This bulletin argues that by integrating academic and vocational instruction into a unified curriculum, schools can ensure that students are better prepared to meet the challenges of careers and a changing society. Vocational education provides three broad areas of skills: entry level job skills, employability skills, and employment skills. But…

An instructional plan to rescue at-risk students must be based on a curriculum intended to serve all students. The creation of a functional curriculum, the promotion of employability skills, and an emphasis on improving study skills are instructional patterns that seem to be effective in reducing the number of student dropouts. Two alternatives…

The following 11 papers were presented at a symposium on leadership and educational policy studies (LEPS): "Food, Filth, Factory, and Flowers: A Critical Analysis of Ohio's Employability Skills Project" (Nina Dorsch); "Defining and Restructuring Work: Implications for Adult Education" (Georges B. Germain); "The Erosion of…

The PTA continues to be engaged in projects and programs which relate to parents' and children's perception and understanding of the world of work, education, and career development. Current activities include a project focusing on television's effects on children and youth, the national PTA's Urban Education project determining issues in public…

The Business and Education Transition Alliance (BETA) is a model school-to-work transition program that was developed to facilitate the school-to-work transition of at-risk youth in the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado. Among the BETA program's specific goals are the following: increase students' knowledge/understanding of demands of the…

Assessing students for workplace readiness requires that schools know what skills and knowledge students need to succeed at work and how to foster their acquisition. Having seen that the educational systems of global competitors provided them with a significant advantage over the United States, policymakers have attempted to address some…

Educators, business and government leaders in the public sector are attempting to provide a kind of comprehensive, effective education for all students by designing a new approach to education which will: (1) eliminate the educationally embarrassing general education track which leads students into an academic and vocational dead end; (2) improve…

Professionals who work in the area of vocational education for students with special needs were surveyed to determine how they identify exemplary programs. Those students include those who are handicapped, disabled, dropouts, of limited English proficiency, immigrants, displaced homemakers, dislocated workers, disadvantaged, single or teen…

Population growth rates in the 1950-1975 period indicate that metropolitan and nonmetropolitan streams of migration are of virtually the same magnitude in Wisconsin; metropolitan residents are moving to nonmetropolitan places as frequently as their nonmetropolitan counterparts are migrating to metropolitan communities. When migration streams are…

Thirteen brief articles look at high school programs for students with special needs with emphasis on programs offered in New York State. Articles have the following titles and authors: "Vocational Education for Handicapped Students in New York City High Schools" (F. Yauch); "Development of a Comprehensive Program for High School…

This issue features articles on basic skills enrichment for summer job programs and on the recent revisions to the Job Training Partnership Act's (JTPA's) performance standards system. "Basic Skills and Summer Enrichment: An Interview with Gordon Berlin" focuses on the summer enrichment movement in general and the Summer Training and…

Five articles from this newsletter of the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) describe IDRA programs that are part of the organization's family literacy efforts. "The Family English Literacy Project: Promoting Adult Literacy in San Antonio" outlines a program to provide English language literacy for 125 parents of…

Standardized achievement tests are often misused as indicators of a school's quality or effectiveness relative to other schools. This is an incorrect use because it ignores variation among schools in student abilities, family support of education, student mobility, and other factors. People also misuse tests because they impute to them more…

The first three steps to developing a program that is both effective and efficient are participant selection, recruitment, and assignment. They require thinking about the populations to be targeted, considering how to open the door to the population and how to get the population in the door, and determining the services that are needed. The Job…

A seminar was held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in August 1987 on the subject, "Illiteracy and the Underclass: Are They Permanent?" The contributions of Chall, Comer, Epstein, Dash, and Rivera identified where illiteracy problems begin--in families with intergenerational patterns of illiteracy. Problems in estimating the numbers of…