TAKING THE SCHOOL-TO-WORK PLEDGE

Truer words may never have been spoken at a national conference of educators: "Decisions already are made before people who have to do the work are told," said Leonard Fox, president of the Denver teachers' union. In recent times, "that's the way (reform) has been done in education."

Mr. Fox was a panelist at a gathering here last week of 500 school-to-work true believers. It was sponsored by the National Education Association and other, mostly left-leaning members of the so-called Safe Schools Coalition.

Although Mr. Fox said he personally favors STW, he is convinced parents and teachers must be in on the ground floor -- as "part of the conceptualizing" -- for this or any other reform to succeed.

Unfortunately, just about everything else at this conference, which I attended courtesy of the Foundation Endowment, went contrary to that blast of fresh air from Denver.

STW is not about improving vocational education as a constructive alternative to college preparation or the liberal arts.Rather, it's about converting all of public education to vocational training for all students, even the potential Nobel laureates among them.

"All means all," was the frequent cry here of the leveled outcome arrangers. The rationale for this "paradigm shift" is the presumed need for schools to appease the economic gods by training a work force for the global economy of, yes, (drum roll, please) The 21st century.

At a workshop on "Making School to Work Happen: the School Board Connection," it was disclosed that the U.S. Department of Education has underwritten a plan to bring all local school boards on line with "curriculum integration," which is defined as a total merger of academics with vocational training, in order to effect STW.

The California School Boards Association has developed this thick document over the past two years under a Department of Education grant from the Carl Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Act. The manual, which is being distributed to school boards associations throughout the country, emphasizes the "critical role" of local school boards in curriculum integration, and defines "leverage points" for the boards to use in bringing others along.

The bright idea is that virtually all academic lessons will be made relevant to the workplace (one can only imagine Robert Frost's "road less traveled" being discussed as traffic engineering.)

The Department of Education's strategy doesn't square at all with Mr. Fox's idea of bringing in folks at the conceptual stage. Rather, it shows how the Department of Education gets around statutory prohibitions against its dictating curricula: It forms out its dirty work.

J.D. Hoge, the director of the National STW Office, a joint venture of the Education and Labor Departments, was plainly contemptuous of STW foes or skeptics. She cracked that "this country wants classrooms to be a museum of their (sic) past."

Ms. Hoge, said that even if students are going on to college, they should have to acquire a portable certificate of their work-force skills. She spoke of Washington's "All Students' Strategy" and said that STW is about putting every child on the path to high-wage, high-skill job.

How, pray tell, can such jobs be guaranteed for "all children," all STW trainees? Will the Clintonoids create them by fat and raise the minimum wage to $1,000 an hour?

As Neil Postman notes in his new book, "The End of Education," the largest increase since 1980 has been in jobs that are relatively low-skilled -- waiters, porters, salespeople, taxi drivers, and the like. These people do honorable work, but "their skills are hardly so complex that the schools must be preoccupied with teaching them."

But suppose our society wanted to teach children to be corporate CEOs, pulling down six-or seven-figure pay and perks? Ask Mr. Postman, "Would we train them to be good readers of memos, quarterly reports, and stock quotations, and not bother their heads with poetry, science, history?"

Obviously not. "Specialized competence," Mr. Postman cautioned, "can come only through a more generalized competence, which is to say that economic utility is a byproduct of a good education. Any education that is mainly about economic utility is far too limited to be useful, and, in any case, so diminishes the world that it mocks one's humanity.

The limitations of systemic STW were apparent in the schools showcase here as the best of the genre.

To attend Milwaukee's Hamilton High School, for instance, students must choose at Grade Eight the "career cluster" they will pursue. Thus, a student in the Health and Human Services Cluster studies such profound matters as food service, fashion, and fabrics, "parenthood education," and human diversity -- while not being required to study a foreign language. Core subjects like English are integrated into the vocational training.

Furthermore, the school is on a 4H4 block schedule (preferred by STW advocates), which means the school day is carved into four blocks of 80 minutes each. As juniors, students begin working as apprentices at local businesses, spending two of the four blocks of the school day for that purpose. Not much time is left for English or history, even of the "integrated' variety.

"Not everyone embraces" STW, understated Margaret Terry Orr of the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia University's Teachers' College. "there is a deep fear we are going to track children into dead-end careers."

That's a fear that is not only deep but wholly rational.

Robert Holland is a columnist and op-ed editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.