Marketing Schools as Local Partners:

Vocational Education and the Charter School Model in a USA Setting

 

Richard D. Lakes¹

 

[A presentation at the annual meeting of the EUROVET (European Vocational Education and Training Network) at the University of Erfurt, Germany, on September 20, 2002.  NOT FOR CITATION OR DUPLICATION.] Lakes, R.D. (in press). "Marketing schools as local partners: Vocational education and the charter school model in a USA setting."  In R. Huesmann et al., MARKETIZATION AND GOVERNANCE IN VET. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

 

 

Introduction

In the past two decades, Americans have witnessed a democratized polity speaking for greater local control of educational agendas.  Today, the monopoly of state-supported public instruction has eroded to some degree, as new alternative delivery systems emerge through decentralized networks, available for quick start-up, lessened bureaucratic regulations, and grassroots support.  No longer solely in the hands of educational professionals working within an ossified organization derided as the welfare state, the rapid growth of school choice models (including “charter schools”) suggests that contemporary neo-liberals pattern their ideas from global competitive capitalism.  That is, by shifting capital to new markets for purposes of economic development and growth, human resources are scrutinized for efficiency, accountability, and match for employability.  Educational decision-making once confined to transference of cultural knowledge now is subject to the technocratic dictates of the marketplace.  Enter vocational education.

 

Historically defined as preparation for crafts, trades, and industries, vocational education served the American working classes well--at least until the late 1970s.  Then, after the onset of corporate deindustrialization practices firmly shifted capital away from domestic labor, and turned to off-shore sites for routine production and piece-good fabrications (in Third World countries), education for a lifetime vocation or apprentice-trained calling (what the German’s call Beruf) became supplanted by a host of non-unionized, commonplace jobs in the service sector, with greater advancements in assorted manufacturing fields requiring technical skills such as in computerized functions, among others.  It is to this latter category of occupational skills--information technology--that many in the new labor force are directed through vocationally trained upper secondary education (years 11 & 12) and the post-secondary technical college (years 13 & 14).  Of course workers with higher levels of vocational education are expected to be more flexible in terms of know-how in the high-tech workplace.

This chapter describes the rise of a charter school, a local educational alternative in one community near Atlanta, Georgia, USA (in Coweta County) for purposes of illuminating a choice model for vocational education.  Charter schools are state-sanctioned entities that receive public monies for a term of three years (or more in some cases), whose plan of approval includes a documented improvement in student learning.  Free of bureaucratic entanglements, the charter school is held accountable for performance-based measures as well as answerable to parents of the students.  Increasingly, the market dictates educational needs as economic development efforts in the county attracted new manufacturers: the school promised customized job training and a fluid or seamless credentialing process, and in return received donations of new equipment for its laboratories.  A number of stakeholders within the nexus of business-industry-education-community-government surfaced to create the school (first opened in August of 2000).

 

The New Vocationalism

Declining enrollments in the early 1990s have led policymakers to try a number of experiments under a set of vocational reforms now titled the new vocationalism.  Carlson (1997: 47) argued that vocational education programs then had a very tough time finding job placements for their graduates.  Employers facing skills upgrade in the post-industrial economy desired workers with a set of broader basic skills in math and academic literacy training, instead of narrow trade-specific specializations.  Other reasons given for the decline in student enrollments, according to Carlson (1997: 47), were the intractability of gender-segregated vocational programs that failed to change with the times, and the image problem of vocational schooling being a dumping ground for low-track, low-achieving students.  In this latter sense: “The image or representation of vocational education not only kept many students away from vocational programs, but also provided a rationale for closing vocational programs, since policymakers could claim that by eliminating such programs they were promoting higher standards for students” (Carlson 1997: 47-48). 

The latest model of new vocationalism emerging in the U.S. vocational-technical delivery system is the employer-linked charter school (ELCS) that brings a variety of stakeholders--community participants--into the organizational design of workforce development.  In this sense business and industry leaders take active responsibility in the actual policymaking process of school operations, including decision-making in the curriculum and instruction arenas.  While not limited to those two functions, however, ELCS stakeholders exclusively may play a major role in the governance of the school through key assignments to steering committee and board seats.  Successful model building along these lines requires a coalition of interested parties, educators, parents, employers, government officials, come together with school-to-work programming foremost in their minds. 

