Ten years ago, no one did web searches; the World Wide Web didn't exist. Email was something only a few techies knew about. VCRs were a novelty. Cell phones were big, clunky prototypes. Even fax machines were unknown. It's hard to believe how new these things are.
"Nothing is constant but change," says an old adage. But now it seems that even change isn't constant: it's accelerating. Microchips keep getting faster, smaller, cheaper, transforming the way we communicate, the way we handle information, the way we learn. The effects are profound, and there is no end in sight.
Ten years ago, no one chose career majors in high school; the idea of a career major didn't exist. Career academies were something only a few dozen high schools had. High schools organized as sets of career pathways or academies were unknown. These are some of the ways high schools are reorganizing to prepare students for a world of accelerating change. But maybe it is surprising that they did not happen earlier--the basic educational ideas have been around for a long time.
Around the beginning of this century, high schools were adapting to large-scale industrialization. As fewer people worked on farms, more students stayed in school to learn a trade. And as work in big factories was being broken down into small steps, with the design of tasks separated from their execution, high schools created separate courses of study for the thinkers and the doers. Advocates of these educational changes argued that specialization was efficient. Why teach students things they would never use? So future professionals did not learn masonry or machine repair, and future tradesmen did not study science, math, or humanities at an advanced level.
Some people at the time opposed this kind of specialization in high school. Most notably, John Dewey argued that "education through occupations" was the best education for any student. Studies by cognitive scientists and anthropologists in the past decade or two have reinforced Dewey's view by showing that people are more likely to be able to use academic concepts if these concepts are related to practical application in the first place.
Now we are in another period of rapid change. At times like this, more education helps. Earnings have grown faster for college graduates than for high school graduates during the past two decades. College graduates are favored by employers who must adapt to changing technology and market conditions. More educated people are also better equipped for self-employment. To prepare students for a world of accelerating change, a growing number of high schools are now trying to give all students the necessary academic foundation to pursue further education, including a bachelor's degree or more. Even for students who go to work full time after high school, the option of going back to school later is important.
More than in the past, adults have to keep learning to deal with new information, ideas, and technology at work, in family life, and in the local and global community. That is why high schools are putting more emphasis on learning to learn. And because this need for continual learning arises from practical situations where people have to make decisions and get things done, high schools are developing the capacity for lifelong learning by giving students more opportunities to learn in practical contexts. Instead of learn now, apply later (maybe), students are put into positions where they have a need to know. Learning and doing are connected, at least sometimes.
The college-prep academic curriculum and learning in practical contexts come together in various forms of career majors, pathways, and academies. In addition to keeping the four-year college option open for all students, these new college-and-career programs also give students knowledge and skills that they can use immediately in the job market. Since most high school graduates go to college and work at the same time, this new kind of integrated curriculum in high school can make it easier to stay in college by enabling students to get better-paid jobs and thus spend fewer hours working. Students who start college but leave before graduating--as many do--also have more job skills to fall back on if they have graduated from a college-and-career program.
The single-theme school is the simplest version of the college-and-career approach. Most often found in big cities where high population density permits more specialization among high schools, these schools organize their curriculum around a theme such as agriculture, aviation, fashion, or finance. Some of these schools are committed to giving all students a strong, college-prep curriculum. Good examples are Chicago's High School for Agricultural Sciences or the High School of Economics and Finance in New York City.
These schools connect classroom learning to practical contexts through work-based learning, community service, and research projects. For example, at the High School for Agricultural Sciences, class assignments may be based on student internships at the Chicago Board of Trade or the Quaker Oats company. The High School of Economics and Finance, located in the heart of New York City's financial district, requires all students to spend time in paid internships at Wall Street firms as well as in unpaid community service.
A second version of the college-and-career approach divides a whole high school into several schools-within-schools. These smaller groupings often are called "academies" or "houses," and their size can range from 80 to 300 students (with four to 10 teachers) each. The academy model was first developed in the late 1960s in Philadelphia and later in the early 1980s in California. Career academies are schools-within-schools, in which the curriculum is organized around a career theme. In its first incarnations, the smaller structure was designed to better serve students at risk of dropping out of high school. Since then, however, many high schools have chosen to provide the academy structure for all students, including the four-year-college bound.
Today, hundreds of career academies in California and around the country are teaching the core academic curriculum through application to broad occupational or industry themes such as health careers, business and finance, natural resources, manufacturing sciences, space sciences, communications media, travel and tourism, law and government, graphic arts, and environmental studies. As in a single-theme school, each academy provides academic and vocational instruction related to its focus. Some academies cover all four years of high school, others only the last two or three years.
For example, at Fenway Middle College High School in Boston, students make their selection of three "houses" upon being accepted to the school for the ninth grade. The options are the Children's Hospital Collaborative, the CVS Pharmacy House, and the Crossroads House. The early selection is not as limiting as it may seem, because the school and its business partners use a flexible approach to recognize the full range of students' career choices when arranging the required work internships. For instance, one student in the Hospital house was interested in architecture, and was therefore given an internship in the hospital's space planning office.
