In 1992, a team from the Consortium to Restructure Education through Academic and Technological Excellence (CREATE) in Oklahoma City attended the National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE) Summer Institute, "Establishing Tech Prep Programs in Urban Schools." Its plan focused on the strengthening of a 4+2+2 program to encourage more high school students to continue their education beyond a high school diploma and prepare for careers in technical areas. Although the plan looked like a winner, the CREATE leaders felt their results after three years were not what they wanted in the most important area: a significant impact on student outcomes and achievement. Students were not taking more vocational or academic courses. The applied academics courses had not led to increased test scores. Students were not taking advantage of the articulation agreements to continue their education in the community college or university systems. More students did not have focused career and/or postsecondary education goals in the fields related to the Tech Prep course sequences. Says Robin Schott, codirector of the CREATE Tech Prep initiative:
We were using tons of marketing gimmicks--pens, pencils, T-shirts, and more--to sell our Tech Prep initiative to kids. But marketing was not really making a difference in kids' experiences in school. We decided we needed a different vision that would focus on all students' career goals, not on a separate program for some kids.
The consortium also identified and supported small teams of willingvocational and academic teachers at a couple of high schools and concentrated professional development and support on them rather than making a mammoth, five-district centralized effort. For CREATE, the different vision incorporated the strengths of its Tech Prep initiative into a structure built on career clusters for all students in the comprehensive high school.
The results in the last two years have been dramatic. The majority of faculty at one high school has requested participation on cluster teams with the enthusiastic support and leadership of the principal. Three high schools are developing two cluster models each that will eventually be placed in all ten high schools in the five districts to give students their choice of six clusters. Parent and student responses as measured by various surveys tell CREATE that community understanding and support for career clusters is very high. Says Schott, "Enrollment in vocational courses is up one-hundred percent. Enrollment in advanced academic classes is up. Although we only require two science courses, more students are taking that third year because they really understand within their career cluster what they need to get where they need to be." Where they used to market with pens and pencils, now the emphasis is on helping students select a career cluster and developing the six-year course plan within that cluster. "Our marketing is truly that one-on-one communication between advisors and students with parents to talk about the students' career goals, develop that plan, and take the courses they need in high school to get there."
Like many consortia and schools around the country as well as most of the teams in NCRVE's Urban Schools Network, CREATE started with an emphasis on a Tech Prep initiative. Several Urban Schools Network teams, including CREATE, decided to expand their initial plans into whole school reform. Why did CREATE and the others choose to go schoolwide? What factors can lead to this decision, and what other factors help whole school change efforts grow or die? What can be learned from the experiences of the Urban Schools Network teams?
THE PLANS 
Most of the teams that were selected for NCRVE's Summer Institutes of 1992 and 1993 sought assistance creating or strengthening Tech Prep programs. Among these teams were the CREATE consortium from Oklahoma City, the Doña Ana Tech Prep Consortium in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which includes three Las Cruces comprehensive high schools and Doña Ana Branch Community College, and the Omaha team composed of Bryan High School and Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska. These Tech Prep programs, when implemented, would rely on a strong connection between the high school and a community college that would provide sequential, seamless articulation between courses in technical career fields to encourage larger numbers of students to pursue postsecondary degrees and technical careers. In addition to the technical course sequences, math and science preparation and achievement were emphasized through the development of new academic courses thatpresented abstract content applied to technical contexts rather than in the absence of such problem-solving contexts.
Those that applied as secondary-level-only teams hoped to create teacher collaboration and curriculum integration across academic and vocational subject matter and classrooms. These teams included traditional comprehensive high schools such as Lake Clifton-Eastern High School in Baltimore City, Maryland; magnet schools such as Gateway Institute of Technology in St. Louis, Missouri; and career centers--magnets that students select because of the vocational programs that were not available at their "home" or zone high school--like Jane Addams Business Careers Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Lansdowne High School, another comprehensive high school in an outlying suburb of Baltimore applied and was admitted to the Network in 1995. For each of these secondary schools, the funding from the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990 (Perkins II) was intended to improve both the vocational curricula and pedagogy as well as the academic preparation for students in these courses. Although lacking the explicit articulation agreements with a particular postsecondary institution, the objectives of the secondary teams included better preparation of students for postsecondary training and degrees as well as employment.
Like all Perkins II funds recipients, the Urban Schools Network teams were required to abide by the legislation's requirements for the use of those funds. During the summer institutes, teams developed strategic plans for initiating or continuing Tech Prep or curriculum integration at their sites. Summer institute fellows guided the many involved discussions that helped teams address both their specific objectives and contexts as well as the legislated requirements and necessary program components. In particular, the legislation required grantees to ensure equal access to all students. Teams addressed this requirement by including in their plans descriptions of a target student population and specific goals and strategies for including special populations in the new academic and vocational course sequences they were developing.
