It is becoming increasingly apparent that the educational development of youth cannot succeed solely through the efforts of the schools. Learning must be enhanced through exposure of young people to a variety of opportunities to test themselves in the community and in the workplace alongside supportive adults. Schools must find ways of working together with other organizations in the community to make this possible. It is in the context of such issues at the forefront of current events that riffs yearbook examines the relationships between education and work.

In this chapter, ease studies of cooperative efforts are described. The descriptions are followed by discussion of several factors that emerge from the ease studies: indicators of cooperation, potent variables that influence cooperation, unresolved issues, and explanatory models of the cooperative process. Those findings and summary conclusions are presented in subsequent sections of the chapter. Because of the different and often inconsistent uses of the terms "cooperation," "coordination," and "collaboration" in the literature, those terms are used interchangeably in this chapter.

Unemployment is up, the economy is faltering, and the major problems in vocational education, in all of education, have not disappeared. Indeed, the issues of the 1960s seem to have grown more serious with time. Although it is not possible to describe all the problems that confront vocational education in a brief concluding chapter, I will discuss a few of the more salient issues.