Reviewed by: Preparing Today’s Students for Tomorrow’s Jobs in Metropolitan America edited by Laura W. Perna Cathy Horn Laura W. Perna (Ed.). Preparing Today’s Students for Tomorrow’s Jobs in Metropolitan America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 334 pp. Hardback; $65.00; ISBN 978–0– 8122–4453–3. Laura Perna’s edited volume, Preparing Today’s Students for Tomorrow’s Jobs in Metropolitan America, seeks to “offer valuable insights that educators, educational leaders, public policy makers, and researchers may use to improve the readiness of today’s student for tomorrow’s jobs in metropolitan America” (p. 15). More specifically, the book, across the various chapters, attempts to clarify what is meant by “success” in workforce preparation, articulate the roles of various constituencies in that preparation, and delineate implications for policy and practice. The book is organized in three sections: (1) “Defining Success in Preparing Individuals for Work,” (2) “The Role of Different Educational Providers in Preparing Students for Work,” and (3) “Implications for Institutional Practice and Public Policy.” Across sections, the chapters usefully connect several larger themes, although all are variable in their consideration of the metropolitan context. First, many of the contributors take up the importance of preparatory flexibility toward the enhancement of life chances for metropolitan youth. Specifically, as Thomas Bailey and Clive Belfield (Section 2) describe, “In most cases, academic and career instruction are not substitutes but complements” (p. 144). Similar conclusions throughout the volume highlight the need for various program types to strike a careful balance between the tension to provide specificity of training for immediate needs and the desire to cultivate meta-skills applicable across needs. Or, put differently, the chapter authors argue for the utility of “both/and” rather than an “either/or” approach to preparing students for both current and future labor market demands. As Harry Holzer (Section 3) summarizes, “To maximize educational opportunities for all young people, any efforts to strengthen [career and technical education] approaches must incorporate strong academics and keep open (or even encourage) post-secondary options for those students” (p. 253). A second theme across chapters is the critical contribution of the well-formed community. Anthony Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Jeff Strohl (Section 2) note that “formal college is only a piece of the postsecondary education and training puzzle. In fact, colleges and universities represent only 35 percent of the entire postsecondary education and training system. The rest consists of formal and informal employer-provided training programs, military training, and a variety of other venues for postsecondary learning” (p. 103). Subsequent chapters present best-practice models that, in various forms, reinforce the utility of blurred rather than bright lines between and among K-12, community and four-year colleges (both for- and non-profit), employers, and the broader community toward common goals. Such efforts especially demand careful attention to equitable practices and the potentially disparate impact of going down alternative pathways. As Perna (Section 3) describes, “The reality of prior vocational educational programs is that low-income students and racial/ethnic minorities were disproportionately tracked into these programs, and these programs had poor outcomes for participating students” (p. 265). Finally, the importance and complexity of rigorous assessment and evaluation runs thematically throughout the volume. More specifically, most chapters grapple with the psychometric challenges of accurately measuring student-level outcomes related to work-based learning. Bridget O’Connor (Section 1) identifies much of that struggle as centering on the inherent nature of the workplace itself as a moving target. Additionally, the majority of chapters present the need for increasingly rigorous analyses, ideally in the form of randomized controlled trials, of a full range of work-based learning and career and technical education programs. As Katherine Barghaus, Eric Bradlow, Jennifer McMaken, and Samuel Rikoon write (Section 1), “[A] majority of states have planned the integration of postsecondary educational and workforce-related data with their developing [state longitudinal data systems]. . . . While clear definitions of what this data entails are available only from individual states, the very inclusion of educational and workforce indicators clearly indicates the priority placed by IES on [End Page 414] facilitating the capability of both policymakers and researchers to track longitudinal workforce readiness information across...
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