School-to-work programs: information from two surveys

Monthly Labor Review, August, 2001 by Mary Joyce, David Neumark

Data from the 1996 School Administrator's Survey show that three-fifths of U.S. high schools offer school-to-work programs, while data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey show that nearly two-fifths of students participate in such programs; also, public high school students and those who work are more likely to participate in school-to-work programs

In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed the School-to-Work Opportunities Act providing federally funded grants to the States and to local partnerships of business, government, education, and community organizations to develop "school-to-work systems." (1) The law encouraged the States and their local partners to develop models that would work best for their particular situations. As a result, the features of school-to-work programs often vary from grant to grant and thus are difficult to describe in general terms. The Act did, however, outline three core elements that all school-to-work programs must entail: (2)

* School-based learning, which encompasses rigorous classroom instruction that is linked to workplace experiences and provides students with the information and skills needed to identify and prepare for promising careers;

* Work-based learning, which includes work experience, structured training, and other workplace learning experiences appropriate to students' career interests and linked to school curricula;

* Connecting activities, which are efforts undertaken to help employers and schools forge and maintain links between the school-based and work-based components of school-to-work programs.

The general goal of the School-to-Work Act is to improve the transitions from school to work for all youths in the United States. The Act points to a "lack of a comprehensive and coherent system to help youths acquire the knowledge, skills, abilities, and information about and access to the labor market that are necessary to make an effective transition from school to work or further education." (3)

In this article, we are interested in studying the extent to which school-to-work programs have been implemented in our Nation's high schools since the Act's passage in 1994, as well as the extent to which high school students are choosing to participate in these programs. To inform our study, we use two promising new data sources. The first, the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), provides information obtained directly from students on the extent to which they participated in school-to-work programs. The second source, the 1996 School Administrator's Survey (SAS96), provides information obtained from the schools attended by the NLSY97 interviewees on whether they offered any school-to-work programs. Using these data sources, we examine the prevalence of school-to-work programs from two different perspectives, investigating the kinds of schools offering such programs and the students participating in them.

These data offer several attractive features for our study. First, the two surveys asked about a number of different types of school-to-work programs, which allows us to analyze both work-based activities and school-based activities. Second, both surveys asked about the same programs and used similar definitions. Third, responses for the schools in the SAS96 can be linked to those for individuals in the NLSY97. Finally, the surveys collected extensive information on the characteristics of the schools and the youths, thus allowing researchers to examine the characteristics of the high schools that offer school-to-work programs as well as the characteristics of the students who participate in them. Ultimately, these data should become an excellent source for studying the effectiveness of school-to-work programs in helping students settle into their careers; currently, however, the available data do not support this line of inquiry. (4)

Data

1996 School Administrator's Survey (SAS96). The National School-to-Work Office sponsored a supplemental data collection effort within the NLSY97 to support their overall research interest in understanding the effectiveness of the School-to-Work Act. As its name suggests, the SAS96 collects administrative data directly from the schools on the extent to which they offer school-to-work programs; it also provides information on the kinds of schools offering these programs. The sample includes all schools with a 12th grade within the primary sampling units (5) of the NLSY97. The survey asked questions on school policy generally and on school-to-work programs in particular, as well as the characteristics of students, teachers, and administrators. The SAS96 questionnaire was mailed to 7,985 schools in September 1996. Of these schools, 595 were excluded because they no longer existed or because they did not have a 12th grade. Of the 7,390 remaining schools, the response rate was about 72 percent. (6)

Table 1 provides descriptive statistics on the 5,253 schools used in the analysis. We focus on characteristics of the school that are related to the quality of the school, as well as characteristics that indicate something about the socioeconomic status of the school's student population. These characteristics include the following: whether the school is private or public; school size; school location; the graduation rate at the school; the percentage of the school's graduates that enroll in a 4-year college; the racial and ethnic composition of the students; and whether or not the school offered a school breakfast program, Title I services, (7) or a dropout prevention program.