Creation and Maintenance of Effective School-Work Linkages: Implications for Systemic Reform

Most policy proposals addressing the school-to-work transition have focused on broad, national strategies for change. However, forging successful connections between youth and the labor market depends upon the individual actions and interactions of employers, students, and schools. In particular, the specific ways that schools and employers interact may be crucial in determining their effectiveness at student job placement. In order to inform policy about the formation of school-employer partnerships, this paper investigates such linkages in an exemplary school, identifying the elements that enable successful and replicable reform. This case study explores the ways linkages operate in a school that relies on third-party job coordinators to mediate between teachers and employers. This model has succeeded in providing weak contacts with a large number of local employers. However, we find that the job coodinators do not primarily explain the schools' job placement success. Instead, we find that the formal third-party system is bolstered and made successful by its hidden non-system, a network of teachers who use their informal industry contacts to place students. Our case study concludes that while third-party linkage arrangements may provide "loose ties" to students, such ties are most effective in the diffusion of information about job openings, not for providing access to jobs. Instead, we suggest that direct, personalized teacher-employer connections offer important assets for school-to-work reforms and may become the basis for systematic connections between high schools and the work world.