The employer-linked charter school concept, defined as a “partnership with employers who are directly involved in the school’s design, governance and delivery of learning to students,” initially was recognized in 1997 by the U.S. Department of Education as a powerful tool for demonstrating how some of the premises of school-based reforms, such as parental choice, changing skill sets, and active learning (to name a few), can be integrated into the administrative system of vocational-technical education (Public Policy Associates et al. 1998: 1).  Of particular concern among industrialists at that time, in part represented by over 5,000 members in the National Alliance of Business, were implications of the new economic turn toward globalization, skilled labor shortages, restructuring within the manufacturing sector, the rise of computerized information systems, and greater attention to customer service--all of which impacted the training of young people, future workers, to learn changing workplace proficiencies. 

Coterminous with on-going questions about the educational system’s responsiveness to workforce development was the heightened awareness of policymakers that newly enacted and federally-funded charter school legislation just might provide the right set of conditions to achieve new educational innovations, which would offer “significant new marketplace dynamics in public education,” a contract policy research firm in Michigan noted (Public Policy Associates et al. 1999: 2); “With their increased flexibility, such schools provide a rich and growing laboratory for redefining public education.”  U.S. policymakers endorsed this model of workforce development precisely because the design offers independence in which to circumvent traditional bureaucracy within the public school system as well as “leverage change” so that a variety of actors become directly invested in the bottom-up process of reform; in order to “assemble a learning program to meet today’s learning needs and goals for students and stakeholders such as employers” ((Public Policy Associates et al. 1998: 14). 

Federal charter school legislation began in 1994 with authorization for the next year of $15 million for state distribution to help fund start-up expenses.  In 1998, Congress renewed the law and increased spending to $100 million for fiscal year 1999 (Leal 1999).  By law charters are public entities managed by members of the community and free from many of the state and local regulations governing traditional public schools (Smith 2001).  Choice conscious parents and other constituents quickly adopted a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors in the nation.  In Arizona, charter applications were granted to a diversity of schools that followed philosophies from Montessori to Waldorf, E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge schools, back-to-basics themes, vocational-technical education, and schools for at-risk youth, among others (Stout & Garn 1999).  In the 1997 to 1998 academic year, nationally 70 percent of charter schools were newly created start-ups, the remainder were split between preexisting private and public schools that switched to charter status (Good & Braden 2000).  By 1999, over 1,500 US charter schools were in operation or had been approved to begin classes (Smith 2001).  Charters are tenured for periods anywhere from a short 3 years (as in Georgia’s new law) to an unusually long-term of 15 years (in Arizona), but can be renewed depending upon state mandates (Good & Braden 2000). 

One attractive feature of charter schools is scale, with median student enrollments only about 25 percent that of conventional public schools (Yancey 2000).  This usually means a lower student-teacher ratio as well.  Although unshackled from laws governing a host of operations (e.g., pertaining to teacher qualifications or the delivery of cafeteria meals), charters are accountable for improved student achievement, although school leaders must show evidence of measurable outcomes through timely evaluations.

 

The Study

What follows is a technical analysis of the founding stages of the Central Education Center (CEC), an ELCS in the state of Georgia that was approved on May 13, 1999, about 30 miles southwest of Atlanta in the city of Newnan.  Located in Coweta County, Newnan has a population of approximately 16,000, and it is the fifth fastest growing county in the state with over 85,000 residents (now nearly 100,000 residents).  The school opened in August of 2000 with an initial enrollment of about 400 students in grades 10 to 12, and plans are to expand two-fold after the first full year of operations.  Of particular interest is the cross-fertilization of secondary and post-secondary program offerings--called seamless education--within one building that required articulation agreements between the county board of education and the state technical college system.  The state governor described the educational model as follows: “If they plan it right, students can graduate from high school on Friday, graduate with a technical college certificate on Saturday, and begin work on Monday in a job that has been waiting for them” (Robinson 2001, 36A). 

Information on the school’s start-up was gathered through digital research databases, articles, and local and regional newspapers, as well as semi-structured interviews with the major stakeholders, unpublished manuscripts and memoranda from steering committee members, ephemera including letters of support from governmental officials, and field notes on aspects of the school operations.  The interviewees included: (a) two members of the CEC steering committee, one was the curriculum director of the county school system and the other was a performance technologist and educational consultant; (b) the school principal, titled the chief executive officer (actually, the Director of High School Program is the “Principal”—my role as CEO is to hold and expand the partnerships among business, the School System and the Technical College); (c) the director of the county Chamber of Commerce; (d) the plant manager of a well-known metals extrusion company; (e) an adult literacy specialist; and (f) two employees of the State of Georgia Department for Technical and Adult Education, one of whom was the commissioner; the other director of special projects. 

