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An array of public and private sector forces keeps the issue of developing a standards driven education system on the national agenda. Yet, the means to knit the pieces together remain illusive. Most public press and national rhetoric continue to center on the need to upgrade the core academic standards. The highly publicized 1996 National Education Summit (site disabled), a collaborative effort of some business leaders and the nations' governors, reaffirmed commitments to national education goals. The governors pledged, again, to establish state academic standards. The business leaders who participated pledged to do several things, among them to clearly communicate to students, parents, schools, and the community, the types and levels of skills necessary to meet the workforce needs of the next century and to carry out hiring practices within one year that will require applicants to show academic achievement. The National Governors' Association and these same business leaders are establishing a new organization called Achieve to track, monitor, and benchmark the states' effort, and presumably, that of the business community to fulfill their commitments.
To date, there is little indication that the business leaders involved are strong advocates for the development of a national voluntary skill standards system. This raises a series of questions, not the least of which is, how do the business leaders plan to communicate the types and levels of skills necessary to compete in the next century? One by one? Community by community? State by state? This lack of a clear and agreed upon strategy to find ways to interlock the development of academic and occupational skill standards is not a new dilemma.
We are in a period of substantial exploration and change as the nation seeks to move forward and infuse standards into the education system. Such change is neither linear nor always logical. The 1989 National Education Summit between then President Bush and the nation's governors first spurred the support for core academic standards. The publication of national standards has been going on for almost eight years. Some organizations received support from the federal government to develop standards, others did not. The mathematic standards were the first to be released in 1989 and others are still being released, with economic standards issued within the past few months. Occupational standards, whose development has been supported by the federal have been issued over the last three years and these standards become a part of the mix of standards that have long been available. States have had the tasks of searching and sorting through all of these sources to develop their own materials.
Many states have found that gaining consensus about the content of academic standards is a process that must be iterative and inclusive. Such processes can be frustrating for parents, elected officials, and businesses. The process can be threatening to school governing bodies and educators if not handled with great care. Continuous improvement strategies must be a part of the process. Few, if any first drafts of standards written at the beginning of this decade can probably be found in state materials today.
President Clinton has shown unwavering support for a standards' based education system. His call for national exit examinations of students in reading and math at the fourth and eighth grades suggests an appreciation for how difficult it will be to alter the practices within our far-flung education enterprise. This is a modest approach compared to our international competitors who have high stakes exit exams for students throughout the education and training process, most of which are managed by the central government. Yet, most of the U.S., for a variety of reasons, has eschewed exit exams as a part of the awarding of diplomas.
A careful study of the National Education Goals reveals that occupation-specific standards were not explicitly part of the goals. However, Goal 6, the Adult Literacy and Lifelong Learning Goal, provided the impetus for the launching of a voluntary skill standards system. The Employment and Training Administration of the Department of Labor (DOL) in concert with the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) of the Department of Education (DofEd) lead this endeavor.
That goal specifically states "by the year 2000, every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and will exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship" (National Education Goals Panel, 1990). Two of the objectives under that goal provide only the most general reference to the development of a national system of voluntary skill standards. These are:
These two objectives will not be realized by the year 2000, yet, compared to 1990, progress is occurring throughout many businesses and communities. However, there is no systematic effort underway to capture the range of what is going on to meet these objectives. The National Education Goals Panel (NGP), charged with tracking the progress of the education goals, lacks the resources to do so. The NGP publishes an annual report on the progress of all of the goals, however there are several areas where information is not available to track progress. These two objectives fall within that category. Even if the NGP had more resources, the technical challenges of collecting the information would be substantial.
A desirable development emanating from these national leadership forums and the work of others is that the necessary connective tissue can be attached to a national voluntary standards skeleton that includes both academic and occupational standards. At certain points in the learning process, the two types of standards must become connected.
A gap was generated when Congress chose not to fund that portion of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994 that established a National Education Standards and Improvement Council (NESIC). This occurred for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the concern that the proposed responsibilities of the Council would generate too much federal intrusion into the public education system. The creation of the NESIC had been one of the most controversial parts of the original legislation and the final version coming out of Congress was not supported by the Clinton Administration nor by key organizations representing state and local education governing bodies. This controversy aside, at least NESIC required coordination to occur between the development of occupational skill standards and the development of content and performance standards for core academic areas such as mathematics, science, English, and foreign language.
Today there is only a modest effort being undertaken to promote correlation. The National School-to-Work (STW) office along with the NSSB and OVAE are supporting three pilot projects to mesh the standards where appropriate. Also the National Center on Research on Vocational Education (NCRVE) is being supported to study and promote work in this area. However, these modest efforts need a broader base of support, particularly from organizations concerned about core academic standards.
A central feature of the National Skill Standards Act of 1994 is that a range of interested parties must be involved in the development and implementation of a voluntary skill standards system. The Act appropriately gives the lead responsibility to the private sector to identify the priority occupations for which standards will be developed with the intent that employers will be primary consumers of the standards for hiring and promoting their workers. However, the Act recognizes that employers are dependent on the efforts of others. This paper is about one of those stakeholder groups -- the education enterprise. The legislation assumes the education enterprise shall simultaneously be:
The Act goes on to note the need for standards to be especially linked to particular portions of the education enterprise (school-to-work, secondary and postsecondary, vocational-technical education, and job training programs).
The Act provides for representation from the education enterprise in the decision-making processes, on the national board, and on the voluntary partnership bodies. Technically, only one NSSB member must represent all of the education enterprise; though by professional affiliations seven of the 24 members come from the ranks of the education enterprise. Membership is also required on the voluntary partnership bodies (the groups that will establish the actual standards) yet again, technically only one member of each group must be drawn from the ranks the education enterprise; however, the minimal number is not likely to become the maximum.
The small number requirement of education representatives reflects a substantive dilemma that the legislative framers confronted. First, and appropriately, pertains to the desire to have the NSSB driven by the needs of industry and representatives of employees. Thus, eight members of the board are industry representatives and eight are drawn from the ranks of unions. Given this weight factor and the need to keep the size of the Board manageable, the additional eight seats were spread among other stakeholders. The framers also faced the question of who from the education enterprise needed to be "at the table." The number of possibilities is large; K-12 general governance representatives, postsecondary, certain parts of the complex postsecondary system (two and four year institutions, proprietary and business sponsored organizations), and the vocational education community, etc. In other words, there was no easy answer and the framers settled for one representative within the "other category" of board representatives. This means that other forms of connecting with the wide ranging education and training community must be found.
Explicit criteria in the STWOA drives home the need for state and publicly funded education institutions to adapt and adopt nationally validated skill standards for multiple purposes; such as, development of integrated curriculum, constructing career pathways information systems, engaging the private sector in STW efforts, and issuing certificates of competencies. The STWOA references to industry standards build upon prior efforts to improve the linkages between the workplace and the schoolplace.
The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Act, commonly called Perkins II, required each state to establish at least two technical committees to establish industry endorsed skill standards. The Institute for Educational Leadership's baseline study, referenced earlier, found that approximately 700 committees, using industry volunteers, exist across the country and assist states in developing skill standards, many of which had been established prior to the passage of Perkins II. Their explosive growth shows the responsiveness of education policy-makers to industry needs (IEL,1993). The study also found that a substantial portion of the education driven skill standards are developed as part of state consortia of member states regularly sharing the work and keeping costs down. However, no one set of skill standards was used by every state. In 1992, only 26 to 32 states used a common set of standards for any one occupation.
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[Lessons for Research and Development Period]