Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills
- An overview of the SCANS Report can be read here online, or can be downloaded for later referral. To access the file, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader. To download the Reader, click here. Click here to download the SCANS Report overview.
In May of 1990, a committee was formed to conduct a comprehensive study on how well schools prepare young people for the work force. This effort was organized by the United States Department of Labor and initiated by the former Secretary of Labor, Lynn Martin. Titled the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), this extensive work was momentous in that it was the first time American business was given a platform to clearly communicate to educators what students need to know in order to be successful in the workplace.
The SCANS Report outlined and examined the demands of the nation's workplace and concluded that "...more than half our young people leave school without the knowledge or foundation required to find and hold a good job." Obviously, the SCANS Report caused quite a stir in education, as school boards, administrators, and teachers were shown that they simply are not teaching our nation's students what they need to know in order to be prepared for the work force of today— the work force of the 21st century.
This problem stems from the fact that the information-, service-, and communication-centered workplace of the year 2000 has drastically changed from the industrial workplace of the early 1900s, due to advances in technology and competition from countries abroad. The way our nation's schools educate our children must change too.
Across the country and in all kinds of jobs, however, employers reported to SCANS researchers that they need workers who can solve problems, think on their feet, adapt to change, gather information, communicate effectively, and work in teams. The SCANS Report goes on to say that "...traditional jobs are changing and new jobs are created everyday. High paying but unskilled jobs are disappearing."
The SCANS Report also concludes that US companies must demand a standard of high performance in "excellence, product quality, and customer satisfaction" by demanding a competent worker who is able to evaluate and correct performance, who is technologically literate, who is able to work with others, and who is a flexible as well as a continuous learner. The report also asserts that in order for business to meet this challenge, schools must prepare young Americans for this demand by designing a new curriculum that will allow learning to take place "in context" by putting educational objectives within a real environment rather than one of abstract isolation. In other words, lessons must be relevant to children and connected to real world applications and situations, since "...good jobs depend on people who can put knowledge to work."
- Resources —allocating time, money, materials, space, and staff
- Interpersonal Skills —working on teams, teaching others, serving customers, leading, negotiating, and working well with people from culturally diverse backgrounds
- Information —acquiring and evaluating data, organizing and maintaining files, interpreting and communicating, and using computers to process information
- Systems —understanding social, organizational, and technological systems; monitoring and correcting performance; and designing or improving systems
- Technology —selecting equipment and tools, applying technology to specific tasks, and maintaining and troubleshooting technologies
- Basic Skills —reading, writing, arithmetic and mathematics, speaking, and listening
- Thinking Skills —thinking creatively, making decisions, solving problems, seeing things in the mind's eye, knowing how to learn, and reasoning
- Personal Qualities —individual responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity
The SCANS Report goes on to emphasize five core subject areas—history, geography, science, English, and mathematics, and it states they should be taught and applied within a framework of five new competencies and a three part foundation which highlights and extends basic skills. This set of competencies and the foundation (listed in the box below) should be "an integral part of each young person's school life."
TracPacs, the curriculum application series that accompanies the Tracs program, was written specifically to the SCANS competencies and foundation listed below. The TracPac curriculum guides teams of students through theme-based sesearch and presentation projects as they use the hundreds of resources available in the Techno-Plaza.
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WORKPLACE KNOW-HOW The know-how identified by SCANS is made up
of five competencies and a three-part foundation of skills and personal qualities that are needed for solid job performance. These are: COMPETENCIES THE FOUNDATION—competence requires: Additional remarks from the SCANS Report: "If all of tomorrow's students are to master the full repertoire of SCANS competencies and their foundation, schools must change...Students will not acquire what they need to progress in life by osmosis, either in school or in the workplace. Learning through experience is okay only if all students and workers are exposed to the right experiences. The SCANS skills can be taught. Schools and workplaces must provide structured opportunity for their acquisition... SCANS believes that teachers and schools must begin early to help students see the relationships between what they study and its applications in real-world contexts." |
It is nothing new to assert that times are changing and technology is advancing by leaps and bounds each and every day. As the SCANS Report suggests, students, parents, business persons—everyone is affected by such change. And yet, the basic needs in education are still the same. It is not that students no longer need to learn basic skills, they do. And it is not the answer that students simply learn how to operate these more advanced technologies (computers, printers, hardware, etc.). Nor is it just the exposure to these technologies that is the answer. It has to be a combination of both so that students will make the connection between the skills and the technologies. Otherwise, it will all remain somewhat useless. This is where the concept of school to work fits in. It is vital that students make this correlation between the skills and the technologies, or to function in the workplace using the skills in the presence of the technologies is only a mockery.
The Tracs system is designed as an extension of the regular classroom. As such, it supports the daily objectives that must be met by teachers with the premise being the workplace objectives established by the SCANS Report. The idea is to teach with technology—not just teaching abouttechnology. As a result, students are using technology to apply the knowledge base they are gaining to real-world experiences, using the latest in available resources and tools. They are discovering possible careers, gaining experience with industry standard software packages and tools, and more.