We have begun to illuminate the specific points of continuity and conflict that schools encounter when they attempt to move on several reform fronts at once--to deepen students' engagement with and understanding of specific subject disciplines, to establish powerful connections across subjects, to resolve persistent inequities, and to grant more serious attention to students' preparation for adult work. Three preliminary observations emerge here.
First, schools attempting the most ambitious forms of academic-vocational integration may also be schools aggressively pursuing other reform agendas. The result is a proliferation of reform agendas and external obligations, of which the integration of academic and vocational education is just one. Because such schools have been quite entrepreneurial in their fund-raising, and quite eclectic in their embrace of new ideas, it is not always easy to locate a singular case of particular models. Nor is it always easy to trace a single over-arching conception of the high school to which the various reform activities are expected to contribute. For example, Southgate was a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a participant in the California Partnership Academies, a recipient of a sizable state "restructuring" grant and a smaller foundation grant, and a site for a national study of youth apprenticeship. Prairie was also a successful applicant for state restructuring funds, a participant in the Partnership Academies, and a recipient of private foundation funds. Both schools also boasted teachers who were active in the subject-matter reforms being promoted by the national subject matter associations and state-level subject matter projects. Under these circumstances, given separate proposals, budgets, activities, and deadlines, each venture begins to seem less like a contributor to an overall reform campaign than a conceptually distinct, organizationally separate, and time-limited project. Teachers rarely encounter these reforms--whether singly or in combination--as closely-woven whole cloth; rather, they follow individual threads whose origins often seem distant and tangled. What may look like a coherent reform strategy or vision at the level of the state, foundation, or even district, has a far more discontinuous appearance to individual teachers.
Second, multiple reforms compete for the time and attention of schools, groups, and individuals. From the standpoint of academic teachers, the most "visible" of these reforms are those that bear immediately on the ways they think about and approach subject matter teaching, and the ways in which they resolve problems of equity in an increasingly diverse student population. The various projects offer quite different answers to questions about work preparation, academic education, and equity; overall, in the case study schools, vocational pursuits remained a different--and for many, a lesser--option for students and for teachers. With the exception of individuals who become directly involved in career academies or similar structures, few academic teachers have had occasion to think explicitly and imaginatively about what "learning work," as Simon, Dippo, and Schenke (1991) phrase it, might amount to in a restructured school, or how vocational education might contribute to other reform goals. Structures that join teachers' work in unfamiliar ways, such as the career academies, have enabled teachers in these schools to discover shared interests, penetrate old stereotypes, and forge new social ties. They have also revealed the limitations of structural solutions to problems that center on multiple and competing views of schooling; judging by the real, but limited gains in these schools, the kinds of changes sought by the vocational reform movements require both the bridge (the new structures), an incentive to cross it, and a reason to stay in new territory. The success and visibility of the new models might engender wider discussion and debate within schools about the appropriate way to prepare students for work. We might do more to foster and make public the nature of that discussion and debate.
Third, the most ambitious integration models, such as career academies, have generally succeeded in garnering the respect of academic teachers, parents, and students--although not necessarily because they have fostered a deeper and broader understanding of what "learning work" might entail. Such models appear to achieve their effect with their students largely on the basis of (1) general "planfulness" about the future (including both postsecondary education and career); (2) small scale and close socio-emotional support for students of the sort also attempted by other "small school" or "school-within-a-school" models; and (3) the "press for achievement" communicated by teachers who monitor student progress closely. On this basis alone, these seem ventures worth supporting. It is perhaps through these accomplishments that these and similar programs most clearly stand to influence the wider school program and the experience of a larger number of students; that is, it would not require a major philosophic shift, and would require only a quite manageable structural reconfiguration, for most schools to supply the conditions available to students in these academies.
This inquiry began with the observation that present vocational reform initiatives challenge well-established traditions of high school teaching and learning, but that they also coincide with other campaigns to alter the face of secondary education. As Tyack and Tobin (1994) anticipated by pointing to the fundamental and unchanging "grammar" of schooling, traditions die hard. Nonetheless, the landscape in our case study schools has transformed in some ways. Certainly the gains achieved by the career academies in both schools have served to elevate the status of vocational programs. Schools have begun to advocate methods of instruction and assessment that have long been associated with the best of vocational preparation, methods that emphasize active student learning and afford students multiple ways of demonstrating their understanding and competence. In these two schools, at least, teachers and others are more likely now than before to be engaged in discussions and debates that center on fundamental purposes of schooling. As yet, these discussions and debates rarely accord serious attention to the vocational goals of schooling. On a large and more ambitious scale, to fundamentally transform the school's role in helping adolescents understand and prepare for work is likely to require more concerted attention to that goal than the academies alone have the power to compel.
Substantial change in the character of vocational preparation seems unlikely unless schools succeed in placing "work" more visibly on the agenda of schoolwide goal-setting and redesign. Schools engaged in comprehensive programs of restructuring seem well-positioned to do so. They typically have created governance and decision-making structures that include multiple stakeholders: administrators, teachers, parents, community members, and students. Many have created common planning times for teachers to work both within and across traditional subject boundaries. Some, like these case study schools, have sought new ways of organizing teachers and students that will foster greater coherence across the curriculum and enable teachers and students to know and support one another better. Professional development activities tend to focus on ways of "rethinking" approaches to curriculum, instruction, and assessment. New forms of assessment offer opportunities to explore the intersection of academic concepts and practical application (e.g., senior projects typically incorporate a written narrative, a "product," and an oral presentation).
Restructuring schools supply conditions that are--in principle--conducive to a serious examination of "learning work." For example, schools might take advantage of existing arrangements for schoolwide decision making and existing blocks of schoolwide professional development time to create opportunities to investigate what is and might be meant by "learning work." This would require that such occasions be centered less on "decision making" (in the case of governance committees) or "training" (in the case of professional development days) than on informed deliberation: study of alternative conceptions and emerging models, scrutiny of past stereotypes, discussion, and debate. It would also require that academic and vocational teachers spend time getting to know one another's work through observation, joint planning, and shared assessment of students' work. The possibilities for developing, supporting, and testing alternatives to present practice seem limited unless that practice, and its relation to student experience and outcomes, is better and more widely understood. Debates at the level of broad ideology will fail to move the school agenda, and will only harden the divisions among teachers.
The focus on student assessment in restructuring schools creates a particularly powerful vehicle for considering the meaning of work and work preparation. That is, it is in the assessment of what students know and are able to do that the relationship between school and work might be made evident. Admittedly, the rhetoric of "authentic assessment" outstrips the reality of school practice. Useful evidence of student experience and student outcomes, and their relationship to school and classroom practices, seems in short supply in these schools. To produce such evidence means not only developing and supporting some small-scale experiments, but testing them and making their experiences known (as we did in comparing the academy, house, and traditional configurations at Prairie). It means developing a mechanism--and a disposition--for the collective and consistent scrutiny of student work and other outcomes. It means discussing the meaning of "evidence" in relationship to teachers' and parents' priorities for curricular and extracurricular activities. What knowledge and skill are valued, and why? What constitutes good work by students? In what ways does "good work" in school resemble good work out of school? What happens to the school's graduates? Institutional support for teacher research, an altered role for district "research and evaluation" units, and university-school partnerships all might enable schools to create meaningful tests of new possibilities.
Together, such developments might begin to establish both the impetus and the capacity to make something quite different of "learning work" in the comprehensive high school. The restructuring environment does not guarantee movement along these lines or assure a close fit among the various streams of reform activity, but it does present the opportunity to act.