At the time of the summer institutes, the vast majority of teams interpreted the legislation's wording regarding access as distinct from and not equal to an objective of whole school reform. Many teams defined their target population by one widely accepted Tech Prep definition at the time--intended for the "middle 50 percent" rather than all high school students (Parnell, 1985). In addition, many teams intended to identify a small pilot group of students for their programs and curricula to reach first. The hope was that successful results with a small group would engender acceptance and support among more teachers and administrators, who may at first have been skeptical of Tech Prep or integrated vocational and academic curriculum. For comprehensive high schools, it was hoped that with this greater support, all vocational courses and students could be included, if not the entire student population. For magnets, or those schools with a career interest already required of all students, teams certainly expected their plans to include all students and the whole school's participation.
While whole school reform was not explicitly the objective of the three institutes or of the majority of teams, the summer institutes were the starting point for many discussions about the benefits for all students of the strategies teams planned to implement back at their sites. For all teams, the wide-ranging debates around various components of team plans invariably found their way to intense discussions about the purposes of education in general, and more specifically, the purpose of the vocational education reforms teams were planning at the institutes. Many teams could not explicitly state objectives to include all students in the plans they drafted because their teams did not include administrators who could approve such plans. However, team discussions reflected an implicit philosophical stance that all students could benefit from strategies that improved student achievement, decreased high school dropout rates and increased opportunities for postsecondary education.
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BACK TO SCHOOL
When Urban Schools Network teams returned to their schools after the summer institutes, they faced varying levels of teacher and administrative support or resistance. Tech Prep teams no longer had the luxury of both secondary and postsecondary team members in the same site every day, and joint meetings were nearly impossible without administrative support from both institutions. Academic and vocational teachers returned to their individual classrooms often on opposite ends of large campuses, with no common planning time or shared students. Those who had not attended the institutes with teams were reluctant to give a stamp of approval to the plans teams labored so hard over. Whether these resistors were principals, department chairs, guidance counselors, or parents, each had his or her own particular reasons for rejecting the proposed curriculum, teaching, or scheduling changes.
Among Urban Schools Network sites, fourteen reported in 1997 that they were pursuing whole school reforms. Of these, seven said their efforts had stalled because they lacked the principal's support. This manifested itself in a variety of ways, from benign neglect to revolving door changes in the principalship. Two schools, for example, are introducing themselves to their fourth new principal since 1994. Another two are welcoming new principals in 1997 after long tenures with principals who preferred to finish their careers without taking on the difficult changes of whole school reform. In another case, the principal's year-long sabbatical halted some beginning efforts in curriculum and scheduling reform that teachers were unable or unwilling to pursue under an acting principal. For all seven of these schools, the four or five years since their initial participation in a summer institute was the necessary length of time to go through a major transition period and refocus on their reform goals. Optimistic about the next five years, the schools looked forward to newleadership that would involve all staff in reform planning and implementation that would affect all students.
BREAKING POINT
The question of why some Network sites chose to pursue whole school reform efforts differs widely, reflecting the unique contexts of each site. For some Network sites, internal barriers to whole school reform had to be overcome because of external pressures and, in some cases, circumstances that pushed schools to a breaking point. For example, Gateway Institute of Technology opened its doors in 1992 because of a state court order to better address desegregation in St. Louis Public Schools. The St. Louis school board was told to close three high schools and create one new one that would meet mandated racial balances and achievement outcomes. In Baltimore, Lake Clifton-Eastern High School earned the district's most intense scrutiny in 1995 because certain student outcomes did not meet the objectives set for the school in areas such as standardized test scores, attendance, and dropout levels. Faculty were told to develop a whole school reform plan or face school reconstitution with possible reassignment of all staff. In addition, the state of Maryland created a new graduation requirement that all high school students be either "college prep" or "career completers." For schools like Lake Clifton-Eastern and Lansdowne High, this meant they could no longer offer single vocational courses that did not lead either to skilled employment opportunities or postsecondary training programs. Instead, students who were not taking the traditional four-year college preparation course sequences must complete a minimum of four credits, a coherent sequence of courses, in one career area.
Finally, Cleveland's Jane Addams Business Careers Center needed to address an increase in enrollment as well as increased state graduation and testing requirements for all high school students. On one hand, the newly raised graduation and test requirements supported the school's plan to integrate the vocational and academic curriculum to support students' academic achievement. On the other, students needed to take more math and science courses that would cut into the time the students had previously spent in vocational courses or work-based learning. Their whole school reform plan needed to accommodate the strains in both directions.
