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THE STRUGGLES AND THE COMPROMISES


Descriptions of high schools with "integrated" programs of vocational and academic education have concentrated on what might be called the technical core of the school program--primarily the formal curriculum and the formal structural arrangements that organize students and teachers (Adelman, 1989; Grubb et al., 1991a; Mitchell et al., 1989). Missing from these descriptions have been the features of informal social organization that help us to explain why some ventures thrive while other structurally similar efforts fail. In the early stages of our field research, we have given special attention to the meaning of proposed reforms in the daily work and long-term careers of teachers. In this section, five topics form a provisional agenda for research and action. Each arises out of the recurrent themes in our conversations with teachers and administrators. Each constitutes an effort to take serious account of teachers' stated priorities (and perceived obligations) in teaching, their views of their students, their conceptions of curriculum, and their relations with one another. Finally, each is directly linked to the subject organization and subject traditions of high school.

The Essential Activities and Topics of "High School"

Public conceptions of what high school should be and should accomplish (or educators' claims about what those public conceptions are) provide a crucial context for the campaign to achieve a defensible academic preparation for all students and to tie academic studies more clearly to the uses of knowledge in work. For the past decade, the relationship between work and schooling has occupied an increasingly central place on the public agenda. Agreement on the broad vocational goals of secondary schooling, while not uniform, is certainly widespread. Nonetheless, the precise translation of vocationalism into the topics, activities, and products of a high school education is not so clear.

To increase the presence and stature of work education in the comprehensive high school means, for most teachers, a shift in curriculum priorities and teaching practices. What will be added, abandoned, or modified in the daily classroom experience? What new relationship will be sought between the learning activities of the classroom and those provided by work, study, or service outside the classroom? In their conversations with us, teachers offered rationales to justify their subject curriculum by showing how it would supply students with the specific concepts or the habits of mind they needed to qualify for certain kinds of work in the future. Underlying the curriculum-in-use are teachers' broad claims that what students encounter in the classroom is--or should be--what they "need" for the future. Neither they nor we had many examples at hand to suggest a more precise connection between school subjects and the conduct of various kinds of work. Further, both they and we experienced a certain ambivalence in attempting to specify such connections--in doing so, we seemed at risk of narrowing the school curriculum to those concepts for which clear (and largely technical) workplace applications can be found. Implicitly, perhaps, we acknowledged that none of us could anticipate all of the ways in which algebraic thinking, the study of historical or literary interpretation, or the ability to construct and evaluate scientific explanations would enable persons to succeed in their work or otherwise pursue their lives. Our failure to do so did not seem an adequate ground for abandoning or curtailing those intellectual tasks in high school, though it might be reason for searching out some of the connections that would engage students more fully.

Teachers also invoke parental (and broadly public) expectations to account for their curricular choices. According to Reid's (1984) analysis of curricular topics and activities as institutional categories, schools are constrained by external views of what must be present for the school to count as a "real school" (see also Hemmings, 1988).[17] For example, Reid observes that "science in the secondary school legitimates itself through laboratory work which is only loosely related to the demands of specific content." In the period prior to the formation of comprehensive high schools in Britain, he recalls, the vocationally oriented secondary modern schools were "frequently barred from claims to be teaching science because they had no labs" (p. 69). Schools risk a certain loss of legitimacy in the eyes of a public if certain categorical activities and topics are not readily apparent in the available facilities or in the list of course offerings.

Students play an important but little-examined part in the persistence of institutional categories. They assess the significance of selected topics and activities not only for their immediate appeal, but also in light of their probable bearing on present school success and on educational and occupational futures. By Reid's (1984) analysis, students pay greater attention to the instrumental significance of a topic than to its contributions to learning: "The goal is success in the system as opposed to success in learning . . ." (p. 73). Prominent among the criteria by which topics and activities are judged are their status-relatedness--the leverage they promise in securing educational and occupational futures. Teachers' stories confirm the part that students and their families play in reinforcing traditional course offerings, topics, pedagogy, and assessment. In the daily classroom exchanges, clear subject boundaries and content maintain the predictability of "going to school." A science teacher reports,

If you spend a day talking about the Vietnam War [in a science class], they don't think it was really history; they don't think it was really English: "Oh, well we didn't really do anything today. She was just telling us something interesting" [or] "Oh, well, you know, this doesn't count 'cause I know it's not science; I know it's not math." And if I ask about it on a quiz, they go, "Well that's not fair!"

