Which non-American education systems best prepare young people for fulfilling jobs and successful adult lives? And what can the United States—where far too many young people currently enter adulthood without adequate preparation for the twenty-first-century job market—learn, adopt, and adapt from these other systems?
In
Schooling in the Workplace, Nancy Hoffman addresses these questions head on, arguing that “the smartest and quickest route to a wide variety of occupations for the majority of young people in the successful countries—not a default for failing students—is a vocational program that integrates work and learning.” As she notes, the programs that successfully integrate work and learning all share a fundamental commitment to helping young people find successful careers: “The purpose is not ‘college for all, ’ as in the United States today, but rather to provide the education and training young people need to prepare for a career or calling.”
Schooling in the Workplace explores the vocational education programs in a wide range of countries, focusing in rich and useful detail on six in particular: Australia, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland. Framing these discussions, however, is a persistent focus on American circumstances and challenges. Far more than a survey of six “foreign” programs, this is a book prompted by and organized around the policy and practical challenges facing the United States.
About the author
Nancy Hoffman is a vice president and senior advisor at Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit in Boston, the mission of which is to improve educational and workforce outcomes for low-income young people and adults. She works on the Early College High School Initiative and state policy supporting high school and postsecondary completion. Hoffman serves as a consultant for the Education and Training Policy unit of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). She has held teaching and administrative posts at Brown, Temple, Harvard, FIPSE, MIT, and elsewhere. She holds a BA and Ph D from the University of California, Berkeley in comparative literature. Recent books include
Women’s True Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (2003),
Double the Numbers: Increasing Postsecondary Credentials for Underrepresented Youth (with Kazis and Vargas, 2004), and
Minding the Gap: Why Integrating High School with College Makes Sense and How to Do It (with Vargas, Venezia, and Miller, 2007). Hoffman serves on the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education.
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