BREAKING AWAY
For
three Urban Schools Network sites, external opportunities opened the doors for
their high schools to pursue whole school reform. In Omaha, Nebraska, Bryan
High School was one of several high schools to receive Perkins funding in 1991
for vocational education reform. At the time, says the school's Perkins II
coordinator Tom O'Hara, the school intended to break the mold of the
traditional high school and saw its funding as an opportunity to look at the
best models in the country. They wanted to identify the most promising
strategies and involve the entire staff in a grassroots whole school reform
effort at Bryan that would be a model in Omaha, if not in Nebraska.
Then, in 1994, the School-to-Work Opportunities Act called for the development of systems with three major components (school-based learning, work-based learning, and connecting activities) designed to prepare students for both postsecondary education and high-skill employment and backed this with large levels of planning and implementation funding to states that presented comprehensive reform plans. Again, while not requiring participation by all students in the comprehensive high school, the legislation clearly addressed all postsecondary options, from employment to associate degree programs to bachelors degree programs and beyond.
In Oklahoma City and Las Cruces, the door to whole school high school reform opened when school-to-work initiatives were seen as supporting and expanding their earlier Tech Prep efforts while addressing some of the problems they were encountering. Specifically, Tech Prep classes and students were being pushed aside just as vocational classes and students had been in previous years. Tech Prep was seen as a program only for students not able or interested in taking the four-year college prep track, leading to a reputation as second best among students, parents, guidance counselors, and teachers. In addition, these sites felt that without a whole school high school reform plan, they were leaving the traditional college prep track students at a disadvantage. These students were leaving high school with no focused goals other than to go to college. Many still needed remedial course work that reduced their chances of obtaining the bachelors degree, and many more wandered aimlessly through the college curriculum without clear career interests and goals. A school-to-work system addressed the needs of all students and helped these teams shift the emphasis of reform from vocational students to all students.
WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
Among the seven schools that had implemented and the seven that planned to implement whole school reform initiatives, there were four types of reforms described. The first--implementing alternative scheduling--is not necessarily related to emphasizing career or technical preparation while the other three are. These three can be seen as related to the school-to-work legislation's call for "career majors" available to all students through the school-based learning component. Career majors were intended to provide an organizational structure in the comprehensive high school that allows students to identify career interests rather than postsecondary education plans (e.g., college bound or non-college bound) and to use these interests to guide their course selections and work-based learning experiences.
Again, the legislation does not mandate that schools require career majors of all students, rather that they be an option for all students. A growing number of high schools throughout the country, including those we describe here, see the potential of career majors to improve the relevance and focus of the entire high school curriculum for all students. The three other whole school reforms we will describe are three ways of implementing career majors for all students: single-theme magnet schools, career academies, and career pathways or clusters.
ALTERNATIVE SCHEDULING 
Although a more detailed discussion of the issues involved in selecting and implementing various alternative schedules can be found in Chapter Four, we briefly discuss the experiences of two high schools here because their experience with the process was central to each school's vision of whole school reform. Bryan High School in Omaha, Nebraska, began a comprehensive whole school reform in 1991. Tom O'Hara, the school's Perkins II coordinator had the specific task of seeking out innovative models of high school reform for the entire staff to consider. "The leadership of the school district tried not to tie our Perkins money to anything traditional or something that had been done. The idea was that we were going to try to break the mold if we could, and that we had some free rein to do whatever we thought we could accomplish."
The staff eventually adopted a five-fold reform plan. It included adopting the block schedule, introducing writing across the curriculum, developing career clusters for all students, creating an advisory structure in which all staff would participate to replace traditional homeroom, and making the Tech Prep connection to Metropolitan Community College. Over the next four years, the move to a block schedule dominated the staff's reform efforts and truly defined a significant whole school change both for staff and students.
The principal and staff agreed that the schedule change must be a grassroots rather than a top-down effort, and to accomplish this, the school held whole-staff monthly planning meetings for an entire year. Every Wednesday, students arrived two hours late so that the faculty could meet, discuss, and vote on various steps in the process of changing the schedule. Although some teachers were more easily convinced than others of the advantages of block scheduling, the entire staff agreed that consensus was essential. The weekly meetings were sometimes contentious, often intense, but all felt personally committed to the work of airing concerns and disagreements in the hope of reaching new understanding. Gradually, after intense debates that mirrored the discussions the Omaha team held during past NCRVE summer institutes, the staff reached consensus. They agreed, beginning in the 1993-94 school year, to adopt the 4x4 block schedule in which all students would take the equivalent of four full-year courses in one semester, each course meeting every day for ninety minutes instead of the traditional forty-five.
