2000-2001 ESSAY CONTEST-A
Subject: Youth Apprenticeships
Using the required reading as background, and the Internet as a research tool, come up with either your own youth apprenticeship plan or reasons to support an existing proposal that you discover via your research. Include in your essays arguments pro and con and make sure your proposal, or the proposal you champion, is able to overcome the objections raised.
First Prize
= $100
Second Prize = $ 7 5
Third Prize
= $ 25
Anyone may enter. There are three categories: (1) Schools that submit a minimum of ten essays from one class. Three prizes will be awarded to every school that submits a minimum of ten qualifying entries. (2) Schools with fewer than ten students submitting essays. They will have their essays merged with other schools in the same situation. (3) Individuals of any age. They will find their work displayed as Unaffiliated and their essays will be judged with others in this category. Never will an essay be judged against more than 30 essays in any category.
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Papers may be emailed to contest@singerfoundation.org anytime
before December 1, 2001.All participants will receive certificates and their essays will
be published online.
Rules
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Required Reading for Essay A 2000-2001
Youth Apprenticeships
(Congressional Quarterly Researcher
1992, updated and edited
where appropriate for this exercise.)
The
Issues
(“Issue”
is adapted from writing by Charles Clark found on p. 907)
[A]
17-year-old begins his day in West Bend, Wisconsin at 7:30 a.m. with the usual classes in
American literature, government and math. By mid-morning [he] joins eleven other selected
students in the school’s graphics lab, where he learns the fundamentals of offset
printing and photographic-plate making.
At noon, he
reports for work at Serigraph Inc., a local printing firm, where, unlike most employees,
he is guaranteed a broad exposure to all aspects of company operations. By 3 p.m.
he’s free for the day.
“I’m
not one who looks forward to going to school,” says the former B and C student, who
says he’s now making A’s and B’s. “But I like this because I
don’t have to spend four hours a night on homework.”
This
student’s schedule still leaves time to be with friends, go to football games and
participate on the swim team. In two years, he will receive a certificate from the state
attesting to his high school graduation and his job training. He will then be a likely
candidate for a full-time job at the printing firm, and he will have a range of other
educational options from technical school to a four-year college.
“The
on-the-job training is the main advantage, and I get paid,” he says, “And it
leaves me a step ahead of the guys coming out of a high school because I can run a
one-color press.” …
Eight youth
apprenticeship bills were introduced in the last session of the 102nd Congress
in 1992. “People are coming to see it’s a very attractive training
scheme—to learn by doing,” said Robert W. Glover, an authority on
apprenticeships at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of
Texas in Austin. “It combines earning and learning—and both of these features
are attractive to school-weary youth.”
Building
better futures also cultivates maturity in young people, apprenticeship advocates say.
“Apprenticeship has always done more than teach a specific trade, “ writes
Cornell University human development Professor Stephen Hamilton. “Learning to work
means learning to be an adult.”
The ascent
of youth apprenticeship up the policy agenda stems from a confluence of trends in income
growth, global economic competition and educational theory. It also reflects concern in
business, government and academia about the perilous and growing mismatch between the
future demands of the workplace and the quality of the nation’s up-and-coming
workers.
“Most
of the kids coming out of high school have relatively low problem-solving skills,”
said Paul Whitley, vice president of Tyson Foods, Inc. in Russellville, Arkansas …
“They have poor math skills, poor reading skills and poor communication skills.
We’re on a collision course as the labor market shrinks and the need for more and
better skills increases.”
“In our
country, for the 80 percent who do not attend or may not complete college, there is no
defined path to a job or career,” observed Carl C. Perkins, a former Kentucky
congressman during July hearings on his School to Work Transition and Skill Standards
Development Act. There is “only a hodgepodge of want ads, dead-end jobs and career
counseling with no link to the job market or needs of employers.”
The lack of
preparedness among non-college-bound youth has been forcefully documented. Between 1977
and 1992, economists say the earnings gap between professionals and skilled workers
widened from 2 percent to 37 percent, and the gap between professionals and clerical
workers increased from 47 to 86 percent. The General Accounting Office estimates that
about 9 million of the nation’s 33 million 16-to-24-year-olds lack the skills needed
for entry-level jobs.
During this
period of blue-collar economic decline, the skills in demand have also become highly
technical. “It hasn’t been all that long since a kid could drop out of school
and find a job as a mechanic,” said a Rockbridge County, Virginia math teacher
involved with new programs to link school with work. “But now you can’t even
balance a tire without knowing how to work a computer.”