In the more completely self-contained academies, students take all of their classes, both academic and vocational, with other academy students, and the teachers in these classes work together to coordinate the curriculum. At Encina High School outside of Sacramento, California, teachers in English, math, biology, and health occupations team up in a health academy. Practical applications are provided by employers such as Sutter Health, which offers paid and unpaid internships in the field.
William H. Turner Technical Arts High School in Miami, Florida, is another example of a high school divided into career academies. After making their academy selection at the end of the freshmen year, students work with the same set of teachers for the next three years. Despite the large inner-city student population of approximately 2,100, Turner Tech has the highest attendance rate in Dade County and reports none of the fighting that plagues most large, inner-city high schools around the country.
Although academies originated as schools-within-schools enrolling only a fraction of the whole student population, they have recently been generalized to a whole-school model in which every teacher and student belongs to an academy. At Fenway, the Children's Hospital Collaborative was the first house to be formed. A formal evaluation revealed that the at-risk students were performing better than other students in terms of attendance and grades. This led to the decision to provide the innovative combination of integrated academic courses and work internships to all students.
A third model, which has flourished since passage of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act, organizes a comprehensive high school into majors, clusters or pathways. Here technical and vocational courses are organized according to broad themes, similar to the academies, but academic classes are not generally composed of students who all major in the same field. Therefore, the traditional academic and vocational departments usually remain as an organizational structure for faculty and courses, but the career major concept provides guiding principles for student course selections during all four years in high school as well as encouragement for curriculum integration by teachers. Some teachers in pathway schools say they would like to see more extensive integration of curriculum. For this reason, this model is sometimes seen as a transitional step toward dividing the school into more self-contained houses or academies.
Students in a career pathway, major, or cluster take academic classes from grade 9 through 12 with students from several other majors, but also a sequence of electives specific to the pathway. Teachers in core academic subjects have students from several pathways in each class, while teachers of pathway-specific electives do not. The broad nature of a pathway is intended to appeal to students with a wide range of academic and technical abilities. Pathways provide preparation for all postsecondary options, whether that is direct entry into the full-time workforce or further education at either 2-year or 4-year colleges.
One example of this approach is Thompson R2-J District in Loveland, Colorado, which created six pathways that prepare students for both employment and further education. The pathways also allow partnerships and student internships with the range of businesses in the Loveland area without relying on one or two specific industries.
The size of many comprehensive high schools makes it difficult to create work-based learning experiences in local businesses for all students. Some, like David Douglas High School in Portland, Oregon, address that problem by developing school-based enterprises.
Teachers in schools with majors, clusters, or pathways are not expected to align themselves with only one career theme, but they are encouraged to develop integrated curriculum. Sussex Technical High School in Georgetown, Delaware, supports this curriculum integration for pathway teachers in a variety of ways. In going to a block schedule, the school day was reorganized to give more daily planning time to teachers that was previously spent in student passing time or in less productive staff meetings. In addition, it encourages the creative efforts of both teachers and students by offering small monetary integration "grants" both for interdisciplinary projects designed by teachers and by students who must complete several such projects throughout their four years at Sussex Tech.
These different forms of high school reorganization can also be combined. For example, in a single-theme school the range of student career interests can lead to the creation of pathways or majors within the single theme. Gateway Institute of Technology in St. Louis illustrates this idea. The entire school is focused on preparation for careers in high-tech science and engineering fields, but students can major in Agriculture, Biology and Health; Engineering Technology; Applied Physical Sciences; or Math and Computer Science. All students must meet rigorous academic requirements that reflect the high-tech focus of the school (for example, all students must take trigonometry), but each major has its own sequence of courses that culminates in very small, specialized elective courses in the 12th grade.
Schools that opt to provide academies for all students are faced with the difficulty of trying to serve a wide range of academic abilities within the same class. Some schools will pull students out of their academies specifically for math instruction so that classes of different ability levels can take priority over the need to integrate the curriculum. For example, a geometry class in a school with academies may look very much like a geometry class in school with pathways because a range of career interests is represented. The geometry teacher may try to serve all career themes by providing several integrated lessons that focus on the media academy students first, then the business academy, and then the architecture academy.
Transforming a high school from the model invented at the start of this century to a model that will prepare students for the next one requires major investments in planning, professional development, and construction of new curriculum. High schools all across the country are now engaged in these efforts. They are spurred by a recognition that the old model doesn't work any more, and by a sense that students will be best equipped for the emerging economy if they are prepared for both college and careers. Federal encouragement in the 1990 Perkins Act and the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act has helped, but many schools began their college-and-career initiatives before these laws were passed.
Whether these efforts will continue will depend, ultimately, on the results they achieve. Are more students mastering a demanding, college-prep curriculum? Are they succeeding in college and in the job market? Are they becoming lifelong learners? Early evidence, mainly from career academies, has been promising. But now that whole high schools are going in the college-and-career direction, they will need to find out how well this new approach is working.
David Stern is the director of NCRVE and a professor of education at UC
Berkeley.
Mayo Tsuzuki Hallinan is an NCRVE researcher at the UC
Berkeley site.