wording. Specifically the clause that states a career major is to "prepare a student for a first job" can, at best, be viewed as a misnomer. In this country a distinct youth labor market exists and a high proportion of youth are employed in these high turnover positions, mostly in the retail and food services sectors. While there are many long term career opportunities in these industries, any clustering schema should never be based only on a first job strategy. The term career major itself has proven to be problematic conjuring up the image that high school students would be expected to make decisions too early in life. The term occupational/industrial cluster provides a better image of what needs to considered by states for a wide range of purposes.

As noted earlier, the education enterprise has long used the tool of clustering for a variety of purposes. The renewed emphasis on clustering connected to standards can be considered as a "back to basics" strategy. It is simply a way to organize information about career pathways and educational and workplace requirements. Clusters can help focus career exploration activities of students. For faculty and institutional managers clusters are tools to use in the development coherent programs of study within a single institution and across institutional levels. For state government clusters can be tools used by several agencies to promote coordination of their work. The exact clustering schema is probably of less importance than having one. However, for the education enterprise the NOICC crosswalk work shows the value of providing sufficient detail for practitioners to envision the building blocks of clusters.
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