What’s
more, the changing workplace does not bode well even for college-educated job seekers of
the future unless they have technical training. By the year 2000 the federal Bureau of
Labor Statistics predicted, only 30 percent of jobs in America would require a college
education.
“Our
front-line workers…may be the least skilled among those of all the major industrial
countries,” assert labor specialists Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker in a new book, Thinking
for a Living: Work, Skills and the Future of the American Economy. In advocating
apprenticeships and other education and training reforms, they argue that trade
competitors such as Germany and Japan will force U.S. industry to invest more in
“human-resource capital,” tapping the skills of the rank and file.
Similar
thinking was apparent in an influential 1990 study, America’s Choice: High Skills
or Low Wages, in which a commission of executives, labor leaders and former Labor
secretaries laid out a plan to create a “high-performance work force.” To
restore economic growth, they proposed “mobilizing our most vital asset, the skills
of our people—not just the 30 percent who will graduate from college—but the
front-line workers, the people who serve as bank tellers, farm workers…data-entry
operators, laborers and factory workers.”
The push for
apprenticeships comes at a time when educators are emphasizing “contextual
learning,” which stresses the practical and concrete over the theoretical. “The
trend now in pedagogy is to push applied education, which reaches more people and in which
people learn better,” says Dale Hudeleson, information director of the American
Vocational Association in Alexandria, Virginia.
The modern
vision of youth apprenticeship is broader than the traditional apprenticeships associated
mainly with construction and metalworking crafts. Drawing inspiration from successful
apprentice programs in Germany and other European countries, the concept includes
apprenticeships in health care, financial services, culinary arts and childcare are as
well as in government and nonprofit organizations.
At its
heart, [former] Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia said when introducing a youth apprenticeship
bill in 1991, the program should require: “certifiable skills, involve employers as
direct participants with a stake in the individual students’ academic and skills
training achievement and be an integral part of the school curriculum, available to all
students, not an add-on or adjunct program, and [should carry] prestige in school and
community.”
“Apprenticeships
can’t be like college or vocational school,” says M. Blouke Carus, a Peru,
Illinois, businessman. “They must be outcome-based like a chef’s school. When
you finish you must be able to bake a muffin, not just say that you completed 1,000 hours
of muffin training.”
Though noble
intentions permeate the apprenticeship movement, it meets skepticism from unions, who
worry about undercutting their decades-old apprentice program for older workers. Another
question mark is the commitment of employers, who profess an interest in education but
spend far less on long-term training than their overseas rivals.
But to its
boosters, youth apprenticeship seems the ideal way to motivate aimless young people while
offering businesses an invaluable resource: a long-term supply of employees with more
up-to-date skills than those taught in traditional vocational education.
“The
Germans have a saying that if you’re trained in something, it makes you easier to
retrain,” notes the University of Texas’ Glover, “Right now, our kid in
high school don’t see a connection between what they’re doing in school and what
happens afterward. We have to make that connection.”
Consider:
Are high school students too young to commit?
“This
friend of mine…had a friend who made $50,000 her first year [working] in physical
therapy,” an Arkansas mother told an interviewer discussing apprenticeships.
“Well, that’s what my daughter wants to do now. Three weeks ago, it was a
graphic artist. And before that she’s marrying a millionaire and moving to Beverly
Hills.”
Adolescents
are known for indecision about their goals in life. And what sticks in the craw of any
students and parents pondering apprenticeship is the fear that committing oneself at age
16 to a “vocational track” means giving up a chance for economic and social
mobility.
Unions
The
following is a quote from Markley Roberts, assistant director of economic research and
development at the AFL-CIO: “We support the efforts to facilitate the transition from
school to work, however, we oppose efforts to undercut child labor laws and the Fair Labor
Standards Act under the guise of promoting youth apprentice programs.” However, the
most vocal resistance to the youth apprenticeship movement centers not on the goals or
methods of the program but on the use of the name. Many union and state government
officials argue that the word “apprentice” should be reserved for the
decades-old “registered apprentice” program, which is strictly defined by
federal and state regulations to refer to the 43,000 highly structured, multi-year
training programs that have been negotiated around the country in collective-bargaining
agreements.
