STUDENT TRANSITION

Student's Successful Transition To The High School Environment



Student's Successful Transition To The High School Environment

Section 1-(Issue)

Too many students leave high school without the occupational and academic skills to succeed in the workplace or in postsecondary education. School-to-work transition initiatives offer a promising approach to this issue and require major school restructuring. Yet only about 50 percent of graduating seniors enroll in postsecondary education, and only half of them attain bachelor's degrees. Students who do not plan to pursue a four-year degree after graduation often are placed in a "general track" - which leads nowhere - and expectations for their academic achievement tend to be low. Although many excellent high school occupational programs exist, the (Bry & George 1980)reports that enrollments in vocational programs are declining, as are the number of occupational programs nationally. Add in a national high school dropout rate of 11 percent - and as high as 50 percent in some urban areas - and the net result is that the majority of American high school students approach adulthood without the skills to sustain themselves economically or succeed in postsecondary education.

At the same time, the U.S. economy faces a serious challenge from international competition, while technology advances at breakneck speed. The resulting changes in skill requirements may particularly affect women's paid employment, the educational needs of rural women, and employment opportunities for minorities, because these groups traditionally have been employed in low-skill and clerical jobs - jobs that are becoming more scarce in the new global economy. Indeed, (Green & Scott 1995) said that 89 percent of the jobs created in the United States between 1992 and 2000 will require postsecondary levels of literacy and numeracy, but only half of those entering the workforce are likely to have those skills. In other words, the skills that employers need and the skills that potential employees have are mismatched.

Meanwhile, even as the world's best companies are redesigning themselves to increase productivity, quality, variety, and speed, most American businesses are still organized around the mass production economy of the early 1900s (Linver & Silverberg 1997). Too many American companies do not make the investments in human resources and training needed for a high-performance workplace.

Clearly, while improving education is not the only answer to the country's economic problems, the education system needs to be restructured to prepare students for success in the workplace and postsecondary education. The federal government is attempting to stimulate such restructuring with the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994. The law funds activities in three arenas: school-based learning, work-based learning, and connecting activities. A core theme of the Act is the need to integrate academic and vocational learning, school-based and work-based learning, and secondary and postsecondary education.

The Act cites tech prep, youth apprenticeship , career academies, and cooperative education as "promising" school-to-work activities. Local partnerships can design systems that meet their local needs through school-based learning, work-based learning, and connecting activities.

Because the research is clear that the first year of high school is pivotal, but the transition ...