Alan Phelps

Alan Phelps, director of the Center on Education and Work and professor of educational administration and vocational education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, talks about the importance of bringing education and business leaders together to discuss the knowledge and skills that students will need when they enter the workforce. Excerpted from the video series Schools That Work: The Research Advantage, videoconference #7, Preparing Students for Work in the 21st Century (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1992).

"It's very difficult to look at manufacturing or look at service industries and predict what they're going to be like five years from now, so I think the most important aspect of this is getting the education community, that is the teachers and the counselors and the administrators into a position where they can talk on a regular basis with newspapers, with printing industries, with hospitals, with banks, with manufacturers about what kind of skills and knowledge do they need now in 1994 for their employees and their workforce, and what are there notions about ways in which this is going to change over the next five or the next ten years, and what kind of math and what kind of science knowledge should we really be putting into a high school curriculum."

This Critical Issue was researched and written by Kathleen Paris, director of the Leadership Institute for School-to-Work Transition, Center on Education and Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Date posted: 1997