In 1997, four years after the momentous change, Jan Hess, business teacher and internship coordinator, says:
It was a major, major reform for us, but it's just been extremely successful in my opinion. I doubt you'd find one teacher who was willing to go back to the traditional schedule. It has given us a lot more flexibility to help students pass classes and earn the graduation credits they need on time. And, as I see it, probably the biggest advantage has been that it forces teachers to break out of teaching styles and ways of thinking that are not contemporary and helps them meet the needs of today's students.
As
mentioned, the scheduling change was only one component of Bryan's five-point
whole school reform. While the career clusters were developed (this aspect of
Bryan's reform is discussed below), articulation agreements were signed with
the community college, writing across the curriculum was implemented and did
have a positive impact on student writing skills, and the advisory structure
was implemented to establish smaller student-to-adult ratios in the school, the
effort to introduce block scheduling stands out in the minds of the staff as
the one thing that brought the school together more than any other reform
initiative. The full staff meetings broke down barriers dividing academic
departments, vocational and academic subjects, and teachers and administrators.
It put the focus on student learning and asked an entire staff to find a
solution to improve the conditions for all students at Bryan.
Lansdowne High School in suburban Baltimore, Maryland, also felt that block scheduling needed to be its primary whole school reform effort and first implemented it in 1995-96. Principal John Bereska found that the move to block scheduling actually helped Lansdowne provide the career completer sequences (similar to career clusters and discussed further below) required by the state. "The advantage of the block schedule is that it gives us the flexibility to deliver the program to students. Without block scheduling, we would be unable to deliver the variety of career completer programs or give students the time to finish them." The time is necessary because the career completer sequences require a rigorous technical curriculum and at least four credits in a particular field. Says Bereska, "That's where we run into difficulty, and where the block schedule helps us out. Kids are expecting it not to be as rigorous as the academic track, or the course sequence needed to apply to the University of Maryland system, but it is."
Another advantage of the block scheduling at Lansdowne is the opportunity it provides to integrate vocational and academic curriculum. "Because you basically only take two academic subjects each semester, the horizontal connection or articulation between these subjects and the career completer courses is there," explains Bereska.
It's real easy from an administrator's point of view to say, "Johnny has math and English this semester. Get together and integrate with those academic subjects," and then do that again the next semester when the student has science and social studies. You can do long-range planning when you do the master schedule so that you can integrate in the curriculum. We schedule the career completer sequences at a certain time during the year so we can give the offerings and actually parallel them with the academics.
SINGLE-THEME MAGNET
When magnet schools first appeared in the 1950s, they were viewed as a way of introducing competition and school choice to public education. About a decade later, they were used in many urban areas to deter "white flight," the phenomenon of white families fleeing from the cities to the suburbs to avoid forced busing. Many magnets use themes that are occupational in nature to provide a context for both academic and technical courses. Examples of such themes are agriculture, aviation, fashion, and finance. In the Urban Schools Network, teams from two such magnet schools attended the 1992 Summer Institute on developing integrated academic and vocational curriculum.
Gateway Institute of Technology is located in St. Louis, Missouri, and its mission is to prepare all students for college and careers in high-tech math and science fields. In order to meet the state court's mandate, three high schools were closed to be replaced by Gateway. One was a math and science magnet that attracted students on a four-year college preparation track but lacked any career preparation or goal setting. A second was a health career magnet that had excellent business partnerships and work-based learning opportunities but lacked a strong academic math and science curriculum to prepare students for health careers in the twenty-first century. The third was a traditional trade school that had declining student enrollment and had failed to keep up with the changing employment or technical skill needs in St. Louis. The answer was a new high school that would include the best of the career preparation and work-based learning components of the health careers magnet, the rigor of the academic preparation for students to attend and graduate from four-year colleges of the math and science magnet, and the labs and hands-on emphasis of the trade school.
For Susan Tieber, Gateway's new principal and former principal of the math and science magnet, the court order gave her the opportunity to hire the faculty she needed to carry out the school's mission to prepare all students for careers in high-tech science and math fields.
The 1992 Summer Institute in Berkeley was terrific for our planning team. We were a new high school set to open that fall, and we had only been together as a faculty since the beginning of the summer. The institute, the sessions on integrated curriculum, the plan writing, the intensive discussions about our philosophy and objectives were absolutely essential to our success.
