SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF A NATION AT RISK in 1983, policymakers and politicians have worked to stave off a perceived decline in the academic preparation of American students. Stubbornly low scores on international exams and signs that many U.S. graduates are ill-equipped for college and the workforce have lent urgency to this perception, and many states have made high-school graduation requirements more rigorous in response. As a result, American high-school graduates today complete more academic courses and more advanced coursework than they did three decades ago. At first glance, this seems clear evidence of progress.

Did you know that close to half of today's jobs in the U.S. could be done by robots and that proportion is rapidly increasing? It is quite possible that about half of today's high school graduates will not have the knowledge or skills needed to get a decent job when they graduate. Tomorrow's high school graduates will be able to thrive in this environment, but only if school superintendents, central office executives, and principals use the strategies employed by the world's top-performing education systems to build the high-performance education systems today's students will need to succeed tomorrow. In Leading High-Performance School Systems: Lessons from the World's Best, Marc Tucker, a leading expert on top-performing school systems with more than 30 years of experience studying the global economy and education systems worldwide, details how top-performing school systems have met head-on the challenges facing school leaders today.

The article offers information on the New Jersey's career and technical high schools vocational education programs . Topics discussed public high school offers work-based learning programs from business and applied technology to construction and cosmetology, and mentions the role of policymakers to help more young people for well-paying jobs.

investigate how the educational demands of local labor markets shape high school course offerings and student course taking. Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 linked to the U.S. Census 2000

The future looks promising for the field of career and technical education (CTE). The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 eases the way to create multiple pathways for high school students to get to college and careers. Philanthropic foundations are funding innovations in career preparation. State departments of education are revamping program guidelines and graduation requirements. In many states, governors have made career preparation a priority. While people plan CTE's future, Educating a Working Society looks to its past. This book explores twentieth-century efforts to bring schooling and work closer together. Chapters feature timely topics, such as public controversy over vocational programs, the influences of racism in philanthropic giving, students'choices in course taking, teachers'efforts to combine the academic and vocational missions of schooling, and contemporary trends in college and career readiness initiatives. Using schools to prepare youth for work has a long and troubled history. The contributors to this book dive into that history, bringing up compelling issues that challenge conventional wisdom about the history of education.

The purpose of this study was to uncover and describe the key components of a "distinguished" National Academy Foundation (NAF) information technology (IT) academy and the nature of implementation to prepare students to be college, career and future ready. Based on 77 semistructured interviews of stakeholders of the academy, we found the following themes: a shared direction; tackling the challenge to promote college and career readiness; seizing on the high impact of work-based learning; and local capacity to adjust and deliver. Based on the case, we recommend leaders work to establish a culture of collaboration, utilize a balanced curriculum and ensure school-based internships are structured.

Our study assesses whether high school science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses provide non-college bound youth with the skills and training necessary to successfully transition from high school into the STEM economy. Specifically, our study estimates the effects that advanced math, advanced science, engineering, and computer science courses in high school have on the probability that non-college bound youth will obtain employment in the STEM economy and on wages within two years of graduating from high school. Our findings indicate that STEM coursework is unrelated with the probability of securing a job in the STEM economy and is unrelated with wages two years post high school graduation.

The article reports on the ways on how to make students be career-ready after graduating high school. Topics include the career exploration and soft skills development; the teachers' challenge in helping the students identify relevant college and career options and providing students continual opportunities to practice their soft skills that would make them successful in their chosen career.

Switching gears now, it's pretty much a given these days that high school graduates are supposed to go to college. About 7 out of 10 graduates say that's where they're headed. And yet, there's a growing concern that this push for college as the only option is missing something - job skills that employers in hospitality, retail, accounting and marketing say they're looking for. Claudio Sanchez of NPR's Ed team visited one high school recently that's sending a different message.

The article focuses on the higher education system in South Africa and the need for curriculum reform to improve the quality of education. It is noted that curriculum reform started with the registration of qualifications on the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in South Africa after the establishment of the South Africa Qualifications Authority in 1995. Other topics include the vocational education, prevention of unemployment, skill development and learning outcomes.

One of the criteria of the success of vocational high school (VHS) education is producing graduates who master competencies based on the standards required by industries. The efforts to produce graduates who meet the required competency standards are realized by implementing communication programs and collaborations of schools with industries. This study is aimed at developing eligible instruments for evaluating communication programs between schools and industries. The design of the instrument is tested to determine its feasibility. The instrument is feasible to use, because it has met the criteria in which all items have a validity and reliability measure.

The purpose of this study is to compare perceptions of girls' vocational high school students about vocational proficiency and entrepreneurship with respect to attendance to practical training. This study utilizes relational screening model. The universe of the study consists of the students of Uşak Central Anatolian Vocational and Girls' Vocational Schools in 2014-15 school year. No sampling was done for the study as the scale was applied to all of the students studying at child development, beauty and hair care, and textile technologies departments. 98 Twelfth graders who have attended to practical training and 70 ninth graders who have not attended have been classified separately. Data has been collected by using two different scales. One of these scales is vocational proficiency scale developed by Bozgeyikli. The other scale used, entrepreneurship scale, is a five level Likert-type scale developed by Yılmaz & Sümbül. It has been found out that there is a significant difference about vocational proficiency perceptions between the students who have attended practical training and those who have not attended. It was revealed that the students who have attended practical training have more positive perceptions towards vocational proficiency (with respect to those who have not attended. When compared to the students who have not attended, the students who have attended to practical training had significant difference in their perception of entrepreneurship. The attending students of practical training have a higher tendency towards entrepreneurship with respect to those who have not attended. The students' opinions also reveal that there is a high and significant relationship between tendency towards entrepreneurship and perception of vocational proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]