“The
rush to embrace apprenticeship … is leading to efforts that could undermine the very
pillars of its value,” warns Barbara Green, one-time chairwoman of the Federal
Committee on Apprenticeship and senior vice president of the Greater New York Hospital
Association. “No one questions the motives or intentions of the youth apprenticeship
advocates, but loose application of the term could undermine confidence in one of the few
effective training strategies we have in this country.”
Registered
apprentices can apply to 800 apprenticeable occupations—primarily in construction and
metalworking trades. There are currently about 300,000 apprentices nationwide, with an
average age of 29. Their program requires 2,000 hours of on-the-job training supervised by
a journey-level worker as well as 240 hours of related classroom time, under rules last
updated in 1977. A registered apprenticeship typically lasts three to five years.
The Federal
Committee on Apprenticeship, a labor, employer and educator group that advises the Labor
Department, emphasizes the distinction between registered and youth apprenticeships. In a
January statement, the committee said that a registered apprenticeship “(a) combines
supervised, structured, on-the-job training with related theoretical instruction and (b)
is sponsored by employers or labor/management groups that have the ability to hire and
train in a work environment.”
Union
spokesmen add that in a registered apprenticeship, state and federal regulations determine
the type and amount of related instruction, the manner of supervision, and appropriate
ratios of apprentices to journey persons, the selection process for apprentices,
recruitment procedures, wage progression and safety procedures.
In a youth
apprenticeship, by contrast, students begin at age 16 rather than in their 20s; there are
a variety of possible outcomes; academic and work-related competencies are integrated into
the regular high school program; and youth apprenticeship would not, in itself, lead to a
“journey worker” certification.
“Every
high school youngster with a part-time job is not a youth apprentice,” observes
Donald Grabowski, president of the National Association of State and Territorial
Apprenticeship Directors in Albany, N.Y. “There is concern among state officials that
if youngsters get involved with programs labeled apprentice and then realize that there is
a state and federal program, they will ask for [the same] credential certificate. No one
to our knowledge is opposed to youth apprenticeships, but people must realize what’s
involved. It must be a meaningful experience that leads somewhere, not just to a warm
feeling all over.”
Youth
apprenticeship boosters originally began by using the phrase “school-to-work
programs” and avoided using “the Big-A apprenticeship,” according to James
Van Erden, administrator of the Labor Department’s Office of Work-Based
Learning…
Laurence
Steinberg, a psychologist at Philadelphia’s Tempe University who has written widely
on teenagers’ employment issues, is wary of using the label youth apprenticeship for
a smorgasbord of programs without differentiating between good ones and bad ones that
exploit kids. “If you began giving a work-study credit for wrapping hamburgers,”
he says, “it would only be a short cry from having McDonald’s call it a
‘restaurant apprenticeship.’”
Employers
“The
primary concern of more than 80 percent of employers is finding workers with a good work
ethic and appropriate social behavior—reliable, a good attitude, a pleasant
appearance, a good personality,” noted the 1990 America’s Choice report
prepared under the chairmanship of a key Clinton adviser, Ira Magaziner.
The problem
presented by youth apprenticeship, notes youth-employment specialist Samuel Halperin,
study director of the W.T. Grant Foundation in Washington, D.C., is that many U.S. firms
resist a three-or-four-year hiring commitment and prefer college graduates because they
don’t believe high school graduates are mature.
What’s
more, the well-publicized training programs at such firms as Xerox Corp., General Electric
Co., Motorola Inc. and American Express Co., are not emulated at most companies. Few firms
are actively upgrading their work forces, preferring to “dumb-down” tasks and
hire less costly part-timers, analysts note.
As Robert J.
Massey, an Arlington, Virginia consultant points out, investment in plant and equipment
shows up on the account books as a positive asset, but training expenses are merely a
debit. … From a manager’s point of view, youth apprentices might add to training
costs because participants are guaranteed a rotation through different parts of the
company and would hence be relieved of certain demands for productivity. “There is a
conflict between the worker role and the learner role,” says Hamilton.
“There’s no formula for working it out.”
A further
complication, notes Quint Rahberger, Oregon’s apprenticeship and training
administrator, is that “employers in this litigious society are wary of violating
child labor laws, hazardous-work orders” and insurance regulations; issues that
designers of a national apprenticeship initiative would have to tackle.
