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559 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1998)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0559 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Contemporary interest in the relationship between education and the economy, broadly defined, has been driven by two different academic perspec- tives. The first and arguably more important was the development within labor economics of research focusing on investments in worker training and skills as well as more general investments in human capital. Pioneering research by Theodore Schultz, Gary Becker, and Jacob Mincer used these investments to explain, among other things, the labor market outcomes of individuals. The second, closely related perspective sought to explain the economic development of nations in terms of investments in human capital. Most of this research viewed education and skill development as something of a black box. What interested most researchers were the outcomes of investments in human capital, not the characteristics of what occurred during education and training that actually made a difference. By the mid-1980s, however, the interest in peeking inside that black box had begun to grow, in large part because of changes in the labor force, shifts in the economy, and the emergence of arguments about the relationship between the two. Workforce 2000, the 1987 report sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor (Johnson and Packer 1987), predicted that the United States faced a substantial skills gap, arguing that a shift toward higher- skilled jobs might outstrip the rise in education levels. While the merits of the report's technical conclusion would be debated by academics over the next decade, Workforce 2000's substantial impact on public policymakers yielded a host of initiatives, each designed to make education and training more readily available to the American workforce. In part, Workforce 2000 struck a responsive chord because it reinforced the growing perception that the nation's schools were failing, as measured by the performance oftheir students, to provide both academic and job-related skills. That was the indictment underlying the 1983 report A Nation at Risk (National Commission 1983). In 1985, The Forgotten Half-the work of a special commission created by the W. T. Grant Foundation-focused on how little is done in the United States to prepare school leavers for the labor market. Several of the commission's studies concluded, for example, that the main benefit of vocational education programs was simply that they helped some students obtain jobs after they graduated with the same employers who provided the work experience. America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! (National Center 1990), a third major report to explore the links between work, school, and economic productivity, made the argument that the gap between rising skill demands and potentially declining workforce skills would threaten the ability of the U.S. economy to remain competitive. The sub- sequent body of research on rising income inequality has similarly pointed to 8

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