Parents, employers, university scholars, educational administrators, and politicians are all "carriers" of the institutional categories that define legitimate schooling and shape teachers' commitments to the established topics and activities of the classroom. Despite the critical commentary launched by all of these groups, they do not yet share a view of the way central topics and activities might be re-ordered. Indeed, they sometimes find themselves in fundamental opposition.[18] Teachers' perspectives on what it means to teach adolescents--what counts as worthy innovation or as a compromise of strongly held views--differentially dispose them toward an integration of vocational and academic education. Although most agree that preparation for adult work is one of the functions of schooling, most are also at a loss to say how work might become a focus or an occasion of academic study.

Competing Demands: Other Reforms in Subject Teaching

The landscape of subject matter teaching is shifting. Much of the impetus to innovate in secondary teaching comes from an altered conception of subject learning. The direction of that change is consistent with the integration of vocational and academic education.[19] This is especially true when new visions of subject teaching emphasize connections between abstract concepts and the occasions of knowledge use in work or other domains of adult life (as in the chemistry course promoted by the American Chemical Society). A promising point of departure might well be the question, How can subject fields better illuminate the character of contemporary work and society?

The fact of the matter, however, is that reforms in subject teaching seem rarely to take their point of departure from that question, or even incorporate it seriously when considering what knowledge and skill students should be able to demonstrate. On the whole, subject specialism is reinforced, not attenuated, by the main reform initiatives. The impetus for reform is conveyed in state curriculum frameworks, national subject standards proposed by professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), state standards for teacher licensure, the certification standards being developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and by statewide student assessment protocols. In each of these, we have witnessed a move to transform the high school curriculum in ways that value long-term gains in students' abilities over their short-term facility in reciting low-level knowledge.

Some of the changes underway in the academic disciplines represent a substantial departure in perspective and practice for secondary teachers. A math chair reports that "A lot of things are happening in mathematics" that she finds "exciting and also scary at the same time." The teachers in her department are confronted with the same changes, reflected in the standards of NCTM, but not all are disposed toward them the same way. The chair relates, "A teacher . . . mentioned to me yesterday that he just breaks out in cold sweats when he thinks about turning on a computer. And he's got to do some things like that, so it's going to be very uncomfortable for him . . ." That prospect may well preoccupy teachers such as this, making the fit between vocational and academic aims seem a far less pressing matter. The math chair anticipates

big changes if we go to an integrated kind of mathematics where we just do course 1, course 2, and course 3 and not call it Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II. Because all the teachers were through Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II; they know what goes in those courses. They haven't been through the other courses so it's scary that you're going to teach something when you don't know really what's in it.

Further, what teachers or departments find attractive or problematic in particular reform proposals is in part a function of the way they conceive subject and subject learning. Siskin (1991) contrasts the ways in which English teachers and math teachers respond to proposals that implicate class size. English teachers, pleading adverse consequences on the volume of students' writing they must read and assess, found any increases in class size to be anathema. Among math teachers, large class size was less problematic as long as the academic tasks could be cast in terms of generating right solutions. When student performance is judged by tallying correct answers, grading student papers can be handled quickly, or even handed off to teaching assistants or departmental clerks. One might anticipate, however, that if the challenge in learning math were to generate multiple routes to a solution, or to write about how one arrived at solutions and why, and if the grade depended on the quality of the problem-solving path, student evaluation might not be so readily delegated and class size would be a more volatile issue.

