Angered by the continued worsening of public school quality despite 1980s reform efforts and growing business-education partnerships, many American business leaders claim that money and concern are not enough. Boosting teacher salaries and reducing class size have yielded poor results. Business's general dismay with public school performance has…

Commissioned by the governor of Minnesota, a study was done of the state's current resources, and future needs with a view to planning an integrated, efficient and effective system of post-secondary education. Through a series of eight meetings and visits to over 70 campuses where commissioners talked to students, educators, policy makers and…

Organized labor in Oregon supports a high-skill, high-wage economic development strategy. The Oregon AFL-CIO Committee on Worker Education and Training has made policy recommendations that support this strategy. The Oregon AFL-CIO believes that fundamental reform of education is needed and recommends the following: emphasis on a high level of…

The following presentations are included in this document: "A Nation of Students" (Lamar Alexander); "Businesses Are Clamoring for Skilled Workers" (Betsy Brand); "We Need to Be Partners in Reality" (Roberts Jones); "The Value of a Working Parent as a Role Model" (JoAnne Barnhart); "Human Capital Is…

The "rhetoric of skill requirements" is a way of describing work by decomposing the human contribution into distinct components. Three important characteristics of this rhetoric are especially germane to an understanding of work. The first characteristic is that jobs and their incumbents can be fully analyzed by breaking them down into skills.…

Workplace literacy programs can support the path toward either low wages or high skills. Instead of the "high skill" path, most U.S. companies follow the "low wage" path. Depending on who is involved, which program goals are selected, and what planning process is followed, a workplace literacy program can maintain outdated workplaces or foster…

This volume reports on the flow of graduates from higher education into working life in Portugal, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Switzerland. Chapters for each nation were contributed by national experts in that field. The first section of the report, on Portugal, contains two papers. The first, written in English, discusses recent changes in the…

This paper takes the position that the completion of the Internal Market Programme of the European Community will require free movement of persons, goods, capital, and services, which, in turn, will require a service infrastructure that enables fast and reliable flows between the Member States. The paper begins by explaining the rationale and…

Although education is the key to labor market success, it never has been a sufficient condition for that goal. In addition to the changing educational attainment of U.S. workers, the shifts in the demographic composition of the labor force and in the very conditions and expectations of the workplace have made the task of efficient use of labor a…

Technology and international competition have transformed business practices and employment patterns. The migration of high-paying jobs from manufacturing to services, the growing importance of small firms in the U.S. economy, and the development of new technical occupations characterized by often sophisticated technologies and the absence of…

For the past 8 years, Minnesota technical colleges have been offering customized training services to the state's employers. To gather data on what kinds of organizations use custom training (CT) programs, the State Board of Technical Colleges surveyed 600 public and private employers that had used CT services through at least one of the system's…

The Career Planning for Life Forum was a national policy forum sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development (CED) and hosted by the U.S. Army. More than 250 representatives of business, education, government, and labor attended the forum and spent the day discussing the preparation of the country's young work force for the global economy.…

A review of long-term international economic trends and the literature linking education and training (ET) to economic performance reveals no evidence of deindustrialization or falling labor productivity in the United States. Over the last 40 years, the nation has experienced lower growth rates in gross domestic product and productivity but…

The first part of this document describes Nova University's doctoral program in Vocational, Technical, and Occupational (VTO) Education, developed in response to the need to create high performance learners and leaders for building learning communities. It discusses how a curriculum change in 1990 resulted in the following: conversion of the…

This brief describes 14 national technical assistance organizations for work force and workplace literacy. Descriptions contain these types of information: specific areas of expertise, experience, or specialization; types of organizations with which it has worked; types of programs or services offered; geographic areas served; and clients. The…