Despite such
obstacles, youth apprenticeship advocates are busy promoting their concept in the business
community. “Companies shouldn’t be passive advisers and think that now that
they’ve sent computers into the schools they’ve done their job,” says James
D. Van Erden, administrator of the Labor Department’s Office of Work-Based Learning.
“Employer
endorsement is the key to the whole thing,” says Glover, A national initiative would
require “industrywide structural supports,” he says, perhaps something akin to
Germany’s private craft and trade “chambers,” business groups that
administer apprentice programs and socialize training costs by collecting dues from all
companies whether or not they participate in training.
“Currently,
there aren’t many jobs set up for apprenticeable skills,” observes Anthony P.
Carnevale, chief economist for the American Society for Training and Development. “We
have to build up the demand side because it’s the job that creates the need for
training, not the apprenticeship that creates the job.”
Because many
youth apprenticeships are envisioned in service industries such as health care and
insurance, notes Garrison J. Moore, director of research and development at the National
Alliance of Business, “there is a cultural barrier. The companies say,
“We’re white-collar, [apprenticeship is] blue collar.’” Companies also
have the attitude that their managers are so special that they have to customize them,
Moore says. His group seeks to change that culture and create industry apprenticeship
standards that would encourage “portability and transferability” among
companies.
Many
companies are having success at tapping into the skills of young students, Moore adds,
even though they might not call it apprenticeship. At the Kroger grocery chain, for
example, high school students who were recruited as baggers have gone on to management
slots, and at Ross clothing stores, even the lowest-level employees are
“cross-trained” so that a backroom clerk can fill in helping customers.
Not all
employers are temperamentally suited to supervise apprentices. As Fairfax County’s
Ellen Carlos points out, “youth apprentices need supportive parents and employer
sponsors who will give them that time off for beach week, who know that junior proms are
important enough to allow that afternoon off to get fit for a tux.”
In one of
the most influential proposals on apprenticeships, prepared for the Progressive Policy
Institute in Washington, scholars Robert I. Lerman of American University and Hillard
Pouncy of Swarthmore College wrote: “Washington’s role is chiefly to act as a
catalyst for efforts by local school systems and business to harmonize their curricula,
job training and hiring practices. Ultimately, the purpose of these effort is to gain
national credibility for apprentices as highly trained workers whose skills are
occupationally specific, portable enough to be valuable for a variety of employers and
critical for taking effective advantage of additional training.”
In an era of
reluctance to create new federal bureaucracies, Lerman and Pouncy, along with Senator
Nunn, have proposed creating a National Youth Apprenticeship Institute. The public-private
partnership would be directed by representatives of business, labor and education and
clearly differentiated from federal jobs programs targeted at the disadvantaged. The
institute would specify skills required to enter and succeed in an occupation, develop a
system for certifying trainers and apprentices and monitor the quality of work-site
training.
“If
youth apprenticeship is to be a national program, available to all, there has to be a
federal role,” says Hilary Pennington, president of Jobs for the Future. “The
goal would be to ensure maximum mobility and opportunity and regulate standards of
quality. …What is not thought through is the federal role as a catalyst for creating
private-sector structures like Europe’s trade and craft chambers,” she says.
Pennington also would step up the federal role in promoting nationally recognized
standards to assess the skills represented by a completed apprenticeship. “But each
industry would have to set its own standards,” she adds.
Glover
agrees that government is needed to create an “infrastructure” for
apprenticeship, but he emphasizes that industry would have to be the main player, creating
an ongoing “feedback system” that would synchronize schools and work sites. The
degree of federal involvement “is a sticky issue,” he says. “The more we
try to structure and regulate the program, the less attractive it is to employers. The
more we try to attract employers, the less leverage we have in its structure.”
“Any
federal apprenticeship effort should spell out rules and set up the system and help
develop standards so that [an apprenticeship] can travel, like a college degree,”
says William H. Kolber, president of the National Alliance of Business. “But the real
work will be done school by school, company by company, community by community. The
government establishes a general pattern, but each state goes its own way.”
Options Linking School With Work
Youth
apprenticeships are among an array of programs designed to help high school students make
the transition from school to work. What characterizes apprenticeship is on-the-job
training administered by a professional, the awarding of a standardized certificate and
the hope that it would be an option for all students, not just special cases. Other
alternatives for those who don’t attend a four-year college include the following:
Vocational
Education: Created in the 19th century, high school Voc. Ed. Programs have
traditionally offered all students such practical courses as typing, home economics and
shop. For a select group of students, they offer hands-on training in technical skills
such as auto repair and mechanical drawing.
