Many youngsters have no idea of how school connects to the world of work. It's true that kids whose parents are doctors or lawyers can probably see that school is the first step toward entering their parents' professions. But for most children, school must seem irrelevant to what adults do at their jobs: How does plane geometry connect with driving a bus? Or world history with being an insurance underwriter? Would their mothers and fathers have been more successful in their work if they had studied harder? (The parents themselves would probably have a hard time answering these questions.) And when kids are around adults who don't go to work at all, they have no way of connecting school with work -- or, probably, any motivation for trying to succeed in school.
The way schools are set up adds to the kids' problems in connecting school with the world of work. Students spend about 85 percent of their class time, listening and most of the talk is about abstract ideas, with only an occasional concrete illustration thrown in. But that's no the way most students learn - about 80 percent connect with abstract ideas only after they've had some practical experience with them. And it's certainly not the way most people learn to do their jobs.
These observations about students, work and school aren't novel. They've been around since the first apprenticeship system was created, and that was thousands of years ago. Apprenticeship is based on the conviction that most people learn best by doing and that connecting learning with work provides a powerful incentive to learn. But today's kids, too, need what apprenticeships offer - a way of experiencing the relationship between knowledge and work. And that's exactly what a school-business partnership program started by the American Express Company and Shearson Lehman Hutton in 1982 is providing for a couple of thousand students every year.
The Finance Academy is a school-within-school arrangement that American Express and Shearson Lehman Hutton originally set up in cooperation with the New York City board of education. It offers high school juniors and seniors a program of courses in subjects directly related to the finance industry - like accounting and banking and credit - and paid internships between the junior and senior years of high school.
This might sound like an update of the kind of narrow, skills-specific vocational training programs that lots of students used to get dumped into, but it's not. Students apply to be admitted to the Finance Academy - they are not tracked in. The courses have been devised by experts in finance in collaboration with curriculum specialists, so the skills they teach won't be obsolete by the time the students graduate. And the courses don't substitute for the students' regular program; they supplement it. Best of all, the summer internships give students a chance to apply what they've learned in school to the real world of work. And the work experience motivates them to learn more when they return to school.
In the course of nine years, the Finance Academies have grown from the original group of 35 students to 35 academies in 17 metropolitan areas across the country. Each academy has been established and maintained thanks to cooperation between the local business community and the local schools and financial support from American Express and Shearson Lehman Hutton.
The students who enter the Finance Academies are a diverse group. This year, of the 2,000 kids who participated, 62 percent were minority students and 58 percent were females. Academy students are academically diverse, too. But no matter whether they enter as strong students or weak ones, the program gives most of them positive feelings about education. About 90 percent of the kids completing the program have been so turned on by its combination of work and schoolwork that they've gone on to postsecondary education.
What accounts for the program's success? Partly the fact that kids choose to go into the academies, which are not necessarily in their local schools, so they have a commitment to the enterprise. Partly the competence and the feeling of success the kids gain. The jobs they do are real entry-level positions for real wages. As they apply what they have learned in their courses, school begins to make sense. And so does the world of work. And since one of the lessons of work is that you don't know everything, the kids return to school ready to learn more. They see and enjoy the connection between school and work.
Why not adapt the academy model to other industries and found academies in school districts all over the country? American Express and Shearson Lehman Hutton have already expanded the program to include an Academy of Travel and Tourism. And a new organization, the National Academy Foundation, which was launched only last week, plans to solicit the help of businesses in various sectors to set up many new kinds of academies in other areas like insurance, public service and accounting.
The Finance and Travel and Tourism academies are examples of the best kind of school-business partnership. They make creative and respectful use of the resources and expertise of both partners. And they offer both partners something of great value. For students, especially, the experience of seeing the connection between education and work could make the difference between being turned off or on to school and their future possibilities. The existing academies deserve our thanks, and the future academies ought to get our firm support.