To the extent that subject considerations and subject-specific reforms carry weight in teachers' work and occupy whatever discretionary time they may have, they require us to think somewhat differently about how we might achieve and assess the integration of vocational and academic education. Should the proposed subject teaching reforms succeed, the traditional subject curriculum will be made far more lively, more credibly connected to practice, and more engaging for students than it now is. The impact on work preparation will be powerful but may be quite indirect--it will arise from students' experiences with collective projects, with problem solving, and with intellectual tasks that require genuine understanding rather than superficial "exposure" (see Meier, 1992). At the least, we must distinguish between the explicit incorporation of work-related applications or habits of mind--an overt and formalized curriculum of work preparation--and the indirect effects that follow from an academic curriculum that produces more enduring benefits for larger numbers of students.[20]

The Compelling Standard of "Curriculum Coverage"

Subject-related achievements are by no means the only way that teachers judge their own success in the classroom or derive personal satisfactions from their work. Nonetheless, the subject arguably supplies the most central and uniform metric of accomplishment for individuals and schools. Schools chart student careers by the accumulation of course credits; completion of course requirements is linked to high school graduation and university admission. Individual teachers--even those who decry the evils of "coverage"--describe the range of topics they expect to teach in a one-year course. The metric of coverage is pervasive and persistent, even among those who have entered voluntarily into projects that are founded on a principle of achieving greater depth ("less is more," in the terms adopted by the Coalition of Essential Schools).

Coverage is both disparaged and defended. Teachers fully understand the superficiality of a curriculum that organizes topics and skills on a rapid conveyor belt of units. Their comments often resonate with Newmann's (1988) judgment:

We are addicted to coverage. This addiction seems endemic in high schools--where it runs rampant, especially in history--but it affects all levels of the curriculum, from kindergarten through college. We expose students to broad surveys of the disciplines and to endless sets of skills and competencies. The academic agenda incorporates a wide variety of topics; to cover them all, we give students time to develop only the most superficial understandings." (p. 346)

Newmann inventories some of the destructive consequences of a coverage mentality, concluding that "beyond simply wasting time or failing to impart knowledge of lasting value, superficial coverage has a more insidious consequence: it reinforces habits of mindlessness" (p. 346). But Newmann also acknowledges that coverage is itself a habit difficult to break. He records the guilt that teachers express when they are unable to reconcile their felt obligation to "cover" content with the time that students require to achieve genuine understanding, saying, "The press for broad coverage causes many teachers to feel inadequate about having to leave out so much content and apologetically mindful of the fact that much of what they teach is not fully understood by their students" (p. 346). A science teacher who is attempting an "integrated" curriculum in chemistry exemplifies Newmann's argument:

The American Chemical Society program has a lot of good ideas, but it glosses over a lot of stuff. I like the fact that the ACS is . . . putting in a lot of involvement and problem-solving activities [that show] where chemistry must be employed. So it shows people how chemistry is applied in our day-to-day lives. But in advancing that agenda in the curriculum, they expect you either don't need the nuts and bolts or you know the nuts and bolts, and I find [in my classes] that I assume the former. We don't need the nuts and bolts so we're just going to kind of talk about these things in general terms and it becomes this real "qualitative chemistry." [But] I think that maybe they ought to be getting also the ability to quantitatively [analyze]. And all their labs expect quantitative analysis at the end.

As teachers elaborate on the prospects for achieving greater depth and practicality in the curriculum, they begin to reveal some of the tensions and trade-offs they anticipate. To some extent, each subject presents its own configuration of possibilities and dilemmas. For most, broadening the range of instructional strategies is an acceptable route toward depth, and one that seems to honor the subject requirements. Thus, a math chair reports that students achieve a better understanding of mathematics when they write about it:

My goal here with our own department the last several years has been to increase writing in the math classes. We do lots of writing. The first assignment is to give me a math autobiography. Every quarter my kids have some kind of a writing project.

Nonetheless, such methods require more time. Does slowing the pace of instruction mean eliminating important concepts? Here some of the differences among subjects begin to show up. One math teacher offers, "I think you can do 'less is more' in English; you can read three books instead of six books. But I don't think you can do 'less is more' in math." Another agrees: "You can't teach 'less is more' in math. There isn't anything you can throw out."

