School to Makework

Of all the attempts to reform education, the so-called school-to-work program, in many ways, looked like the most promising. Even the name had a nice back-to-basics feel to it.

After all, one of the most tangible ways of measuring the failure of progressive education is the degree to which students graduate into the workplace virtually unprepared for the transition. Now, even the greatest proponents of the program admit that its record is mixed at best.

“Career academies made no difference in scores or graduation rates but did affect post-graduate earnings,” says James Kemple of the Manpower Research Demonstration Corporation. The MRDC has been promoting school-to-work initiatives for more than 20 years.

Valerie Lee of the University of Michigan made a case study of career academies. She found that the vocational aspect of the institutes mattered more to the creators of those institutions than to the consumers of the vocational training.

“When asked, students admitted they picked the schools not on career themes but based on whether or not their friends went there and on how easy they were,” Lee says. Both Lee and Kemple spoke at a conference on education sponsored by the Center for Education at the National Academies.

“We’re making modest differences,” Kemple says of overall efforts at education reform. “For instance, we’re moving graduation rates by five or ten percentage points.”

“Only 68 percent of the nation’s high school freshmen—and only about half of African-American and Hispanic students—graduate on time,” researcher Craig D. Jerald reports. “Just 57 percent of high school graduates take the core academic courses proposed by a national commission two decades ago.”

“As a result, only one in three high school freshmen graduate on time with the academic preparation necessary to succeed in college.” A principal partner in The Education Trust, Jerald served as project director for the annual Quality Counts report when he worked as a senior editor at Education Week.

“And while test scores of younger students have risen in recent years, with 9-year-olds scoring higher in reading and math than ever before on national measures and racial achievement gaps at their lowest level in 30 years of tracking them, today’s 17-year-olds score no higher in reading and math than did teenagers in the early 1970s,” Jerald writes. “Nor are high schools doing well by many of their best-prepared students.”

“One-quarter of Chicago students entering high school in 1999 in the city’s top achievement quintile ran into serious academic trouble by the end of the Ninth grade, and only 37 percent of those struggling students graduated four years later.”

Ironically, compared to most metropolitan school systems, Chicago’s has a stellar track record in recent years. “I have long recommended getting rid of the low-level courses like ‘Checkbook Math’ and opening up the high-level curriculum,” Lee says. “In 1998, Chicago did that.”

“The graduation rate is not great but it has not moved.” In other words, the graduation rate, of high school students who actually graduate, has neither increased nor decreased markedly.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.