SINICK: Placement is a problem that has long plagued vocational guidance. Which societal institutions and professional personnel should be responsible for placement? How does placement relate to other aspects of vocational guidance? These questions and their ramifications can properly be discussed by you, Chuck and Dave, because of your pertinent experience and professional concern. As moderator, I have kicked off; now who wants to pick up the ball?
PRITCHARD: Well, certainly the schools and colleges are much more concerned about job placement today than probably they've ever been. This relates directly to the recognition, now, that the so called non college bound student needs just as much attention and concrete specific help from the educational institution as does the so called college bound. The arrangements between colleges and agencies of various kinds to aid the transition of the student from secondary school to college developed immensely over many years. We have no equivalent arrangements in terms of transition of students from the secondary school directly to work, and so it is a matter of equally effective attention being needed.
ODELL: I disagree a bit with Dave's view on that. We started a very long time ago. In fact I really started my career in the Employment Service in a demonstration project on school Employment Service relations and the transition from school to work in Baltimore in 1939, out of which came a book called Matching Youth and Jobs, by Howard Bell. I sometimes wish people would read the book because a lot of its message is as valid today as it was then.
Beyond that, by 1950 with the help and understanding of Harry Jager, who was then head of the Occupational Information and Guidance Service of the U.S. Office of Education, the Employment Service and OIGS had formal agreements and working relationships to improve the transition from school to work. By about 1960, of the 26 odd thousand secondary schools in the country, more .than half of them were involved in formal working relationships with the Employment Service.
Historically, there has been a lot of interest in this subject. What has happened to us is that in the '60s the Employment Service got diverted into a preoccupation and concern with the really hard to place, the hard core, the disadvantaged, the inner city school systems, and began to taper off its outreach to the schools on a universal basis. The U.S. Office was, in my judgment, more preoccupied with the pursuit of excellence than what now seems to be its concern with career education. I agree with Dave that we are now coming full circle on the issue of what we will do for the student who is not going on to college. I think that's a healthy development and one which justifies our sitting here talking about what can be done to strengthen the placement impact of existing institutions and institutional arrangements.
SINICK: Perhaps the source of whatever disagreement there is stems from disparities between policies and practices, the failure of written agreements to be implemented.
ODELL: Well, I think part of that problem is that the U.S. Office has a very tangential impact on the day to day operation of local school systems. The Employment Service likes to think it has a profound impact on the day to day operations of local employment offices because of its 100 per cent funding of state and local operations, but there is a tremendous problem of communication and implementation in a proliferated bureaucracy like the Employment Service and an even more difficult problem of proliferation in the schools. That only suggests the importance of the institutional representation of these programs at the national level, sitting down as we're sitting down here, to have some dialogue about how we can do something about this problem. I quite agree that there is a big gap between expressed policy and implementation.
PRITCHARD: Well, we in the Office of Education are thinking in a much broader sense than just the relationship between a particular school and a particular office of the Employment Service; we are thinking of more than relationships with the public Employment Service at large. I made my opening comments in a very global sense, comparing the arrangements for transition between secondary school and college and the arrangements for transition from secondary school directly to work. Even in its heyday, the cooperative Employment Service program, in terms of placing all the students who wanted placement and actually getting them suitable jobs, was never very effective. There are many reasons for that, and that's why we need to take a global picture here there are more than two kinds of institutions involved in this whole matter. You have, for example, the employers and the worker group organizations involved, their needs, their policies, and so on.
Moving from the global, I'm trying to get down to something more specific that is, what we have to do within institutions and across institutions, internally and in linkages among them, to help with this whole large process we call transition from school to work.
ODELL: I think that's the right attack on the problem, and it's one that we need to explore in depth because my concern has been that each of the institutional bureaucracies we're talking about tends to think of itself as a self contained delivery system for all the things that ought to be done. Yet we know that the schools' resources are limited for doing the total job. I am assuming that schools have a responsibility for seeing to it that their students are placed not only that they're placed but that there is some learning and feedback from that placement as it relates to curriculum, as it relates to guidance and counseling services, and so on.
Certainly, the Employment Service is never going to be in the position to monopolize or pre empt the placement business. Its principal function, not particularly in relation to schools or colleges but in its relationship to the community at large, is properly one of facilitating movement, intelligent movement, guided or choice oriented movement, into the market on the basis of sharing, interpreting, and using more intelligently the informational resources and potentials that exist within the system.
For example, I would be much happier if I felt that counselors or placement officials in schools were using intelligently information about the job market. I find an abysmal lack of information and of basic occupational information resources within the schools. We have a large responsibility for seeing to it that the information flow is improved and that the tools available are improved. For that to happen, schools have to make greater demands on the Employment Service, on the employer community, and on the labor movement for the kinds of information that can be used in planning curricula, developing curriculum content, and in helping students and parents to make meaningful choices and decisions about work and the world of work.
