“Linked Learning” programs must be designed to provide academic rigor as well as career education, concludes Linking Learning to the 21st Century: Preparing All Students for College, Career, and Civic Participation, a National Education Policy Center brief.
Linked Learning policies also allow students to gravitate to schooling themes that are personally relevant, and they hold the potential to substantially improve secondary schooling. But if poorly designed or enacted, the reform will only maintain the same old vocational education programs or “alternative” schools, continuing discredited practices of ability tracking rather than transforming the comprehensive high school.
The brief recommends ways to design effective Linked Learning curricula.
In the past, students considered less likely to succeed were tracked into work-focused education, while college prep was reserved for the better students, the brief notes.
. . . under the Linked Learning model, academic learning and real-world applications and opportunities are integrated for all students, thus exposing everyone to all potential opportunities: immediate entry into the workplace after high school, apprenticeship, technical certification, and two- and four-year colleges.
It’s important to avoid tracking, says researcher Marisa Saunders. Harvard’s Pathways to Prosperity Project, which calls for alternative pathways to meet students’ diverse needs and interests, fails to stress “the importance of comparable academic rigor in all pathways,” she says.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation‘s $28 million New Options Project will create career pathways for out-of-school 16- to 24-year olds who lack a high school diploma.
