By Randi Weingarten and Neil Sullivan
For the past two decades, American public education has focused on rigorous academics as the way to ensure that students are prepared for the future — college, career, and life in general. There is no doubt that establishing higher academic standards for all students has increased the number of students succeeding academically. However, it is also true that many students have not responded to elevated expectations and that racial and socioeconomic disparities continue to persist.
In response to these persistent disparities, there is an emerging consensus is we can reach more students more effectively by weaving career exploration and work-based learning — often referred to as “career-connected learning” — into the high school experience. Career and technical education (CTE) programs have long known the value of integrating academic instruction, skills training, and work-based learning for a long time. While this approach is beneficial for all students, it is essential for some, particularly those who do not respond well to traditional academic instruction. It cannot be limited to vocational-technical high schools.
Some school districts do career-connected learning exceptionally well. They design industry-based career exploration curricula for signature courses that define career pathways. They partner with employers to provide career-oriented work experiences. When students are exposed to a variety of career opportunities and the education required for each, they begin to aspire in ways that motivate them academically. Many school districts are integrating career awareness within the curriculum as early as the middle grades.
Once students reach high school, youth employment becomes part of the equation. The workplace can become a learning place, focusing on developing a critical set of skills — communication, collaboration, and problem-solving, to name a few. When students learn new skills in the context of a paid internship, they begin to understand what they do well and what they enjoy doing. When combined with ongoing career exploration, work-based learning offers a powerful complement to the classroom. Plus, there’s nothing like fun a paycheck to get a teenager’s attention.
Good intentions alone will not create a career-connected learning system, especially not a robust one that reaches beyond the school day and the school year. It takes a well-designed public-private partnership and dedicated staffing at the local level to engage employers and connect students with paid internships and work-based learning.
In Boston, for example, the city’s workforce development board, the Private Industry Council, has stepped in to meet the need. Best known as the PIC, Boston’s workforce board places career specialists in the city’s high schools to identify, prepare, and match students with paid internships. It also deploys an employer engagement team to recruit businesses and institutions and to help them manage their internship programs and related school-year activities.
In Massachusetts, this intermediary work is referred to as “connecting activities” and the state budget features a specific line item for this purpose that flows through the education department to each of the Commonwealth’s sixteen workforce development boards. This funding mechanism facilitates collaboration between public education and the public workforce system at the local level, ensuring that there is an infrastructure of staff and relationships in place to make work-based learning possible.
Fortunately, we can do this at the national level as well. The Department of Labor oversees a network of workforce development boards that parallel the nation’s public schools — we just have to connect them. A national school-to-career initiative that makes these connections possible at the local level holds great promise for integrating what students learn in school with career exploration and work-based learning. Workforce boards offer an already existing infrastructure to help tie them together.
Funding intermediary structures to help an ever-increasing number of students gain access to career-connected learning is an economic imperative as well as a moral one. Our country faces a shortage of skilled workers, hampering economic growth and competitiveness. Not everyone learns the same way, and we can’t afford to leave anyone behind.
Strengthening and expanding the school-to-career pipeline could have substantial benefits for both students and employers. Career-connected learning — and the collaboration it requires between education and workforce development — has the potential to enhance our economic competitiveness, while addressing social and economic justice issues in a measurable way. It’s time we make it the norm, not the exception.
Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers. Neil Sullivan is executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, Boston’s workforce development board.