 

The Stakeholders

     A number of nations now dedicated to skill upgrading have exhibited social partnerships that use consensus-seeking practices and stakeholder involvement in vocational education and training policy.  Brown (2001, 36) named the process “building national settlements” among government, employers, and workers, and noted it was distinguished foremost by trust and cooperation.  “The more workplace learning, innovation, and productivity are seen to depend on technical, interpersonal, and self-management skills of a large proportion of the workforce,” he wrote, “the more the discretionary commitment to acquire skills, to be innovative and creative, to work constructively with others, matters in terms of overall performance of the economy” (33).  Finlay (1998, 11) advanced the notion of participatory democracy embedded in stakeholder politics but recognized the tension in achieving consensus among constituents who have been historically situated as rivals.  He ventured that it is possible to agree “on a set of shared values about education while group members retain very different political and religious values.”  Brand (1998), former Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education under President George H.W. Bush, insisted that vocational education and training policy formation in the US was a direct result of such consensual alliances operating at the state, local and national levels, explicitly among six stakeholder groups: students, parents of students, employers, taxpayers, representatives from the education and training industry, and government officials and policymakers.

     One commonality shared by stakeholders linked with the creation of the Central Education Center was their recognition of the importance of up-skilling or re-skilling the local labor force.  The school principal (rather, the CEO), with over 18 years experience in banking, declared that businesses considering relocation to Coweta County always looked closely at labor’s access to educational facilities.  “Companies used to look first for a workforce but they figured out in this new economy, nobody has the workforce” able to perform at the skilled level.  Relocating firms near universities can become a strategic advantage for businesses as well; however, changing employment patterns dictate future workers gain work-based learning through vocational-technical education.  The president of the Newnan-Coweta County Chamber of Commerce explained that corporations not presently located there would look to CEC as “a training ground to help build their companies.” 

The local plant manager, instrumental in alerting the county school superintendent to the problems of workforce development, concurred that a “difficult labor market” plaguing the industry for years, was now magnified by the changing technical requirements employees are expected to carry in their mental toolboxes.  Highly computerized manufacturing processes in the metals extrusion industry required more depth of training beyond simply reading a rule and calculating fractions.  Even so, many prospective employees have difficulty passing sixth-grade math and reading tests administered by the company.  He firmly believed in “continuous improvement,” a process devoted to monitoring the quality of in-house manufacturing and administrative practices as well as the growth of human capital development.  In fact, the firm’s commitment to local educational institutions included holding a seat on the CEC steering committee during the planning and design stages and on the board of directors at the nearby technical college, that reflected a dedication to business-industry-education partnerships.  Additionally, the plant manager admired “the whole idea of the seamless thing”--combining secondary and post-secondary vocational-technical programs in one building so that students no longer had to surmount articulation hurdles.  “I’m still amazed to this day,” he stated, “that we took a local school system that has a whole separate set of objectives, budgets, everything and we took a technical school that is part of a state system that’s got its own goals and objectives, and prior to this [CEC] they didn’t even talk to each other.” 

The state department commissioner spoke about the seamless educational process and the potential integration of secondary and post-secondary vocational education throughout the state.  “When you marry a technical college and a high school together, the essential pieces of the way you do business go with it,” he argued, allowing for a “great deal of flexibility.”  One example of this can be seen in the offer of dual credits to students for taking Advanced Placement (these really aren’t “AP” classes, but rather are taught directly by the college) courses for college credit.  Moreover, instructors employed by the technical college taught secondary-level (the classes taught are those actually taught to any adult enrolled in a technical college in Georgia.  There isn’t a “secondary” course and a separate “post-secondary” course.  In fact, we have a growing number of cases, in Years 2 and 3, in which we have seen high school students and adults together in the same postsecondary class) certification courses on the same floor together in one building at CEC.  “There are basically two entities that are fused together in the school,” the commissioner said about the charter model, “and I challenge you to tell me when you walk down the hall which is which.” 

