IEE Brief No. 7, October 1993 Sue E. Berryman, Erwin Flaxman,
and Morton Inger Too many young people complete high school
equipped neither for college nor for the training required to
enter middle-level jobs. What is worse, our nation's schools
have no coherent strategy for educating non-college-bound
students or for helping them develop the competence required for
middle-level jobs. Attempts to create that strategy—which we
call "building the middle"—have generated a flurry of learning
arrangements and alternative models. The purpose of this paper
is not to select a winner among the various models and options,
but to provide a template for building a strong school-to-work
transition program emphasizing the most valuable contributions
from each of the approaches. The full realization that we
seriously have to prepare all students emerged in the 1980s.
Throughout that decade, the less-educated were increasingly less
likely to be employed, and, when they worked, earned
increasingly less than the better-educated