Dear friends,
I've had some experience in the School-to-Work arena as well, working to
facilitate and integrate diverse stakeholder groups in a large urban
school district.
The School-to-Work focus allowed us to bring together a number of folks
who simply weren't talking much across their diverse roles: business
folks, union folks, ROP, JTPA, Perkins Voc Ed folks, Special Ed folks,
higher ed folks, library folks, machinists, Adult School folks, high
school teachers and administrators and some elementary education folks.
That was the (somewhat) enlightening part, though not really surprising,
finding out just how little people knew about each others' work and
resources.
My interest and challenge was to get the group not only to look at new
possibilities for collaboration or coordination or resource sharing, but
to address the issue of a majority minority (mostly language minority)
school-age population. Few of them had adequately addressed language
minority issues in their programs.
While some high schools had developed Career Academies and Career
"Houses" they had simultaneously created "ESL Academies." It took a lot
of work to get the group to recognize that creating career and higher
education pathways for native English speakers and only creating
opportunities to develop English language skills for English Language
Learners does not constitute either an equitable or desirable
School-to-Work program. We had to look at the language requirements and
possibilities for inclusion in internships, externships and academic
learning opportunities for speakers of languages other than English.
The group had also not considered ways to support involvement of the
growing number of small and medium minority-run businesses (though all
of the literature makes clear that most jobs are in the small and
medium-sized businesses). Mapping opportunities in the healthcare
industry and in public policy also came up, but with a largely
white-guys network the initiative and a sense of the real potentials was
not strong enough at the time. Some of the more innovative arrangements
were made for work opportunities working in the Ports, which make use of
some fairly high tech machinery (and high tech training programs), with
an active union membership.
Pinpointing the object or objects of that complex mix of ostensibly
joint activities might make an interesting case in itself. People were
driven by everything from the requirements of their federal funding
streams, to fear of the perceived changing demographics, to jockying for
position a a "city father" - two separate business groups formed, in
part, it seemed to one-up the other, though we ended up getting the two
together. Country club affiliations including who is "in" and who is
"out" also affected who participated at which meetings and towards what
ends.
Ultimately the group came together around the common watering hole of a
new funding opportunity so some gains were made both rhetorically and
operationally in bringing factions together towards the "seamless"
ideal. I think things most approximate becoming "seamless" when joint
decision-making over budgets is agreed upon (which is rare).
Just a few notes on School-to-Work.
In Peace,
K.
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