Tech
Prep: Short for technical preparation
(also called “2+2”), this program links two years of high school with two years
of community college or technical-school study focusing on math, science, computers and
technologies. Tech prep offers an associate degree and prepares students for specific
occupations in such broad areas as computers or engineering. A tech prep grant program was
formalized under the 1990 Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act
Amendments.
Cooperative
Education: A longstanding approach that alternates study with work. High school
students receive credit for their work hours and often receive only the minimum academic
instruction needed for a high school diploma.
Community
Colleges: Primarily open-enrollment local colleges that offer adult and vocational
education and two-year degrees.
Trade
Schools: For-profit schools that offer practical instruction in such fields as hair
styling, computers, dental technology and trucking.
Career
Academies: Over the past two decades, corporations in Philadelphia, New York and Los
Angeles and elsewhere have sponsored simulated work environments, a “school within a
school,” in such fields as health, insurance and finance. Employers help design the
curriculum and often provide students with summer jobs.
Focused
Schools: Schools identified by the National Center for Research in Vocational
Education for their success in integrating academic and vocational studies to create a
special identity. Examples are Aviation High School, the High School of Fashion Industries
and the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences.
School-Based
Enterprise: Students provide services or produce goods in such enterprises as school
restaurants, construction projects, farms, child-care centers, auto repair shops or
production of school yearbooks or campus newspapers.
Mentoring:
Corporation-sponsored one-to-one relationships between an older employee and a part-time
worker still in high school. Mentors are often volunteer employees or retirees. Mentoring
takes place at school or at the workplace.
Alternative
Schools: Known for their individualized instruction and flexible scheduling, these
experimental schools integrate remedial reading, writing and math instruction into all
subjects, providing work/study options at the students’ own pace. They also offer
personal and career counseling, day care, family education and referrals to other agency
services.
Youth
Community Service:
Led by Minnesota in 1987, several states are appropriating money to allow recent high
school graduates or dropouts to work full time in such areas as conservation, recreation
and historic preservation. There is [some] interest in federal renewal of the 1930s
Civilian Conservation Corps.
Job
Corps: Dropouts or poorly prepared students in limited numbers are eligible for a
residential training, counseling and remedial education program under the Jobs Corps,
funded under the federal Job Training Partnership Act.
Contextual Learning
Interest in
youth apprenticeship has coincided with a re-examination of the benefits of vocational
education. Historically, writes Paul E. Barton, director of the Policy Information Center
of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) there was a “wall between academic/general
and vocational education.” There was a tendency among vocational advocates not to see
value in academics that do not have obvious application and a belief that their students
would not sit still for academic course work. “On the academic side,” Barton
writes, “there has been a tendency to belittle vocational education as being
second-class, or to believe this was not the best way to prepare for employment.”
But
nowadays, education specialists increasingly emphasize the value of practical—as
opposed to theoretical—instruction that is applied in a concrete situation.
“Contextual education,” explains Columbia University Teachers College Professor
Sue E. Berryman, is effective because it replicates the learning process of the young
child, “who is the most spectacular learner.”
In the early
years of a human life, she writes, “(1) learning takes place in context. Children
learn during their first five years in the midst of meaningful, ongoing activities and
receive immediate feedback on the success of their actions; (2) Parents and friends serve
as models for imitative learning and provide structure to and connections between their
experiences; (3) Learning is functional. Concepts and tools are acquired as tools to solve
problems; (4) The need for and purpose of the learning are explicitly stated for the
child.”
In an
apprenticeship or any school environment more oriented toward the work world, such theory
would have English students writing practice business letters instead of book reports on The
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and students of auto mechanics would stay literate in
the increasingly technical language of manufacturers’ parts manuals.
Apprentice
programs that were well integrated into school curriculums, advocates argue, would turn
out students far better prepared for the ever-changing job market than students in
traditional vocational education, where 60 percent of the participants “end up in
jobs that have nothing to do with the training they receive in high schools,” assert
Lerman and Pouncy.
New emphasis
on contextual learning might also motivate students to take their studies more seriously.
“Most kids think [academic] educational methods are torture devices invented by
teachers,” says Cornell’s Hamilton, “And they get that idea because they
can see that no one in the workplace is doing these things.” Concrete student
accomplishments in high school might in turn, prompt employers to take high school job
applicants more seriously, asking to see transcripts, for example, which currently they
seldom do.