The state governor worked closely with the stakeholders in the chartering process and matched $7 million as an incentive grant (the county provided $7 million in an existing middle-school facility and surrounding acreage for the project).   In addition the county raised $3 (the allocation was to have been $3.5 million, we actually spent only $2 million of SPLOST dollars because we received both the State Model Project Grant and the dollars from business) million in a Special Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST)--a one-cent sales tax increase to be used for capital construction to renovate the facility.  Area businesses and industries contributed another $500,000.  At the school’s groundbreaking observance and again at the dedication ceremony, the governor touted the advantages of this workforce development model of seamless education that collapsed the compartmentalized silos of secondary and postsecondary education (Holsendolph 2002; Skinner 2002).  Moreover, he listed four reasons why CEC should become an exemplary state model: (1) it used the resources of the state’s post-secondary technical college system; (2) it allowed articulation no matter where students are physically enrolled; (3) it involved business leaders in planning the school; and (4) it drew upon the charter school law to create a publicly-funded experimental form of educating children. 

 

The Champion

     Brand (1998, 146) noted that for a stakeholder group to initiate a number of targeted activities or get off the ground, it was essential to “identify an agent or champion of change.”  While champions could be more than one person including a group or alliance of leaders, nonetheless, they “must be able to articulate a vision of what effective change would mean for the primary stakeholders, and then be able to expand that vision to other stakeholders, in order to build support” (146).  Champions or change agents have to reach out and build a coalition of community constituents who support the vision. 

In the beginnings of CEC, the champion was an educational consultant and retired performance technologist, a local resident with over thirty years working with private industry in solving training problems related to changes in manufacturing. Here the champion, author of an award-winning book on human resource development (Harless 1998), applied his know-how of vocational curriculum development to a novel business-industry-education-community partnership by serving as CEC steering committee chair prior to gaining the charter, and directing 22 members responsible for constructing the model, including a state legislator, representatives from three area post-secondary institutions, staff from the county school district office, in-town governmental officials, and area business leaders.  “It was an idea whose time had come,” the champion exclaimed; “there was zero opposition, everyone was completely on board” (Foster 2001, 70).

Members of the steering committee began planning in earnest several years before charter approval, in 1997, with a study of area employment concerns and analysis of data from the state department of labor, the area technical colleges, and national sources.  In addition, a local needs assessment (designed in consultation with the champion) was distributed to businesses and results tabulated for about 50 organizations employing nearly 10,000 people; the survey identified over 75 job titles of which one-half were from the manufacturing sector.  Respondents noted that job growth was expected to accelerate, among a number of findings about the future of economic development impacting educational services in the region.  More to the point, area employers and community leaders were troubled by inadequate preparation of job seekers: about one-third of citizens in the county did not have a high school diploma (college graduates numbered less than 15 percent), and teenage pregnancy rates were 4 points above the state average of 16 percent--potential impediments in producing a quality workforce in the future (21st Century Coweta 1999).  

The survey noted which potential vocational-technical course offerings employers might want to see provided by the Central Education Center.  Four occupational clusters were identified at that time: human services, with programs in child care and foods; health and medical, with programs in health occupations and certified nursing assistant; business, marketing and information systems, with programs in graphic arts, marketing and business education; and technology and engineering, with programs in computer repair and networking, construction, metals, and manufacturing.  Worth mentioning was the common point of view that the Center would consolidate vocational program offerings in the trade and industrial and career clusters which had been taught at three area high schools, hence course duplication would be minimized and staffing patterns centralized at the new facility. 

Of particular interest to the steering committee planners were survey results indicating local employers discontent with the work deficiencies of new hires: tardiness, absences, poor teamwork, unsafe behavior, resentfulness of authority, conflicts with supervisors, cursing, theft, racist/sexist actions, and so forth.  The champion was most adamant that CEC could deliver on a curriculum to answer the need for soft skills in addition to technical, accomplishment-based content.  In fact, his research on employers indicated a strong desire to have schools teach the work ethic and related topics than even traditional vocational-technical skills (Harless 1998).  Today the CEC uses an evaluative rubric covering ten work ethic traits confirming the champion’s determination to promote good student-work attitudes. 