PRITCHARD: Serious program development needs to be done with respect to placement, the same as other program components are worked out. One needs to survey the student body to begin with, in terms of their needs for placement assistance of various kinds and for other kinds of help contributing to placement. Then one needs a community survey of employers and of other community resources that are involved with placement, such as the Employment Service, the state and local Vocational Rehabilitation offices, minority group organizations, churches, the whole gamut of community agencies that have some relationship to what we're talking about here.
Phase 2 of this kind of development is establishing broad goals and process and outcome objectives. District wise speaking now of educational agencies, the local educational agency district, and the particular school buildings within it one of the patterns evolving within the last few years is that of a centralized director at the district level who deals with the employers to develop job opportunities and so on plus a placement team headed by a coordinator in the local school building. The local board of education has to make a commitment to this; superintendents have to make a commitment to this; principals and the whole line of authority of management and administration have to be committed to this.
ODELL: My concern is that most administrative officials from the superintendent of schools in the district on down tend to play down this aspect of their responsibilities. I am wondering if it will ever come off as a self generated, internalized function of the educational system or whether we don't really have to build a much greater awareness and concern on the part of the community, employers, labor, and the parents themselves to get this job done.
PRITCHARD: What you have said helps to explain why more has not been done within and by educational institutions. Needed implementation has to stem from a commitment to the role of the school, the very concept of the school, as preparing and aiding people to make the transition from school to work, not just from school to further education.
ODELL: In that regard, Dave, what is your current perception of where career education is? Is it really a banner we can march under or is it largely rhetoric?
PRITCHARD: Rather than comment directly, Chuck, on where career education is or where it's headed, I would like to say that we do have a commitment underway to try to explore what would be effective in the way of placement in educational settings.
One thing the Office of Education recently did, as part of a larger study contracted with the American Institutes for Research in Palo Alto, was to test the hypothesis that placement services operated within the school improve school accountability and promote and enhance the relationship of the school to business, industry, and other agencies providing jobs for students. From a review of literature of the last five years or so, AIR found the hypothesis to be only partially true, although at least 90 per cent of the documents reviewed supported the assumption that narrowly defined school based placement and follow up services should exist. By "narrowly defined" they mean placement concerned with just education and job. Those writers who did not agree with the hypothesis believe that maintaining placement programs in both schools and state employment agencies is uneconomical.
The literature indicates that placement services get youths employed and that some self enlightened businesses and industries cooperate with schools. None of the literature covers the accountability that such cooperation achieves within the schools. There are no explicit studies of the process, products, and cost benefits of such services in the direct terms of the hypothesis. In addition, few data exist on the availability of placement services in schools or the quality of the placement services offered.
ODELL: A task force in the Department of Labor, under the auspices of the Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation, and Research in the last days of James Hodgson's tenure as Secretary of Labor, made recommendations for more effective bridging arrangements and relationships between schools and employment services and other community agencies. Their basic recommendation, which was supported by studies done by the Urban Institute on the transition from school to work, was that there ought to be an arrangement for the out stationing of Employment Service counseling trained personnel in school systems. That is, there ought to be at least one full or part time Employment Service counselor identified with and working on behalf of the school guidance program as a placement and occupational information and vocational guidance officer. Such a counselor could take full advantage of the potentials in the Employment Service job bank system, which provides updated information on a daily basis on microfiche or computer printout hard copy for use by schools in identifying job opportunities currently available to which students can be referred. Unfortunately, after Secretary Hodgson's departure, it was decided that this was not a high enough priority in terms of the use of Employment Service and manpower funds to justify the effort.
I happen to think this is a very critical matter. I'm less concerned about whether it is an Employment Service counselor stationed in the schools than I am that there is someone in each school who has this responsibility and who has the available information.
PRITCHARD: The view that is emerging today, in principle anyway is that, in both the planning and the operation of programs, the school and its personnel and the community and its personnel need to be involved so that programs become school based and community linked. The team within the school can well include a representative from the Employment Service where that seems useful and feasible. It can have representatives from other community organizations also, both for planning and for operation.
ODELL: I'm concerned about the word "accountability" you raised earlier in staking out the hypothesis. It seems significant that for 50 years follow up has presumably been an integral part of the total vocational guidance process. What a vocational counselor does, or is supposed to do, not only includes placement but it also includes follow up and presumably feedback from follow up. What does it all mean to the individual as well as to the institution preparing the individual for work or for life? One way to approach accountability is to say we are concerned with constructive criticism, evaluation, and feedback on what guidance accomplishes and then open our doors to our severest critics.
