POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Even a casual perusal of the literature on change in schools reveals that rarely if ever does one find strict adherence to the original intent of reform initiatives. Policy formulation, no matter how well and tightly conceived, inevitably takes a back seat to policy implementation (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987; McLaughlin, 1987). It is at the nitty gritty level of the local school that any reform policy is realized and takes form and substance. The range of this enactment can vary widely, from minimal and surface compliance to imaginative and opportunistic use (Berman & McLaughlin, 1975). Wilson and Rossman (1993) and others suggest that this phenomena of local variations in fidelity can be explained by examining two related facets of local response to school reform--(1) will and (2) capacity. The case studies above clearly illustrate the potency and influence of site specific understandings and commitments, of local capacities, of organizational/structural constraints and resources, and of the cultures of the individual schools on the implementation of both reforms. To the explanatory concepts of will and capacity, this research suggests a third--that of monitoring or accountability.

I use these three factors as a conceptual framework for reexamining the fate of the vocational education reforms in the local context of schools and for formulating some recommendations. My fundamental argument is that vocational education reforms face serious challenges in all three areas when it comes to implementation in traditional, comprehensive high schools. This can have the effect of placing the reform efforts from the start in a negative position and can allow the idiosyncrasies of local context and the dominance of the status quo to ride roughshod over the reform to an even greater extent than might be expected.

Will

As Firestone (1989) notes, "will" encompasses more than commitment and understanding on the part of organizational participants. It first implies a highly political process whereby a reform initiative wins the "active" endorsement of a dominant coalition in the school (Pfeffer, 1978). [I use the word "active" in quotation marks to denote the fact that many ideas, plans, and initiatives routinely get endorsed or assented to, by school organizations. "Active" endorsement refers to a level of enthusiasm and commitment beyond the routine.] While the composition of the dominant coalition will vary by site (Firestone, 1989), it is likely to consist of top school administrators, school board members, and, especially for school-based reforms, principals, and influential teacher leaders. Locally, parent and community groups and business and industry may also participate.

The backing and support of these "influentials" in the dominant coalition accomplishes several critical functions. First, they supply and control vital communication channels through which the reform gains the attention of and status in the larger organization. Second, these individuals either directly make, or are capable of influencing, critical decisions in the organization with regards to the reform. Third, to a large extent, they will be responsible for interpreting the change effort for others, and that interpretation/ understanding will determine the degree and fidelity of organizational response.

For the schools in this study, there was a clear lack of political will and clout behind the vocational education reforms and, to a lesser extent, the essential school reforms. The formation of a viable dominant coalition in support of reform was most nearly realized in Oakfield, at least for the essential school reforms. Even this, though, was hampered by incessant superintendent and principal turnover. The school board members, the "old Oakfield" community, and the long-tenured teaching staff at the high school basically formed an informal coalition that allowed the school and district to continue to function as administrators came and went. However, this maintenance function precluded much else. Even in a rural community that clearly valued and wished to preserve its vocational education program and attendant reforms, these received primarily maintenance support.

It seems reasonable to assert that vocational education reforms have not enjoyed the active endorsement of a dominant coalition in the case study schools. At best, the degree of success and expansion of the vocational education reforms at Oakfield rests solidly on the shoulders of the two Tech Prep coordinators and some of the vocational teachers. In the Edgewater case, the vocational education reforms are, for all practical purposes, nonexistent at East Campus. At West Campus, any enthusiasm for or support of these reforms rests exclusively with those intimately connected with the vocational/ cooperative education program. Vocational education reforms, by themselves, are not likely to garner the political strength and clout necessary to attract the active endorsement of a dominant coalition. This would seem to leave two rather straightforward options: (1) either creatively find ways of attaching to and linking up with other larger secondary reform initiatives or (2) build a nontraditional coalition, inclusive of prominent community, parent, community college, and business/industry representatives that can then exert influence on traditional strongholds of power in school organizations.

Capacity

Reform designers and policymakers seem to tenaciously cling to two bedrock and completely fallacious assumptions about schools and reform. First, they appear to assume that schools will agree with and see the value of the intent of the given reform, and second, that schools have similar sets of resources and capabilities to respond to a given reform. While the former assumption concerns "will," the latter touches on the issue of capacity. Firestone (1989) put it well: "If will refers to the commitment to a decision, capacity refers to the wherewithal to actually implement it. The capacity to use reform is the extent to which the [school] has the knowledge, skills, personnel, and other resources necessary to carry out decisions" (p. 157).

The point is that local schools vary enormously in their capacity to respond to reform initiatives. Each school is characterized by a complex mix of transcending factors that include, but are not limited to, community tradition and history, local socioeconomic conditions, and the characteristics of the population being served; as well as school-specific conditions like culture, availability and allocation of resources, and the stability and tenure of the staff. I would add time as another significant determinant of capacity for change. From accumulated evidence (see Prestine, in press), it does seem that there are propitious moments for schools to enact significant changes. These windows of opportunity, however, can close as suddenly as they are opened, and it takes exceptionally alert and astute leadership to recognize these openings and be able to capitalize on them. On the other hand, there are clearly times when attempts at significant change are likely to be ill-advised such as in times of exceptional instability for the school (Fullan, 1993; Prestine & Stringfield, in press).