"Deep" understanding of a subject might be thought to follow readily and naturally from practical applications that increase opportunity for students to discover the concrete manifestations of abstract concepts. However, teachers are reluctant to tie curriculum priorities only to those concepts for which practical applications seem most readily apparent. Math and science teachers express the greatest reservations (though they are not alone), lamenting the compromises that seem to result from attempts to make the curriculum more "practical":

You can't say, "Well, if you can't find an application for it, let's throw it out." The application may come when the student is in advanced math. You need the building blocks beforehand. [Someone] told a math teacher, "Well, why don't you do an exhibition on the trajectory of a ballistic missile and relate it to the Desert Storm War?" "They don't have the skills yet for that." "Well, isn't it a simple Distance-Rate-Time problem?" "No, it is not. It is a study of parabolic movement." [math teacher]

Science and math are kind of linear. You really need to have a foundation before you can put it to work on a project, or really address . . . some thesis like, Why should we conserve minerals? Why should we be careful about the way we use certain things? Why should conservation be our way of life? Unless you've got basic understandings of atoms and the way atoms act in the real world in reactions, then you may not really have a powerful way to advance conservation. . . . So, I understand "less is more," where you can delve into things and explore and so forth, but a lot of times in a year's course, "less is more" ends up being less. Science has been, you know, not really hard science anymore . . . . It makes you wonder about what you're doing. [science teacher][21]

Slower pace ("less is more") creates special discomfort when teachers cannot readily detect gains in students' understanding or engagement. A science teacher commented,

We have done less and less and less. Biology used to be just one year and we used to cover not only biochemistry, but the bio-geochemical cycles and the role of chemistry in nature. We would also cover biochemistry in systems and then we would cover the human body. Approximately twenty-three units. And I'm to the fourteenth unit right now of what I used to teach in a year, and this is the second year of the course. So, I've slowed down incredibly to try to enrich and address the needs that my students have for discussion and so forth; and yet, I don't necessarily see them doing a hell of a lot more.

The obstacles to depth in the high school curriculum are formidable (though Newmann, Sizer, and others would argue they are not insurmountable). As Newmann (1988) remarks, formal education encapsulates a "legitimate need for a certain degree of coverage" in the education of the young (p. 347). When this legitimate need is combined with a testing industry that supplies the single most visible guarantor of public accountability, a textbook industry that reifies disciplinary knowledge in unit outlines, and university admission procedures that specify completion of particular course content in the high school, the result is (or has been) a curriculum strong on breadth within a few core academic subjects but weaker on conceptual depth, connectedness, and situated use. (It remains to be seen how evolving experiments in standardized performance testing--testing that better approximates students' actual performance on complex tasks--bear upon the movement toward greater depth in curriculum. See Frederiksen et al., 1991). Other obstacles to achieving curricular depth arise from the teachers' perception of what it means for a student to have "learned" the subject they teach. This is not to say that the views teachers express are uniform, or are uniformly defensible. They are neither. Teachers within the same discipline disagree about what counts as "essential" concepts and skills and about the ways in which students best learn them. Teachers sometimes express views that are clearly at odds with some of the advances in the discipline or with theories of learning. Their views are, however, a reasonable clue to the practices they will embrace or eschew in the classroom.

What Counts as "Work Education" in the Academic Curriculum?

When confronted with the practical possibilities for specific work applications in the academic curriculum, teachers' experience and imagination run short. Most teachers can imagine an increase in outside speakers or career-oriented counseling and school-level activities far more readily than they can imagine a shift in the nature of curriculum content, pedagogy, assessment, or teacher-student relations. One teacher in a school that is planning career clusters said, "In the classroom, I don't think it will be a major change" for the academic teachers. Among the examples we heard, most concentrated on how one qualifies for a job rather than how knowledge came to be used in doing work. The former turns out to be easier to convey than the latter:

I do a career project every year with my [math] students. The last three years that's been writing a letter to someone in a field, asking what mathematics they needed to take to get there, and then what mathematics is used. Because a lot of kids will say, "I'm not going to use this higher math in my job." However, what they're hearing back is that they had to take it to get to that higher job, and that's important just for some of the kids, so that, that they'll be one of the competitive people then, in getting that job. You know, they've had the background. [math teacher]

Another common theme highlighted work-related attitudes and habits, most of them focused on compliance with authority relations in the workplace (e.g., see Claus, 1990). Despite the burgeoning attention to problem solving, critical thinking, and cooperative learning, the teachers with whom we spoke did not elaborate on the ways in which such activity might prepare students to take initiative on the job, or to be competent members or leaders of a group of workers:

