May 17, 2012
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 1993 Vol. 2 No. 2
SCANS and Beyond
Sidebar for Apprenticeship American Style
At the core of an apprenticeship “system” is a set of national or by-industry standards for certification. “They are a guiding point for organizing a program and maintaining quality,” says Stephen Hamilton of Cornell University's Youth and Work Program. “They also give young people goals.” A stringent skill certification system is critical, says Sue Berryman, former director of the Institute on Education and the Economy who is now with the World Bank, “no matter if apprentice ships are school-based or work-based.”
Apparently, such a certification system is in the making. The most publicized effort has been that of the Bush Administration initiative—the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, or SCANS. Its report, released in June 1991, calls for all high school students to develop a set of higher competencies and that these standards for high performance be geared to those of the country's most competitive companies.
Among the five categories of competencies seen as basic for workers of the future is that of technology. Education should prepare entering workers to be able to select the proper equipment and tools, apply technology to specific tasks, and maintain and troubleshoot technologies, SCANS says.
Without reference to the SCANS effort, both Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Secretary of Education Richard Riley have testified for a Clinton Administration proposal—a National Skill Standards Board. Its work would parallel that of a national education standards board, continuing efforts already under way to rewrite the curricula for K–12 schooling.
According to Reich, the board “would unite representatives of business, labor, education, and others with a stake in the development of the American work force and the expertise to contribute.” He sees skill standards as “the cornerstone of our work force development system.” They would be voluntary; designed with private sector leadership in order to incorporate the best of what is known about top-quality competency and performance; knit together work already carried out in industry, the states, or the education system; and be inclusive and free from gender, racial, or other bias.
Presumably, this National Skill Standards Board will take steps beyond the SCANS recommendation for experiments and demonstrations. One effort, however, already is setting the pace for others. The Fort Worth Independent School District decided that “tinkering” with its education program would not be enough to assure its graduates could be absorbed into increasingly high-tech jobs in the area. “Today's schools are better than they used to be—at what they used to do,” Superintendent Don Roberts told education and business leaders. But in order to be what they should be, schools need to link with real-world applications.
Working with the local Chamber of Commerce, the school district developed a strategy to find out what skills students would need. Literally thousands of employees from 300 companies and community organizations analyzed nearly 800 jobs in the area. The levels of proficiency identified have been used to help teachers redesign their curricula and their teaching strategies.
This partnership with the community—known as C–3 for community, corporations, and classrooms—has led to Applied Learning at schools in which students work in teams and learn by doing; and Vital Link, a job shadowing program that involved 2,000 students during the 1992-93 school year in five half-day sessions with their teachers at local workplaces. Further, the school district is moving to replace simple field trips to work sites with hands-on internships for students.
—Anne Lewis
Return to Apprenticeship American Style TECHNOS Quarterly article.