COLUMN ONE : Making the Grade in Real World : Shop class used to be education’s answer to preparing students for a job. A reform movement goes far beyond vocational training to relate every subject to making it in the workplace.

Jim Burson, who used to work in a cabinet-making factory, teaches what used to be called “shop” at Western Hills High. But now the “shop” is lined with a couple dozen personal computers. Students work on manufacturing graphics and construction graphics projects.

Every once in a while one of the students walks up to Burson and asks him a question.

Burson has a standard answer: “Look it up! Figure it out!”

“I will not spoon-feed them,” the teacher declares. “In the real world you don’t constantly ask your boss. I’m trying to be a facilitator. Students have lost the ability to look stuff up. They don’t know how to do it.”

“The real world” is evoked in the Ft. Worth Independent School District as often and as fervently as righteousness at a revival meeting.

The 72,000-student district is part of a growing national movement aimed at building a formal bridge between school and the workplace--an effort to repair one of the worst voids now plaguing U.S. education and business.

In isolated corners of the country, a handful of school systems, prodded by sagging test scores and prolonged criticism from the business community, are attempting to drastically expand high-technology occupational courses and to teach virtually every academic subject in the context of the workplace.

The so-called “school-to-work transition” movement is the most visible consequence to date of a loose national consensus to overhaul public education. But it carries some twists that may strike many parents as radical.

It means, for example, that the traditional competencies of reading and writing are about to be joined by new, fluffier standards like “interpersonal abilities” (working colaboratively) and “resource competency” (being able to allocate time, money, materials and staff).

And it means judging a student’s performance not just on letter grades, but on the contents of a “portfolio” documenting his or her role in a variety of workplace-like “team projects” that students perform together.

Most school systems are paying little more than lip service to these concepts. But interesting experiments abound:

* In the Pasadena Unified School District, a system of small “career academies” operates at each of the district’s seven high schools. Through a network of local businesses and community college instructors, students receive work experience in a field directly linked to their academic program.

The academies--offering specialties such as health, computers, finance, electronics and graphic arts--give students the option of going directly into the job market upon graduation or continuing into college.

* In Pennsylvania, 130 high school students at a half-dozen schools are studying metal trades in a program modeled on Germany’s fabled “dual system” of education, in which secondary school students train in industry while pursuing their academic studies.

Students work three days a week at local metal shops and spend two days in classes where a team of teachers integrates work themes into college-prep-level academics. If workplace safety is the day’s theme, the English teacher may read a Robert Frost poem on the accidental death of a young man, the social studies teacher may assign an article on New York’s historic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and the science teacher may discuss why fire outside a building tends to lap into windows.

* In Oregon, legislation passed last year will force most students to choose between a course of study emphasizing either a technical career or college-preparatory classes as they enter the 11th grade. The legislation, regarded as one of the most extensive statewide education reform efforts in the nation, attempts to improve workplace readiness by requiring all 10th-grade students to obtain a “certificate of mastery” in basic subjects, beginning in 1996.

The Ft. Worth school district is attempting to make itself a shrine to an earlier education trend known as “applied learning.”

District officials have independently analyzed academic skill levels needed in 800 types of local jobs. That enables them to warn students, for example, that 70% of all jobs require algebra. The district sent 1,000 seventh-graders to one-week summer internships at scores of companies and has begun a 90-hour program that trains teachers in real-world teaching techniques.

In recent years the district has spent several million dollars to replace some traditional vocational classes with computer-aided introduction-to-technology courses. This fall it opened an elementary school that requires real-world participation, such as writing a letter of application to work on the student newspaper or making a kids-only decision on how a $10,000 playground budget should be spent.

Eighth-grade algebra students at two middle schools are working with a local title company on a yearlong mock purchase and renovation of a local park that will require youngsters to contract with an architect and perform a title search. Other classes, guided by personnel from General Dynamics, will engage in the mock selection of a supplier for an F-16 antenna, using computers to sift through eight bids. They will present their findings to executives of the corporation.

At the district’s applied-learning elementary school, teachers stress team projects, rarely give paper-and-pencil tests and do not require children to raise their hands before talking.

“When you’re in a business meeting you don’t raise your hand--you talk,” said Sandra Garcia, a fourth-grader.

Asked how she knew when to talk, Sandra explained with slight disdain: “When somebody’s talking, you don’t talk.”

Educators championing school-to-work transition programs say they are the long-term solution to increasing classroom comprehension among the great mass of students who do not attend college, lowering the dropout rate and developing a smarter, more independent work force.

Proponents call it the broadest, most serious school reform movement ever undertaken. They admit there is a political risk--traditional basic skills tests do not measure some of the qualities that real-world learning stresses--but say they have lost faith in the current system.

“What we’re doing is uncharted, but it’s clear that the old ship has sunk,” said Gary Standridge, the Ft. Worth district’s director of research and development. “This may be the first time we’ve ever come to grips with our overall model of schooling. All of the other reforms were imposed on the traditional 2-by-4-by-6 schoolhouse: two texts, four walls and six periods a day.”

Ft. Worth and some other innovative school systems are receiving unprecedented assistance from business executives, who are alarmed by the low skill levels of today’s job applicants and increasingly conscious of the trend to give “front-line” workers more decision-making authority while trimming layers of middle management.

“These kids get bored in school. They don’t make a connection,” said John Torinus, a West Bend, Wis., print shop owner who has invested $40,000 in a high school apprenticeship program. “The kids working here are making a connection with what they learn.”

However, the new programs, often based on Western European models, will take considerable time to spread in a nation long soured on unfulfilled educational experiments. Even the most optimistic educators believe it will take at least a decade of progress for many ideas to reach the average school.

