Prairie High School opened less than a decade ago, with a mission to expand opportunities for its 2,400 ethnically and linguistically diverse students. Unlike Southgate, which attempted to convert an established departmental structure to one based on houses, Prairie retained subject departments within broad interdisciplinary divisions ("Cultures and Literature" and "Math, Science, Technology") that encouraged collaboration across subject lines. The school also urged teachers to develop various small-scale programs for students that would provide both curriculum focus and a measure of identity and belonging for students and teachers. At the time the study began, three such initiatives had been launched: a career academy in the domain of "business technology" (with supplemental external funding); an interdisciplinary "house" initiated by a small group of English and social studies teachers; and an arts "consortium" for students interested in concentrating their elective coursework in the visual and performing arts. These early ventures in turn stimulated other proposals, most of them modeled loosely on the idea of a program "major," and most designed to enroll students who would take at least some of their coursework as a cohort. To a greater extent than at Southgate, Prairie's career academy emerged as part of a more generalized and evolving set of experiments in a small scale and curriculum focus.[3]
In certain respects, the teachers in Prairie's career academy echoed the experience of their Southgate colleagues. They credited the academy structure with promoting professional community by organizing a team of teachers who shared responsibility for a cohort of students, and by providing common time for planning and coordinating the students' program. Like their colleagues at Southgate, they nonetheless found the pace and scope of program development to be exhausting, and the constraints of a state-defined model to be problematic. In particular, they found it hard to work on strengthening students' within-school experiences (through coordinating and integrating curriculum, monitoring student performance, and developing new forms of performance assessment), while also extending their opportunities for work-based learning outside of school (finding appropriate "mentor" matches for all juniors). The strain felt by teachers stemmed from limits on their individual and collective ability--working largely on their own--to develop and sustain the multiple components of a program that fully embodies the dual mission of career and college preparation.
Despite these similarities, Prairie's business academy also differed from the Southgate experience in important ways. One principal difference lay in the environment for restructuring in the two schools. Prairie's staff experienced almost no turnover, and school leaders--administrators, head counselor, and teacher leaders--had been successful in eliciting a high level of involvement from staff. The academy teachers were in the throes of schoolwide debates, and were active participants in the school's various committees and pilot projects (e.g., an effort to introduce "senior projects"). The academy's coordinator was a member of key school-level restructuring committees, while one of its English teachers served part-time as a schoolwide language arts resource teacher.
A second and related difference resided in the staff configuration of the academy and in academy teachers' perceived professional obligations. Southgate began with a single specialist in graphic arts and two academic teachers whose full-time responsibilities and interests lay with the academy. Both were experienced teachers who made an informed choice to join the academy. Prairie's four-person academy team was composed of a business education specialist and academic teachers in English, social studies, and math. The business specialist had been instrumental in starting the academy, securing funding to support a reduced teaching load and common planning time for the four-person team. However, the academy program also relied upon the extended instructional resources (and political goodwill) of a five-member business department to supply a range of course offerings to the academy's students. Enthusiasm for the academy was mixed among the larger department (e.g., besides the academy coordinator, only two of the department members participated frequently and enthusiastically in academy events or special projects). The academic teachers endorsed the mission of the academy, but also took seriously their ties to their academic departments. English and history teachers from the academy attended workshops on integrating the academic and vocational curriculum, but also participated in all-day planning sessions with their department colleagues to design an interdisciplinary academic curriculum. In the second year of our study, one of the English teachers reduced his involvement in the academy to half-time, resulting in a mix of full-time and half-time academy staff. The social studies teacher announced that he would be seeking an administrative post.
To some extent, then, the teachers' broader involvement in school restructuring provided Prairie's academy teachers with visibility for the accomplishments of their students and a forum for advocating the merits of their program. At the same time, visibility and school-level involvement helped to multiply the demands on teachers, and to highlight the divided loyalties experienced by the academic teachers. At Prairie, as well, then, the answers to our three guiding questions could not be taken for granted.
[3] Perhaps predictably, the "grow-your-own" approach to these small-scale programs eventually reached a sticking point. The proliferation of proposals led to questions in schoolwide committees regarding the purpose of individual majors, the relationship among them, and the possibilities for curriculum depth and breadth. In addition, teachers began to see such programs as creating differential advantage among teachers in competition for students, material resources, and organizational influence.