 

School Organization

Parents, educators, and industry representatives composed the CEC board’s administrative structure as directed by charter school law.  Of the seventeen-member governing council, 9 seats were for parents, 4 for faculty and administration, and 4 for business representatives (one seat was designated for small firms less than 100 employees; the other for large firms greater than 100 employees; one representative from the Chamber of Commerce; and another from the [business] community at-large).  Due to the seamless articulation model two of the four CEC board seats for faculty/staff were designees from the county secondary-level school system and the technical college system--both could hold dual appointments on their own system’s board as well. 

Georgia’s charter schools must exhibit performance goals to improve student learning as well as a plan for measuring progress along these lines.  Toward that end CEC charter petitioners initially proposed a 5 percent reduction (actually proposed a reduction to 5 percent in the annualized high school dropout rate) in dropouts, increased attendance by 3 percent, raised pass-rates on graduation tests by several percentages over the five-year term.  Even more ambitious is the goal to place at least 95 percent of CEC completers in related postsecondary programs or allied jobs within 90 days after graduation.  (Assessment instruments and evaluation plans for measuring school performance criteria are forthcoming.)

Noteworthy are the CEC community-education functions serving adults, such as preparation for non-completers of a General Educational Development (GED) diploma and the evening high school.  Computer literacy classes are offered as well, run by a non-profit organization housed in the Center that serves the primarily African-American constituents of the immediate neighborhood. (The G3 organization is no longer on campus.  The need to grow core services for high school, technical college and basic literacy has necessitated a move for G3.) CEC provides off-campus learning activities, with opportunities for job shadowing, supervised paid or unpaid internships, and long-term youth apprenticeships.  Other work-based experiences are Habitat for Humanity’s Newnan-Coweta chapter, which has partnered with CEC for help in its homebuilding projects serving low-income residents (Skinner 2001b); and the Preservation Trust of the Newnan-Coweta Historical Society that has asked CEC students to help in restoration of an historic in-town property (Sager 2002).

 

Economic Development

     Charter school models embrace the ideal of parental choice, institutional autonomy, and shared-decision making--three of the most popular strategies embodied in the US educational reform movement (Whitty, Power & Halpin 1998).  Yet employer-linked charter schools in particular also help to strengthen the quality of the local workforce, while providing employers with a pool of qualified candidates.  It could be argued that vocational charter schools boost the local economy, and serve as magnets to firms considering relocation and expansion possibilities into new geographic regions.  This is the case for CEC.  The school can point to its role in stimulating economic development where situated in the city of Newnan and identify the rise in industrial growth and business expansion benefiting Coweta County.

At about the same time that the Center was preparing its charter, 21st Century Coweta, a partnership of local government and the private sector issued a report entitled Coweta Vision 2020 which spelled-out the potential pitfalls for the local economy in the not-to-distant future (21st Century Coweta 1999).   The tax-base was weak due to the lack of vital job growth, a factor that contributed to sluggishness in the early 1990s.  While 15 percent of the county was in farmland, producing $9.7 million worth of commodities in livestock, forestry and ornamental horticulture, only 9 percent of the property tax base lay within industrial zoning (Sager 2001).  Recently, the influx of new residents, the fifth fastest growing county in the state, has turned Coweta into a bedroom community close to the metro-Atlanta region (roughly 43 percent of Coweta residents commute outside the county; a large contingent works at the Atlanta airport).  Anticipated business expansion prompted city leaders to fund infrastructure improvements such as a 300-mile broadband fiber-optic network linking all of the county school buildings and libraries; the entire system is used for high-speed Internet access, teleconferencing, cable TV, telephone, utility monitoring and automated meter reading (Walton 2000; Jackson 2001). 

Worldwide firms are being drawn to the county in part due to technology and industrial parks (designated as a US tariff-free sub-zone) that can waive import duties for merchandise used in assembly, packaging and processing, or distribution (Robertshaw 1990).  Growing light commercial space is defined by easy on/off interstate highway access, and the Atlanta-Hartsfield International Airport is just 25-minutes drive away (the regional Newnan-Coweta County Airport is planning runway extensions).  Industrial recruiters can promise state authorized reduced-rate contracts on natural gas and electric power, specifically to curb the threat of firms desiring to leave in search of cheaper suppliers elsewhere (Quinn 1997).  Evidently rate rollbacks are justified as a kind of tax abatement that keeps people employed in Georgia.  Non-union labor in the region is an additional plus.  Such is the justification in neighboring Southeastern states which successfully lure foreign automakers with generous subsidies: Mercedes received over $250 million or $167,000 for each of its 1,500 jobs opened at an Alabama plant in 1993, and another $253.8 million went to Hyundai; Nissan was courted with a $295 million package of incentives in Mississippi; and BMW was wooed into South Carolina for comparable reasons (Cobb 2002).  Apparently Daimler-Chrysler has settled for an undisclosed industrial site in the Charleston-Savannah-Jacksonville area in which to build a cargo van plant, but reportedly once eyed a large tract of land in the southern part of Coweta County (Jackson 2000b; Paul 2002).