Whenever a student gives me a paper, I'm the boss--you work for me. Does the boss like the looks of it? You know, a couple of times I've returned it and say, "Do that over--you're not going to have a job." [business teacher]

In his critique of work education a decade ago, Boyer (1983) proposed that students spend one semester in a course dedicated to the academic study of the history, politics, and economics of work. Such a perspective seems nearly absent in the schools we have visited--especially when considered as a separate course. The coordinator of one business education academy is planning a course, "Business in English," that will examine the treatment of work in various works of English literature.[22] The course is intended to satisfy an English elective requirement for students in the academy program. The chair of another English department describes activities that she plans to incorporate in her class to expand students' perception of the meaning and types of work:

My students do a family history report. This time I will include a family employment history. Students will investigate what members of their family have done, and why. This should generate a greater sense of work. [Work] doesn't just happen on the day you graduate.

The impetus and the opportunity to figure out "integration" seem greatest in the career academies or in other closely interdependent teams that have incorporated an explicit orientation toward work preparation. Teachers' conversation in those settings, in so far as we have been privy to it, tends more toward the discovery of possibilities for curriculum coordination than toward worries over the compromises in subject integrity. Academy teachers concentrate on blurring the boundaries among subjects and between the vocational and the academic:

We try to eliminate the old differentiation between vocational and academic. We're always being asked, "Who's your technical guy?" and we're uncomfortable about that. We still cling to some of that [differentiation]. One of us is responsible for graphic arts, one for English, one for math and science. But our goal is to cross-teach more.

We like to relate a concept to a real-life concept. We like to think in those terms. They had to learn about acids and bases in chemistry. They got all the theory, but then they had to use the theory to test the acidity of paper they would use to print their poems. If it's acidic, it doesn't last a long time.

To gain the attention of the subject specialists--and especially those who teach the more advanced academic courses--the integration of academics and work requires (1) that the workplace applications of academic concepts and skills be made more visible to academic teachers (the only workplace that teachers tend to know well is school); and (2) that the "work connection" be seen as adding both rigor and utility to the academic curriculum, rather than requiring a compromise with subject integrity (see Stern & Dayton, 1990).

What Teachers Can Achieve: Issues of Preparation and Opportunity

Multiple reforms compete with one another and with the daily immediacies of the classroom for teachers' time and attention. Academic teachers may experience simultaneous demands to advance reforms within subjects (e.g., the new mathematics standards) and to participate in efforts across subjects (e.g., interdisciplinary work in math and science or in the humanities). In principle, these various reforms are compatible. In practice, each is demanding of teachers' intellectual resources, social relations, time, and energies. Teachers sometimes experience them as being in conflict. In particular, academic teachers may view the integration of vocational and academic education as compromising the aims of subject matter reforms. An English teacher on the verge of taking early retirement found new enthusiasm for teaching in one of the career academies. But other teachers experience a sense of loss or compromise when what they are asked or required to teach departs radically from the subject as they know it or have been prepared to teach it.

What might we anticipate in the early stages of "collaboration" among teachers who have taught largely or exclusively within separate departments? Stodolsky and Grossman (1992) observe that the subject perspectives, vocabularies, and epistemologies are sufficiently different from one another that teachers might have to learn a new language to speak meaningfully to one another. Yet the opportunities to understand one another's language, and to forge accommodations among the perspectives, seem sparse. The elaborated meanings regarding "subject" or "work" on which teachers rely are taken for granted but rarely are made explicit, visible, and/or accessible to discussion and debate. Despite the frequency with which we encounter references to subject disciplines or subject topics, there is remarkably little talk recorded in our interviews or field notes that maps the contours of subject philosophy or subject pedagogy.[23] Rather, there are truncated topical references that signal subject affiliation, but reveal little of the specifics of subject that might establish the grounds for integration (or separation) of theory and practice. When social studies teachers speak of "doing Manifest Destiny," they employ a shorthand language that masks both the philosophical and pedagogical aspects of their belief and practice in the teaching of history.