SINICK: With respect to accountability, you both have emphasized a need for a meshing of operational mechanics and underlying philosophies. A philosophy of long standing rugged individualism might function in such a way among school superintendents and others to place the onus for job placement upon the students or graduates or other people who are to be placed.
ODELL: Well, we clearly are a nation of people who like to believe that, in the best of all possible worlds, we all make our own decisions about work and life with a minimum of social intervention. And I think there is nothing basically wrong with that. The difficulty is that individuals in an increasingly complex society need at least information, if not guidance and direction, so that they can make reasonably adequate choices.
Some feel that what we deplore as an inordinately high rate of youth unemployment in this country is a good thing because in milling around in the job market individual young people have an opportunity to try things out, to make judgments and decisions, and ultimately to make choices. That's a very comfortable sort of laissez faire, rugged individualistic approach, but when you see how many students get crunched by that process, by repeated failure, by the revolving door approach to young people in the job market, you begin to wonder whether it isn't terribly wasteful, terribly frustrating, and ultimately self defeating. Young people and older ones, too need information; they need assistance, and I would hope the assistance would be in the direction of facilitating their decision making processes, not directing them in the interest of the state.
PRITCHARD: I want to stress that we need to build in capabilities and competencies within the individuals themselves. Many people are talking about placement in terms of job development, but they are not talking about placement in terms of student development. Both terms of the equation are involved here. Individuals cannot be left just shopping around in the labor market; they ought to know what that market's like; they ought to know what's on the "shelves"; they ought to have built in capabilities and competencies that have to do not only with job getting but also with job holding.
Too many people are thinking of follow up just in the sense of program evaluation getting data to revise the curricula and the guidance programs. I see follow up in terms of follow through, which is more the guidance idea of it follow through with individuals, not only into the job, but on the job, at least for a period of adjustment, and be available to them when they consider significant job change, further education or training, or other important career redirections.
ODELL: I would certainly agree that when follow up leaves substantial numbers of individuals hanging in a very unsatisfactory situation and simply records the fact that they're there, it certainly is not a professionally well conceived approach to either career development or personal growth and development. Many adults went to work at an early age, stayed in one line of work, with one organization, with one employer, for almost the duration of their working lives, and then suddenly there's a re organization, a merger, a technological shift, a geographic move, and they're dumped. They've never looked for a job in any real sense; they don't know about anything else that's available in the market; and they sit there wondering what to do next.
When you get into the problems of special groups among adults, such as the physically and emotionally handicapped, the people coming out of penal institutions, the people confronted with problems in mental health, there is a tremendous unmet need for this kind of service and the need for continuing relationships between educational institutions and other community agencies.
PRITCHARD: We must be concerned not only with transition from school to work, but also with transition from work to school, or other education or training setting, through the life span of individuals and groups. Adults may want to move from employment status back to some educational or training situation or to some mix of employment and education. As to the oncoming stream of students, they ought to be afforded experiences not only in the academic setting and in the vocational programs and shops within the school, but also out in actual work situations sometimes on a paid basis, sometimes nonpaid.
ODELL: Programs with labels like "distributive education" and "cooperative education" and "work study" offer tremendous opportunities, since most people learn most effectively on the job, doing something in a hands on discovery method way... W. Willard Wirtz had an interesting idea when he was Secretary of Labor we ought to identify the points of entry or reentry where substantial numbers of people move into the job market, whether from secondary school or college, rehabilitation agency or Veterans Administration, or the separation centers from the military, and assist in bringing the people entering or reentering the market together with suitable jobs. If we really worked at it, we could demonstrate tremendous cost benefits to the society through this kind of organized approach.
PRITCHARD: If the career development concept is to guide us in education and in other institutions, placement has to be regarded as a process which puts people in situations for further growth. Placement in the old limited sense now you're ready to leave school, you have to get a job, you're referred to the Employment Service or something simply is not an adequate conception of either need or response to need.
ODELL: I certainly agree on that. It's interesting that some European countries operate on the principle that workers who migrate are to be supported in the new work location with social workers, psychologists, and counselors to ensure that they're not simply exploited in the work setting to which they go. We've almost lost sight of, and interest in, that whole concept of personal growth and freedom of vocational choice in our approach to these problems in this country.
There should be greater concern than I now perceive among top policy makers and legislators, as well as front line counselors and placement personnel, with the basic issue of whose interest we represent. Are we representing the client's interest or the interests of the state? That's a terribly important issue and one that we ought not to overlook when we talk about placement whose responsibility and where should the responsibility lie?
