Editor's note: the following was originally an open letter to the members of the Urban Schools Network. It is reprinted here in its entirety.
Just getting through the day can be a challenge sometimes, so it helps to remember that the changes you are making are truly historic. The NCRVE Urban Schools Network is dedicated to making high-quality, career-related curricular options available to all students. A key aim is to prepare students both for careers and for postsecondary education, including four-year college or university.
Available evidence from California career academies and New York City career magnets indicates that this approach can improve school achievement for students who have not fared well in the standard curriculum. College-bound students can also thrive when their education focuses on broad industry-related or occupational themes. If students move on to different career interests after they leave high school, nothing is lost: they still have had the benefit of a coherent high school curriculum that appealed to their interest at the time.
The idea of preparing students for college and careers at the same time is a big departure from what has happened in the past and still happens now in many places. That's why we're making history. The Urban Schools Network is part of a movement that could mark a major turning point in American education.
At the 1995 week-long summer institute-cosponsored by the Hands and Minds Collaborative of the Center for Law and Education and the Rindge School of Technical Arts-we also hammered out an Agreement for Program Improvement, a new charter for the Urban Schools Network that states enduring aims not tied to specific language of the Perkins or School-to-Work Acts. This has been signed by teachers, administrators, and in some cases parents and business partners, from 20 sites. The Hands and Minds Collaborative also endorsed this statement of purpose.
In just a few years, you have taken many significant steps. In some network sites, changes are mainly happening in individual high schools.
To take just one example, Somerville High School in Somerville, Massachusetts is reorganizing itself into clusters consisting of approximately 125 students each, staffed by a team consisting of English, math, social studies, and science teachers, a building master, and two guidance counselors. This reorganization grew out of a plan drafted at the 1992 NCRVE Summer Institute. Another example is McKinley-Penn Senior High School in Washington, D.C., which in 1992 created a Publishing Academy in 1992, complementing a School of Communication that began in the mid-1980s. These two magnet programs have a strong partnership with some 19 different businesses which come together in an active advisory council. In 1995 the school valedictorian and salutatorian were both academy students.
Many NCRVE teams began with the intention of creating tech prep linkages, and several of these have borne fruit. For instance, a partnership has been established between George Westinghouse High School and New York City Technical College in Brooklyn, New York. One outcome has been the creation of an integrated, interdisciplinary course on entrepreneurship and society. School-based enterprises have also been started. In one of these, students repair fax machine circuit boards under contract to the Ricoh Corporation. Another tech prep partnership, involving Maplewood High School and Volunteer State Community College in Nashville, Tennessee, has produced a detailed plan for a curricular pathway in hospitality, tourism, and recreation, which is Nashville's fastest-growing industry. This plan was drafted during NCRVE summer institutes, and is now being used as a prototype for other career clusters, which are intended to enroll all students. NCRVE involvement at Maplewood has been coordinated with the High Schools That Work project of the Southern Regional Education Board.
In addition to these efforts in individual schools or tech prep partnerships, several NCRVE teams have involved a larger set of schools, an entire district, or a consortium of districts. A good example is the Cleveland Public Schools Health Center, which formed a partnership with Cuyahoga Community College to prepare high school students for health careers using an integrated curriculum that fuses mathematics, science and communications with health classes. Another good example is in Oklahoma City. There the Edmond Public Schools, Western Heights Public Schools, Putnam City Public Schools, Francis Tuttle Vo-Tech Center, and Oklahoma City Community College formed the Oklahoma City CREATE Consortium (the Consortium to Restructure Education through Academic and Technological Excellence) in 1991. For CREATE's 4+2+2 career cluster initiative the development of interdisciplinary faculty teams has been the essential component. CREATE has now begun an effort to align four career clusters in one school district and adapt this model to other districts in the area. In January, 1993 the CREATE Consortium was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a federal demonstration site, and was awarded a grant to support evaluation, dissemination and assistance to others in replicating the CREATE model.
The 1995 summer institute brought most of the teams together for another week of intensive study, planning, and problem-solving. Two days of this will happen again for most of the teams just before the 1996 National Leadership Forum on School-to-Career Transition, which NCRVE is cosponsoring this year with Jobs for the Future, as we did last year. These off-site sessions give you an opportunity to take stock, compare notes, and figure out how to cope with the myriad contingencies that beset these change efforts.
In addition, teams are also putting summer time to use at home. Many are hosting fellows for summer planning activities, while one team, Oklahoma City, is hosting its first week-long retreat for cluster teams.
For the next three years, we have three objectives. One is to strengthen activities currently under way in network sites. Integrating the curriculum, linking it to work-based learning, smoothing the path from secondary to postsecondary education, and using performance assessment to monitor student progress are all elements of the activities now under way at network sites, but some are at a more advanced stage of implementation while others are only planned. To move the process along, we want to continue the on-site support and technical assistance begun in 1995-96. Marilyn Raby, Lola Jackson, and the faculty fellows organized by Erika Nielsen Andrew can continue to provide valuable trouble-shooting, networking, and staff development services, including Getting to Work sessions. We are also seeking funds to provide partial salary support for one or more individuals at each site, who would act as local project leaders. In addition to coordinating the ongoing change efforts in their own schools, these local leaders could become resources for other schools nearby.
On-site assistance for schools in the Urban Schools Network (and also outside the network) is now beginning to make use of a major new NCRVE product, called Getting to Work. This is a staff development guide for schools that want to use career-related themes as part of their reform strategy. It consists of a five-volume practitioner's guide and a facilitator's guide. The practitioner's guide contains best-practice case materials accompanied by structured activities in which groups of teachers and collaborators analyze the case materials and then determine how they can do something similar in their own schools. The facilitator's guide is to be used by a trained leader to help participants through the analysis and planning process. The package took two years to develop, and was extensively pilot-tested in 1995. NCRVE is now offering these workshops free of charge to schools in the network, though other schools have to pay. In February, 1996, faculty fellows received their first training on how to facilitate Getting to Work sessions, and several on-site sessions have now taken place.
A second objective is to move toward district-wide implementation at existing network sites. As illustrated above, some of your activities have moved to the multi-school or even multi-district level. In some locations, however, network activity still remains small and too isolated from the mainstream of the school and community. We want to help you move these projects from beachheads toward full-scale school reform affecting entire districts. We do not advocate or expect that all high school students in your districts will necessarily be enrolled in career-focused programs of study, but we think it would be desirable to make enough of these learning sequences available so that all students could realistically consider one such sequence as an option. Urban Schools Network staff based at Berkeley, along with faculty fellows and local leaders at the network sites, could engage in more aggressive outreach in other schools, at the district level, and with local business partners.
Our third objective is to help you achieve financial self-sufficiency for these activities in your own communities. Whether in 1996 or 1997, some kind of new federal legislation for work-related education and training will probably soon be in place. Many states are also passing new school-to-work or employment training legislation of their own. We would like to work with you to take advantage of the new laws. We have also identified community foundations or potential corporate donors in several locations, and can help you approach these private donors. If the teams can find financial support from one or more sources, they will be able to continue their efforts without further assistance from Berkeley.