The truncated, compressed language of these subject specialists can be traced to three related circumstances. First is the pervasive isolation or independence of teaching, leaving teachers to form opinions about entire "subjects" on the basis of their partial knowledge of what individual teachers do in their classrooms. The possibilities for collaborative work rest in part, then, on the visibility and credibility of local teaching performances. Second, superficial treatments of subject teaching are consistent with the "coverage" standard by which teachers' obligations are judged to be met. There is rarely a reason to communicate to others what "doing Manifest Destiny" amounts to in conception, pedagogy, and assessment--only a reason to assure one another that it is being "done." Finally, teachers themselves command little knowledge about the uses of their subjects in occupations other than teaching; the opaque character of the world of work, at least as it employs the fundamental concepts and skills supplied by a strong academic education, is equally problematic. Teachers, not surprisingly, are most intimately familiar with the workplace of the school itself. About the various ways in which their subjects inform other kinds of work, most can only guess.

To act knowledgeably on the basis of a changing conception of teaching and learning is not merely a matter of adequate time. It is a matter of interdependence among teachers--the reasons they find for joint work with one another and with persons in a range of other occupations and work situations. It is a matter of the perspectives and practices that teachers acquire in their formal programs of teacher education and in the formal or informal activities they encounter in the course of their work. Finally, it is a matter of the vision of schooling that is embedded in the social organization of schooling and in the resources and rewards of teachers' work.


[17] Reid (1984) posits four characteristics that define the attractiveness of particular topics and activities to wider publics. They are (1) centrality, or the extent to which the topic or activity is viewed as central to membership in some categorical group such as the college bound; (2) universality, or the extent to which the topic is viewed as essential for all or for some; (3) sequential significance, or the extent to which the topic is a prerequisite for future student progress; and (4) status-relatedness, or the degree to which topics are chained in sequences with career significance. Mathematics is high on all dimensions (though "higher" mathematics is not universal, and its status-relatedness increases as its universality declines). The study of metalwork forms a counter-example in Reid's analysis: "progress through metalwork activities, where the curriculum moves from lower to higher skill levels, does not confer status. . . . [Thus,] centrality, universality, sequential significance and status-relatedness are socio-historical or ideological rather than educational or epistemological facts" (p. 71).

[18] This is an arena in which inquiry is well-informed by the micropolitical perceptive introduced by Ball (1987). Ball's examination of the "micro-politics of schooling" not only illuminates the salience of within-school reference groups and the mechanisms by which they come to wield or surrender power, but also links the formation of reference groups to theoretical orientations toward competing theories of schooling, teaching, and subject.

[19] When Stern et al. (1992) assess the fit between career academies and other reforms, they cite the reform impetus to link schools more meaningfully and closely with employers and the movement to create wider choice for students and families. However, they do not talk about the fit with other subject teaching reforms.

[20] On the whole, attention to such "indirect effects" has taken three forms: (1) criticisms of the "hidden curriculum" of schooling, (2) studies of the economic return to years of schooling, and (3) studies of the differentiated content of academic instruction (including content variations among courses of the same title but enrolling different student populations).

[21] In neither of these comments do we discover any sense of how students come to an increasingly sophisticated grasp of complex practical problems over time; rather, there is an underlying assumption that the pursuit of such practical issues as resource conservation must wait until students have a command of all of the conceptual and methodological elements required for a solution. Ironically, each of the teachers displays a subject-bound view of what counts as an essential element. For example, the problem that the math teacher defines as "a study of parabolic movement" might be defined by the science teacher as a problem in force and motion. Claims such as these may do more to assert and defend teachers' independence on matters of curriculum (employing the subject paradigm as a resource) than to explain or explore possibilities for student learning.

[22] In the interest of supporting the development of such courses, NCRVE has organized an annotated bibliography of novels and short stories that might be used in the academic study of work (Koziol, 1992).

[23] I am indebted to Susan Threatt for her observation that, despite all the categorical subject references in those texts, there was almost no detailed "subject talk" in them. This may, of course, be an artifact of our field research methods (especially in the case of the interviews); or it may accurately depict a situation in which subject is made routinely opaque in the discourse among teachers.


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