With a student population of nearly sixteen hundred, Gateway is now St. Louis' largest public high school. It offers five career majors within the umbrella theme of technology careers: health, agriculture and biological sciences; computer science and math; engineering; and applied physical sciences. Students take an academic core that is shared across all majors. In the freshman year, all students take an introductory course that provides rotations in each of the five majors to help students make their major selection. This freshman science course also introduces or shores up beginning lab science skills, such as measurement or the proper use of sensitive lab equipment. Beginning in the tenth grade, students take increasingly specific science courses that prepare them for the next steps in the specific high-tech career of their choice. By the senior year, some of these courses may have only ten to fifteen students. Last year, Gateway students took 103 of the 130 Advanced Placement exams taken in the entire district, and the school was named one of ten "New American High Schools" by the Office of Vocational and Adult Education at the U.S. Department of Education.
Cleveland's Jane Addams Business Career Center serves students from throughout the city who are interested in the school's emphasis on school- and work-based experiences that prepare students for six fields related to business careers. Last year, the school increased the freshman class it accepted by nearly one-hundred percent and needed to change the curriculum to prepare the large number of new students for their selection of one of six vocational majors offered at Jane Addams. To do this, it transformed the Diversified Business introductory ninth grade course into a two-period blocked exploratory rotation of the six vocational areas with units called "mini-courses" in employability skills. "In one period, you would have a class in personal banking, parliamentary procedure, or dressing for success," explains Susan Bobey, marketing teacher. "In the next period, you would go to hospitality/food service or the academy of finance and have some actual hands on experiences in those lab areas."
One of the ways in which this ninth grade curriculum change affected the entire faculty was that all staff, whether they were academic or vocational teachers, were required to teach a ninth grade class to accommodate the increased enrollment. Says Bobey, "Many of the teachers who were teaching the mini courses probably had not taught a ninth grader in fifteen to twenty-five years! It was a new experience for most of them. It definitely opened up people's eyes, and everybody had to work a little harder."
A happy side effect of this change was the greater understanding of each other's jobs among vocational and academic teachers. Previously vocational teachers had been used to small class sizes of fifteen to twenty-five students for 150 minutes each section. A vocational teacher with two sections would see at most forty or fifty students a day. Academic teachers, on the other hand, had dealt with the traditional 150 to 180 students every day in shorter, forty-minute periods. The new freshman Diversified Business class required vocational teachers to deal with large numbers of students and academic teachers to work through double period blocks.
With Ohio's recent increase in graduation requirements, Jane Addams has also had to increase the academic courses it offers. This has cut into the time that used to be available for upper-class students to spend in work-based internships. But, it has helped the faculty focus on improving academic skills through curriculum integration, including in the curriculum of the ninth grade Diversified Business course. Lead teacher Bonnie James talks about the changes that took place:
We used to have to integrate the curriculum with no overall theme or support. That made it very difficult for teachers to conceptualize and implement. Now, we all understand, for example, that the students need more preparation in math problem solving in order to improve their state test scores. So, we'll designate several weeks to focus on math integration with the vocational areas. The curriculum integration has become more understandable, and the need is very clear.
James notes other changes in teachers as a result of the new ninth grade course as well:
The vocational teachers may understand a little better now how hard it is to keep track just of paperwork for 150 students, rather than for twenty. And, academic teachers now know what it is like to plan for 120 minutes instead of 60. Also, the benefit of the whole plan is that almost every teacher in the building knows almost every ninth grader. Now, as they go through the ranks from tenth to eleventh to twelfth grade, students will have a better rapport with teachers because teachers have had that experience.
For Bobey, this change made an impact. "Before, I probably had fifty tenth, eleventh and twelfth graders maximum during the year. This year, I probably know at least 220 of the ninth graders. That's been really positive for me."
CAREER ACADEMIES
In
the career academy model, the school is organized into several "schools within
schools". These smaller groupings often are called "academies" or "houses," and
their size can range from eighty to three-hundred students (with four to ten
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.
In 1994, Lake Clifton-Eastern High School was designated "reconstitution eligible" by the Maryland State Department of Education. This designation was a wake-up call to the staff that it needed to undertake large-scale changes to improve student outcomes like achievement test scores, attendance, and dropout rates to avoid takeover by the state. To meet the state's mandate, the staff wrote a long-range whole school reform plan that stated goals, objectives, and measurable milestones to keep track of progress. Lake Clifton-Eastern's staff felt that restructuring the school into several small learning communities, called "schools," with career themes was the key to addressing the needed improvements in student performance for all students.
In 1996, the school offered six different "schools", each with its own physical location in the building. These are the School of Business and Commerce, the School of Technology and Communication, the School of Humanities, Fine and Cultural Arts, the School of Business and Human Services, the Academy of Finance and Law-Related Education, and the Ninth Grade Achievement School. In addition, academic and vocational teachers were grouped in each school and taught all students primarily in grades ten through twelve. With a few exceptions, most students enter the Ninth Grade Achievement School and make a small learning community selection at the end of their freshman year. (The exceptions select citywide magnet programs that are also incorporated into the schools' career themes and enter the programs/schools as ninth graders.) With the help of CRESPAR (see Box 5-1), the small learning communities provide smaller student-to-teacher ratios, extended relationships between teachers and students over three years, a career theme to provide context and relevance to all academic subjects, and an emphasis on student learning and achievement.