“Most
employers look at the high school diploma as evidence of staying power, not of academic
achievement,” says the America’s Choice report. “They realized long
ago that it is possible to graduate from high school in this country and still be
functionally illiterate. As a result, the non-college-bound know that their performance in
high school is likely to have little or no bearing on the type of employment they manage
to find.”
Such a
change in school curricula would have to be accompanied by new efforts by school guidance
counselors to understand and inform students of the realities of the current job market.
… “Higher education is doing a
great job of selling college,” says Oregon’s Rahberger. “And in college
prep, there are catalogs, and everyone understands the criteria.” But if guidance
counselors could be asked to compare college prep and practical, job-related counseling,
“the question would be, which gives you more bang for your buck?”
Demonstration
Projects
Youth
apprenticeship has clearly moved form the talk to the action stage. … In Maine,
apprenticeship pilot projects [were introduced] in the fall of 1992 in three schools under
the supervision of Maine Technical College and state agencies. Maine’s former
governor, John R. McKernan Jr., got the inspiration for the program after watching
apprentices at work in Germany and Denmark.
In Arkansas
in 1992 one of the first state-funded apprentice programs placed 246 apprentices at 70
companies. One component of the program was a five-year apprenticeship for high school
juniors offered by the Metalworking Connection, a consortium of 67 small fabricating
companies organized at Henderson State University. It was modeled on a program in Italy
and was funded by sales tax and a portion of the Arkansas corporate income tax.
Oregon and
Wisconsin were the first states to model a youth apprentice program on the recommendations
of the America’s Choice report. Oregon’s program is part of a
comprehensive education-reform law. Beginning in the fall of 1992, 100 paid slots at six
schools were offered to high school juniors for a two-year period and matched with
registered training agents at companies around the state. The Wisconsin program,
established after state officials looked at Germany’s vocational education program,
is part of a larger “School-to-Work Initiative” passed by the Legislature that
provided funds for 10th grade “gateway assessment,” tech prep and
postsecondary enrollment options.
Business
groups have several pilot apprentice programs up and running. Since 1990, the National
Alliance of Business has presided over the Quality Connection Consortium, collaboration
with BankAmerica, San Francisco’s Mission High School, Sears, Roebuck & Co., and
the DuPage County (Illinois) Area Occupational Education System. It is one of six of
demonstration projects to receive early grants from the Labor Department.
Also since
1990, Jobs for the Future has been operating a foundation-supported National Youth
Apprenticeship Initiative at 10 sites, giving high school students apprenticeships in
manufacturing, office technology and health care. Similar foundation grants have been
awarded under the umbrella of the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, as
part of its general efforts to promote career-oriented education over past programs that
seemed merely to explore a student’s lifestyle, talents and interests.
Finally, in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, a nonprofit organization called Next Innovations launched a pilot
apprentice program that enables 18-to-24-year-olds to work in nonprofit community
development.
Faced with a
shortage of funds for registered-apprentice programs, many labor officials worry that
youth apprenticeships might exploit cheap labor and aid non-union firms in recruiting. But
some of their anxiety is dissipating. In the spring of 1992 the Federal Committee on
Apprenticeship stated, “the nation
should develop a comprehensive, seamless youth training program and education system that
responds to needs of all industries and all young people.”
Questions to be answered after the
required reading has been completed:
1.
Discover and write a two-line
description of four programs in your community that currently operate on the
school-to-work philosophy.
2. As above only substitute “state”
for “local” programs.
3.
Discover and write a paragraph or two describing two examples of federal
legislation that have been either proposed or enacted during the Clinton administration.
4.
Businesses often make partnerships with schools to introduce students to the
workplace. Discuss a situation like this in your community. (Hint: Contact your local
Chamber of Commerce.)
5.
What is meant by “outcome-based” in the illustration below?
“Apprenticeships must be outcome-based like a cosmetology school. When you
finish you must be able to cut hair, not just say you completed 1,000 hours of
training.”
Write a similar illustration of your own.
6.
From the reading, give three reasons the AFL-CIO might be opposed to youth
development programs.
7.
From the reading, give 3 reasons employers might be opposed to youth apprenticeship
programs.
8.
In the reading, Aviation High School, High School of Fashion Industries and the
High School for Agriculture Sciences were mentioned. Research on the Internet and describe
the program at one of these schools or another at another school you discover through the
National Center For Research in Vocational Education.
9.
What are the differences between contextual learning, applied learning, community-based
learning and experiential learning?
10.
In the required reading the federal government’s role was described in one
word. What was that word?