The business enticements just mentioned brought Slumberland Corporation, a British-owned mattress company with manufacturing and showroom sites in 40 countries, to the county with an investment of $20 million and a promise of 150 jobs.  Prince Philip was on-hand to ceremonially open the plant as well as meet with county students engaged in school-based entrepreneurship training (Smith 2000a, 2000b).  And Yamaha Corporation, which initially threatened to leave the state, expanded its local operations employing about 800 workers to the tune of $50 million and a promise of another 300 jobs in its golf cart division (Paul 2000).  (Another large private employer in the county is the William L. Bonnell Company, founded in 1956, that employs roughly 750 people.)

Importantly, the Central Education Center had been credited with keeping Yamaha from looking elsewhere.  It will deliver customized technical training for future workers on a technology lab installed at the school with a $25,000 donation from the company (Ellis 2000; Paul 2000).  In fact, the charter school is a regular stop on economic development tours by international visitors investigating expansion possibilities in the county.  Representatives from about 20 telecommunications and software firms in Finland, for instance, toured Newnan’s technology parks and the Center (Jackson 2000a; Paul 2000).  Business partners such as 3M Corporation provided $107,000 worth of fiber-optic material and labor for the schools’ 800 computers, and Lab-Volt of New Jersey donated $126,000 in equipment for the information technology program at CEC (Foster 2001; Skinner 2001a). 

 

Conclusion

In the US many are uneasy with the intrusion of business elites influence, power, and control within public education. Critics Apple (2001) and Molnar (1996), among others, point-out that granting economic development inducements to corporations emboldens businesses to privilege their educational imperatives at taxpayer expense.  “If only school could turn out more high-skilled workers,” Carlson (1997, 57) explained the logic; “there would be fewer low-skill, low-paying jobs in the economy.”  Yet this thinking is flawed, he continued, because corporate policies favor hiring cheap labor in the service sector, using temporary and contingent workers.  Apple (2001) claimed that high-tech education impacts a very small minority of the paid workforce.  “More cashiers jobs will be created by the year 2005,” he surmised, “than jobs for computer scientists, systems analysts, physical therapists, operations analysts, and radiologic technicians combined” (43). 

In spite of the criticism school choice reformers believe that free market policies optimize resources and reward entrepreneurial endeavors--an ideological position advanced by so-called neo-liberals or market capitalists (Korten 1995; Wells, Slayton, Scott 2002).  Yes, new corporate-styled organizational designs are admired by educational leaders who can implement cost-cutting measures effecting building operations and faculty functions such as hiring non-certified and non-union teachers, link curriculum and instructional practices to industry standards, and self-govern without external authority.  But that does not mean business influence undermines democratic ideals.  Charter schools operate as “quasi-markets” and still have to answer to state authorities (Whitty, Power, and Halpin 1998, 3). 

Grubb (1996, 137) rightly pointed out the “contradictory messages” emerging from rhetorical claims of business and industry in the past two decades, ones that are driving the new vocationalism.  There is a big difference in the demand for job-specific technical skills and that of the national reform commissions arguing for student readiness in workplace competencies and know-how, notably emerging from the US Department of Labor’s Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (the 1991 SCANS Report).  Wirth (1992, 71), too, cautioned that the business perspective on schooling offered a “mixed message” because its historic stance on technical, job-specific schooling has benefited Fordism alone--not self-actualized personhood and egalitarian community.  The promise of the new vocationalism, he continued, is that all children could have access to an education in what Robert Reich, former secretary of the US Department of Labor, termed symbolic-analytical learning: “people who solve, identify and broker problems by manipulating symbols” using abstractions, systems thinking, experimentation, and collaboration (Wirth 1992, 67). 