CAREER PATHWAYS OR CLUSTERS
In high schools with career pathways or clusters, technical and vocational courses are organized according to broad themes, as they are in academies, but academic classes are not generally composed of students majoring in the same field. Therefore, the traditional academic and vocational departments usually remain as an organizational structure for faculty and courses, but the career pathway or cluster provides guiding principles for student course selections during all four years in high school as well as encouragement for curriculum integration by teachers.
As mentioned above, both Bryan and Lansdowne introduced career pathway or cluster reform along with their block schedules. As described by Lansdowne's principal, John Bereska, the choice of maintaining the academic and vocational departments is one of maintaining an emphasis on instructional quality. "What many schools in our area have found is as soon as you eliminate departments, you lose instructional quality or instructional integrity. Unless you have somebody overseeing that specialty or area of instruction, you lose it."
Lansdowne's
career completer areas are not grouped into the usual four to six clusters
often found in high schools that pursue this whole school reform initiative.
Instead, teachers in various departments, working with county curriculum
offices developed required course sequences that were submitted for state
approval as career completers. Student enrollment in vocational courses has
increased dramatically with the implementation of career completer sequences.
Lansdowne now offers more than eleven such sequences. Says Assistant Principal
Delores Cassell, "Student interest and student enrollment became so heightened
around the career completer areas that you found more departments asking, `How
does my department fit into a career completer?'" Teachers in departments were
encouraged to collaborate with each other to develop these programs. For
example, a visual arts career completer sequence involves the family studies,
art, and business departments.
Bryan High School's career clusters are a way for teachers and students to see the connection between academic and vocational course sequences to meet students' stated postsecondary education and career goals. The five clusters are: business, industrial engineering, health, arts and humanities, and human services. Students select a cluster in the tenth grade, and that selection becomes key when students select the courses they want to take each year.
Bryan's advisory period has become a unique way to involve all staff, not just counselors, in the process of helping students select courses related to their cluster choice. The advisory period takes the place of homeroom and gives all staff, not just teachers, a group of fifteen to twenty students that remain with them for all four years at Bryan. Everyday for thirteen minutes, students meet with their advisory teachers who facilitate a range of discussions with them, from conflict resolution strategies to career exploration activities to crisis intervention. Last year, advisory teachers got involved in the scheduling process, helping students pick the academic and vocational classes they needed and that met their postsecondary goals. Says teacher and internship advisor Hess:
Several teachers said, "I'm not a guidance counselor. I can't do that." But, we did pretty well guiding those kids into the right classes. We extended the advisory period from thirteen to twenty-five minutes during that phase, and it really helped those kids talk about [their goals] rather than who's the most popular teacher or what friend is taking what classes.
Focusing on the students' goals was also the objective of Oklahoma City and CREATE's whole school reform initiative. When it became clear that the Tech Prep program was not meeting students' needs, the consortium cast about for other models that were gaining attention. Among those was the career cluster model. A team from the consortium visited one such high school that had all students in career clusters and used the clusters to provide connections between academic and vocational classes. One of the school's clusters, called College, was intended for students and parents who felt the other clusters, in the health, business and technical areas, did not meet their postsecondary goal of attending a four-year college or university. The visiting team from Oklahoma City debated the pros and cons of this type of cluster. In interviews with students at the model high school, the team made a surprising realization.
CREATE codirector Schott describes the interviews:
We talked to the kids in each of the career-related clusters, and they would tell us, "these are my goals, and I'm going to this community college, and I'll get this degree, and I'm going for this four-year degree." They could tell us exactly what their goal was and how they were going to get there. But, when we talked to the kids in the College career cluster, they would say, "Well, I'm going to college." What are you going to major in? "Well, I really don't know." Their end to high school was college, and they didn't see beyond that. Our whole team discussed that fact and decided we needed to get all our students to create specific goals.
As a result, CREATE schools are focusing on six career clusters: health, industrial engineering technologies, business and marketing, natural sciences, social sciences, and fine arts and communication. Two of the clusters are being piloted in three different high schools. One high school will have four clusters in place in 1997-98, while two others will have two clusters beginning then. The consortium expects to have all six up and running in its first three high schools by the year 2000. Each cluster is following the school-to-work model, incorporating school-based learning, work-based learning, and connecting activities.