The path is littered with roadblocks: Budget cuts have sliced many vocational-education programs in past years. There is no tradition here of substantial business support for public schools. The idea of creating a special curriculum for non-college-bound students raises the specter that children will be segregated into different quality “tracks,” a practice opposed by many education reformers. And a debate still brews in some quarters over whether the idea of teaching “critical thinking” skills is merely a quick fix for an education system that is cranking out students who lack even basic skills.

Ft. Worth has been able to move fast because it enjoys several advantages over huge bureaucracies such as the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Ft. Worth has one-ninth the number of students as the Los Angeles system and smaller class sizes. It enjoys cordial relations between its board and superintendent. Because Texas makes it harder for unions to organize than California, the Ft. Worth teachers union has relatively little clout. In the mid-1980s, Ft. Worth voters approved a school bond measure that included millions for vocational educational equipment. This is virtually impossible in Los Angeles, where California’s Proposition 13 requires a two-thirds majority vote for approval.

While some Los Angeles high schools are experimenting with school-to-work transition programs, overall reform remains at the talking stage. A proposal by a coalition of Los Angeles business, civic and education leaders recommends establishing transition “councils” throughout the district and making career preparation a formal part of school curriculum.

Lauren Resnick, an educational psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh who is regarded as a leading researcher in how children learn, said school traditionally gives students “almost zero opportunity to learn in a contextual situation.

“What you know and how you know it are not two separate things. They are intimately related,” Resnick said. “The textbook knowledge . . . simply can’t substitute for just being there and doing it.”

Bolstered by this philosophy, educators are blending the traditionally segregated concepts of vocational education and college prep to create courses of study called “tech prep.” They are trying to prepare students for careers ranging from cosmetology to computer technology that--like the vast majority of jobs now being created--require technical skill beyond high school but do not demand a four-year college degree.

Apprenticeships are being combined with standard teaching approaches like “team teaching” and “applied learning.” Teachers are being encouraged to develop projects that force students to integrate numerous academic subjects, analogous to the way workers in technically demanding jobs must rapidly evaluate information from various sources or juggle several tasks.

Much of this effort is aimed at the 56% of American high school graduates--about 1.4 million a year--who forgo college and plunge directly into a job market that differs radically from the one their parents faced. Hundreds of thousands of other graduates enter community colleges with only slightly more focused aspirations.

Years later, having bumped their heads against a wall of minimum-wage jobs--and having discovered firsthand the disappearance of millions of low-skilled factory jobs that used to let high school graduates build middle-class lives, many of these same people filter into adult job-training programs, trying desperately to develop the skills and real-world savvy they missed in high school.

That sober economic quandary is often played out most savagely in inner-city neighborhoods, where a disproportionate number of well-paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs were eliminated in the past decade by foreign competition and decisions by companies to move to outlying suburban regions.

Many of the educational reforms are rooted in a 1990 report by a bipartisan commission of prominent American businessmen, educators and labor leaders, who said the nation’s productivity crisis can be solved only by radically restructuring both its educational system and basic manufacturing philosophy along the lines of industrialized countries of Western Europe and Asia. The commission’s chairman, Rhode Island business consultant Ira Magaziner, became one of Bill Clinton’s key economic campaign advisers.

Further fueling the efforts was a 1991 Labor Department report warning that the workplace is changing so drastically that half of all Americans now enter the working world without what Labor Secretary Lynn Martin described as “reasoning skills and an ability and willingness to learn.”

Although many of the experiments in school-to-work transition reflect the Bush’s Administration’s frequent cry for “break-the-mold” schools, the hard reality is that few of the efforts incorporate an entire school, let alone an entire district.

In the culture of teaching, cooperative ventures--such as English, science and woodworking teachers having their students jointly renovate a greenhouse, as is being planned at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles--are rare.

“Teachers aren’t used to working with other teachers,” said Cathy Armstrong, an English teacher at Jefferson. “They love to go on and on, to the last chapter” of the textbook. “What you have to start looking at is: What is essential? In my case, this (greenhouse) project focuses me on literature about going back to the earth. . . . This, to me, is the only way to teach. People don’t think in math, then history, then science.”

The Pasadena Unified School District’s academy system follows the same principles.

The academies are limited to 120 students and five teachers, so that most students have the same group of teachers, and teachers meet daily to integrate each other’s subjects into the next day’s lesson plans. They are so popular that parents of children as young as 11 years old have inquired about trying to reserve a slot in the high school programs, officials say.

The academies run on elbow grease. Teachers attempt to build alliances with local businesses and community colleges. Students, who may enroll in any academy in the district, are required to sign a three-year participation agreement that includes performing 100 hours of community service. Each academy has four to five business sponsors that provide students with work experience and a mentor.

John Porter, the Pasadena district’s director of secondary education, said the academies accept students from all achievement levels.

“Regular high school, you just learn the regular stuff--government, English, math--in a way that doesn’t relate to the real world,” said Linh Le, 18, who spent her final two years of high school in the health careers academy at Pasadena’s Blair High School.

In her junior year, Le took classes that helped her pass the state’s certified nursing assistant exam. In her senior year, one of her teachers--a former nurse--arranged for her to work a daily afternoon shift as a nursing assistant at a local hospital. In English class, her essay assignments dealt with health issues. She went off campus to take an advanced physiology class at Pasadena Community College.

“In the academy, everything you do is taught so that it relates to what you want to do,” said Le, who this fall began full-time nursing studies at Pasadena Community College. “It’s realistic. They want you to have a realistic goal and work on that.”