As schools vary across these dimensions, so does their capacity for change. While these factors clearly must be understood and taken into consideration, most of them are largely out of the locus of control of schools. Two features directly related to capacity issues over which schools do exercise some degree of control, however, are allocations concerning personnel and resources.

While a dominant coalition may make the decision to pursue a particular reform, it is not likely that most members of the coalition will be directly involved with the daily, nitty-gritty work called for by the change effort. It is at this juncture that it is imperative that organizational rearrangements and role redefinitions be made in ways that clearly prioritize the change effort. Participants in the organization will value and commit to the change effort to the extent that there is evidence that top administration values and is committed to the effort. One substantive way of showing this is by identifying and recruiting the best able individuals for the tasks required. This means not assigning someone to head up a reform effort because he or she is one teaching assignment short anyway. At Oakfield, the inspired use of the two academic teachers along with release time for their efforts has served to infuse new life and vitality into the flagging Tech Prep effort. As these teachers already commanded respect within the faculty, they imbued the Tech Prep effort with a legitimacy that was previously lacking.

While somewhat overlapping with personnel, resources refer to the necessary time, material, and facilities needed to successfully move reform forward in the school. New knowledge, training, and technical assistance will likely be required. This means that staff development must be schoolwide and have a sustained and well-defined focus that directly contributes to the reform effort. While the essential school effort did not necessarily do a sterling job of attending to this, it certainly outstripped the vocational education reforms in reaching a significantly greater portion of the faculty through professional development activities. It seems clear that vocational education reforms need to attend to this issue in a much more systematic and serious manner, especially if academic teachers are to become knowledgeable enough to participate meaningfully.

Monitoring

Without consistent monitoring and oversight, any reform effort seems likely to falter and eventually fail. At once a great strength and a great weakness, the Coalition's adamant refusal to adopt any kind of "model" for essential school change left schools floundering as there simply were not any benchmarks by which to gauge either progress toward implementation or fidelity to intent. Schools will inevitably face a myriad of competing demands for their time and energies. Those initiatives that carry no built in oversight or monitoring will inevitably get less attention as others carrying more direct and obvious consequences elbow their way to the front of the line (Prestine, in press). As Firestone (1989) noted, without such oversight "it becomes difficult for school staff to understand that, among the welter of demands made on their time by students, parents, and other policies, this one should take top priority" (p. 161).

Wilson and Rossman (1993) argue that embedded within the specifics of a given reform are what they call "intuitive causal models" (p. 161). These models hold implicit predictive linear projections of the consequences of taking a certain course of action. For example, for the vocational education reforms, a part of the causal model was that increased academic focus and requirements would better prepare students for postsecondary educational and work experiences. However, in the case study schools, there was limited monitoring of the implementation of such reform changes and none of their outcomes. Little if any attention was paid to whether the causal model actually worked. In a classic instance of goal displacement, this lack of any kind of substantive monitoring of either implementation or outcomes allowed participants to abdicate any responsibility for the reform change and instead to focus on the constraints of their particular context. Thus,
no one really took responsibility for the reform and, in turn, this allowed participants to focus more on the peculiarities and constraints of their local context than on the overall reform effort.

It seems that when such monitoring or oversight is absent, there will be little reason to suppose that the reforms will achieve more than superficial implementation and impact (Clune, White, & Patterson, 1989; McDonnell, 1988). Possibilities (what we can do) will be ignored while local constraints (why we cannot do this) will take center stage. Thus, local context will come to have an inordinate and deleterious effect on the reform initiative. It also appears that such oversight must come from external agencies. While some rare schools may be capable of self-monitoring, the past decade and a half of the history of reforms in schools has not been overwhelmingly favorable to this conclusion.

Clearly, as these case studies have shown, conceptions of change, whether essential school or vocational education reforms, cannot be thought of as either linear or context free (Cohen, 1990; Prestine, 1993). Instead, the centrality of the local context must be highlighted and ways and means found to exploit its resources and uniqueness while not allowing it to overwhelm the reform initiative itself. Especially for essential school and vocational education reforms that aim at changing the core technology (curriculum, instruction, and assessment) of schools, this has important ramifications for all participants. It is helpful at this juncture to keep in mind an early admonition from Sizer (1991) that everything of importance in school is connected with everything else. As Wilson and Rossman (1993) note, "altering the curriculum has profound implications for teaching strategies, organizational structures and supports, and professional relations as well as for a host of other elements of schools" (p. 191). Especially vocational education reforms need to be mindful of these connections.

The dilemma of the vocational education reforms in traditional, comprehensive high schools is complex, multifaceted, and varies from context to context in significant ways. The vocational/academic split is, at once, school-site specific and, yet, larger than any individual school. As Hargreaves (1994) noted, "Clearly, this is an issue that extends far beyond the individual school itself to the educational and social community outside it, where any such struggles to equalize and establish value between rigor and relevance, academic and practical mentalities, and high- and low-status knowledge will challenge the interest of the powerful and not be ceded easily . . ." (pp. 236-237).