The
school-based learning is based on creating relevance to academic content by
relying on specific problems and projects
that
are related to actual situations faced by the partnering workplaces in each
cluster. The consortium has done away with the applied academics courses they
had originally added as part of their Tech Prep plan because they felt they
were a manifestation of the "separate but equal" philosophy that contradicted
their objective of reaching all students. The work-based learning includes a
sequence of activities from less structured job shadowing and company tours to
more structured internships. Importantly, these work-based activities target
both students and teachers, to emphasize the need for teachers to gain
experience in the workplaces associated with their career cluster in order to
create relevant classroom lessons and integrated projects.
Finally, the consortium provides essential technical assistance and support for teachers in the planning and beginning implementation stages. Modeling the NCRVE summer institute experience, CREATE has sponsored three such summer institutes for the teacher teams developing the cluster models. The week-long intensive professional development activities take place at a location two hours outside the city and include expert speakers who conduct sessions on curriculum integration; developing work-based learning, and business partnerships; team time in which teachers write the plan that will guide their cluster's implementation; and cross-team networking time for teams to discuss barriers and solutions that they all share.
In Las Cruces, New Mexico, the Doña Ana Tech Prep Consortium has supported the development of career clusters at three high schools in a similar fashion. Rather than creating a separate Tech Prep program only for students who were not taking the traditional four-year college prep curriculum, the consortium wanted a structure that would include all students' postsecondary goals, from employment to two-year associate degrees, four-year bachelors degrees, and beyond. The consortium's advisory committee developed the four career clusters in 1993 with the input of business representatives and the facilitation of a consultant. The clusters are in the areas of business information and management; industrial and technical engineering; health and human services; and arts and humanities.
The clusters were first implemented in the three comprehensive high schools in the consortium in 1994-95 and initially provided a way for students to see the connection between vocational courses and career goals. The vocational course sequences also included the twenty-six articulated programs offered at the community college for advanced placement credit. Since then, the enrollment in these articulated courses has increased one-hundred percent, which has created an increased demand for these courses at the community college.
According to Las Cruces Public Schools School-to-Career Coordinator, John Krause, the consortium's whole school reform effort has had a very strong impact on students and vocational class enrollment. He adds that the next step is to make similarly significant changes among the teachers and the vocational and academic integration of the curriculum:
Our clusters have aligned the vocational courses in each cluster so that kids can look at a cluster and see which courses they ought to take if they're in, say, the engineering/technical clusters. But the weakness is we really don't have an identification with each cluster on the part of the teachers. So, students in the Principles of Technology class may be in several clusters, one of which is the engineering/technical cluster. Also, we haven't aligned the academics yet.
To try to address this next step, the consortium has supported the development of two academies at two different high schools. The idea was that smaller models of vocational and academic teacher collaboration and curriculum integration would help win the widespread teacher and administrator support needed to take these reforms schoolwide. Krause credits the team's participation in the 1993 Summer Institute with first introducing the academy concept to the consortium and inspiring them to pursue it as a whole school reform strategy:
Because of what we did at the institute, we decided in 1993 that we wanted to create a couple of academies that would serve as minilabs for us to see how teachers work together and how we can integrate the curriculum. So we started an academy of business at Mayfield High School and an academy of health at Oñate High School.
The academies have been most successful at integrating academic and occupational education. They have been less successful at providing work-based learning for their students, because funding provided to hire staff was discontinued.
LESSONS LEARNED
For most of the teams in the Urban Schools Network, the period of 1992 to 1997 was a difficult one marked by high staff turnover at even the highest levels and the intersection of many levels of reform initiatives, from building to district, state, and national. For these reasons, it can be seen as a transitional period for many schools, a time in which long-term objectives were reevaluated or created anew, and strategies to obtain those objectives were carefully considered rather than swiftly implemented.
This transitional period clearly affected the development of whole school reform initiatives. In half of the fourteen schools that reported whole school reform as an immediate goal in 1997, the last five years had been spent juggling leadership changes or resistance, district and state mandates, and national reform priorities. Only now did most of these seven schools report optimism about a critical mass of support among faculty, administrators, and district leaders for the whole school changes they had tried to pursue earlier.
THE PRINCIPAL PRINCIPLE
Among the other seven schools, the last five years presented a range of possible whole school reform paths to pursue. As discussed, some schools emphasized the change to an alternative schedule, while others emphasized the use of career themes for all students through single-theme magnets, career academies, or career clusters. In all of these cases, the high school principal has been a key factor in providing the vision and support that helps whole school efforts grow rather than die.