Certainly the employer-linked charter school model encourages business participation in vocational-technical education through closer working partnerships.  Employer interest in public education arose in the nation at a time when businesses anticipated rising industry standards would make it harder for educators invested in vocational-technical training to fully identify and chart the sea change in career pathways and skills preparation.  Industrial representatives lent their expertise to re-defining learning outcomes within the world of work.  “Partnerships with businesses are central to the integration of workplace skills with academic and technical coursework,” noted Raby (1995, 88-89), a curriculum consultant and national expert on school-within-school career academies.  “Formation and maintenance of strong school/business partnerships are not easy tasks,” she cautioned; “Often, neither schools nor businesses know how to collaborate in such efforts, much less take the lead to clearly define the roles for each entity.” 

The capitalist political economy has been reordered under globalization, and previous educational settlements that served well working-class kids under Fordism are reconfigured and renamed to reflect the perceived needs of industry (Brown 1987).  Assorted manufacturing fields now require technicians install and monitor computerized functions in telecommunications; others need advanced training as managers and professionals in specialty industries or in sales and administrative support roles (Levesque, et al. 2000).  It is to this shift of occupations in the information and services economy that vocational students are directed at the sub-baccalaureate level through a number of educational options (Grubb 1996).  In the US, the new vocationalism features an integrated curriculum approach of combined academic and applied study in secondary-level occupational education as embodied in the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act (Benson 1997).

ELCS models showcase training for the new economy and just may revive declining student enrollments in vocational-technical education, a development that roughly parallels labor market changes in skill levels over the past two decades (Hurst and Hudson 2000).  For example, evidence from US high school transcripts in the years 1982 to 1998 revealed a pattern of below-average course taking in two occupational areas: trade and industry (production, craft and repair) and business (secretaries and typists).  However, that downturn was offset by above-average growth rates in technology and communications, food service, health and child-care clusters.  Traditional vocational course taking has given way to a trend in academic preparation, moreover, as more and more occupations require some type of advanced educational linkages to post-secondary credentials (Levesque, et al. 2000).

Lastly, ELCS models are part and parcel of a major movement in the knowledge-based economy where new technological processes and production systems involve workers in sharing and disseminating information--specialists employed in so-called high performance firms as technicians and managers; professionals involved, inspired, and challenged to learn-to-learn in self-directed teams.  Work redesigns, say the management experts, facilitate organizational learning under post-Fordism: information is necessary and accessible in order to promote allied decision-making and ensure quality control measures (Zuboff 1988).  Schools, too, can be viewed as learning organizations with open access to lines of communication and expansive types of information for experimentation and innovation.  But there is no guarantee that they will be sole providers of know-how.  According to Peter Drucker (1993):

as knowledge becomes the resource of post-capitalist society, the social position of school as “producer” and “distributive channel” of knowledge, and its monopoly, are both bound to be challenged.... What will be taught and learned; how it will be taught and learned; who will make use of schooling; and the position of the school in society

--all of this will change greatly during the ensuring decades. (209)

As newer alternative organizational designs for the field of vocational education and training arise, only time will tell whether employer-linked charter schools hold forth promise as a choice model preparing students for work in the global marketplace. 

 

 

Notes

1. Richard D. Lakes is associate professor and program coordinator in the Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA (USA) [rlakes@gsu.edu].  He is grateful to Janet Z. Burns for assistance with data collection in the study.

 

 

 

 

References

 

Apple, M. (2001) Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (NY: RoutledgeFalmer).

 

Benson, C.S. (1997) “New vocationalism in the United States: Potential problems and outlook,” Economics of Education Review, 16(3), 201-212.

 

Brand, B. (1998) “The process of change in vocational education and training in the United States,” in I. Finlay, S. Niven, and S. Young, (eds.) Changing Vocational Education and Training: An International Comparative Perspective, 137-155 (London: Routledge).

 

Brown, P. (2001)  “Skill formation in the twenty-first century,” in P. Brown, A. Green and H. Lauder, High Skills: Globalization, Competitiveness, and Skill Formation, 1-55 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

 

Brown, P. (1987).  Schooling Ordinary Kids: Inequality, Unemployment, and the New Vocationalism (London: Tavistock Publications).

 

Carlson, D. (1997) Making Progress: Education and Culture in New Times (NY: Teachers College Press).

 

Cobb, J. (2002, July 7) “Offering sweet deals to industry puts South in worldwide spotlight,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, F1-2. 

 

Drucker, P.F. (1993) Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperBusiness).

 

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