Indeed, codirector Carla High at Oklahoma City's CREATE consortium notes that although three high schools are actively pursuing the first model clusters, she observes a clear difference in the rate of changes being implemented based on the active support and involvement of the principal:
The school where the principal makes a visible statement of support by stating the philosophy and vision of the career clusters in a board or staff meeting is just so far ahead of the school where the principal says to us, `I'll support it, but you [meaning the consortium representatives] should stand up and give the vision and philosophy statements in the staff meeting.
With
the principal's support and vision, however, the success of whole school change
is impressive. The principal ultimately makes decisions that provide or remove
the time and professional development support needed. This
investment
is particularly needed in the beginning of whole school reform efforts as the
vision is first communicated in a way the staff can absorb and then implemented
in a manner that is not overwhelming. Not only are tangibles such as schedules,
curriculum offerings, and students' career plans being created and changed, but
the intangibles of relationships--between academic and vocational teachers,
between students and staff, between administrators and teachers--are also
profoundly affected by whole school change. Without a principal's guidance and
long-term vision, these changes can cause individuals to dig their heels in
deeper, cling to familiar divisions harder, and divide schools even more
sharply than ever.
ALL OR SOME: WHO IS THE TARGET POPULATION? 
Another factor that helps determine the growth or decline of whole school change efforts is agreement on the definition of the target student population. All of the schools described here at some point had to face the question of which students are served by the reforms pursued. As noted, neither federal legislation nor NCRVE mandated that all students in a high school be involved in the curriculum or structural change discussed. Yet, for these schools, it was important to make the choice to involve all students. Two reasons have been stated: (1) external circumstances mandated a whole school reform plan, whether it was the state desegregation plan in Gateway's case or the threat of state reconstitution in Lake Clifton-Eastern's; and (2) a Tech Prep program for some students was seen as a deterrent to its success because it, like traditional vocational programs before it, was viewed as serving the students not quite able to succeed in the traditional college prep track, as in the case for CREATE and the Doña Ana Consortium.
Although external circumstances may make the direction clear, the debate within schools around requiring all students or not is a thorny one. Schools that are beginning the debate should be encouraged to focus on the needs of the students. While many point to the traditional college prep track as successful because students graduate high school and are accepted at respectable postsecondary institutions, they are encouraged to look more carefully at those students' progress. Do these students obtain bachelors degrees in four years, or do they drop out, try several majors unsuccessfully, or take more than five years to finish? Do they say high school prepared them for the career choices they eventually made?
For students not in the traditional college prep track, the question often revolves around adequate preparation for any postsecondary choices. Do the curriculum and graduation requirements prepare students for desirable employment or associate degree programs? Is it appropriate to divide high school students into the college bound and the non-college bound at the threshold of the twenty first century? While the answers are not simple, these questions help focus the discussion on students rather than on tradition or turf. Many schools are now considering this kind of feedback in deciding whether to pursue whole school reforms.
ASSESSING SUCCESS
Although the whole school change efforts described here are relatively new, it is important to consider what evaluation, summative and formative, can tell us. For example, from the first draft of its plan as a Tech Prep site in 1992, the CREATE team was concerned with its impact on students. When the consortium decided to support several whole school reform efforts, the only significant change in its evaluation plan was the removal of control groups with which to compare its Tech Prep students. Once it was decided that all students would benefit from selecting a career path, the consortium's evaluation plan began to look for overall improvements in its student outcome data. Their evaluation efforts are noting increased student enrollment in academic and vocational courses, increased statements of understanding that high school course selection is connected to postsecondary education and career goals, increased support from parents for the reform efforts, and increased communication, collaboration, and enthusiasm among academic and vocational faculty.
Other student outcomes that deserve attention include high school attendance and dropout rates, standardized test scores, matriculation to postsecondary degree programs, both two and four-year, completion of postsecondary degrees, and employment in fields related to high school career plans. In addition, certain career exploration software can be tied to academic skills inventories to reveal matches or mismatches between individual skills and strengths and desired career areas. Finally, student and parent surveys can reveal perceptions of the high school as an adequate preparation for postsecondary choices.
While the last five years for the Urban Schools Network was sometimes tumultuous, all of the fourteen teams pursuing whole school change say they are looking forward to the next five years as periods of significant progress toward their goals. Although we have outlined some of the structural differences in achieving these goals and the debates surrounding decisions of what components of the high school should change, the ultimate end is the improvement of achievement and preparation for all students. Using this goal as a touchstone to remind schools of their vision and help revisit specific strategies, the path of whole school change can be successfully negotiated.
REFERENCES
McPartland, J.M., Letgers, N., Jordan, W., & McDill, E. (1996). Early evidence of impact on school climate, attendance and student promotion in a Talent Development High School. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk.
Parnell, D. (1985). The neglected majority. Washington, DC: Community College Press.
Sizer, T. (1985). Horace's Compromise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.