Question 2: In the Search for a More Coherent Curriculum, Did the Schools Embrace Integrated Academic and Vocational Curricula?

An emphasis on "integrated" and "interdisciplinary" curricula pervaded the restructuring atmosphere and rhetoric at both schools. At Prairie, parents were informed that "the school curriculum has been designed around five divisions instead of the usual 13 to 15 departments. There is an interdisciplinary curriculum in the four-year English and social science humanities program" (Prairie High School: A School of the Future, 1993). According to school documents at Southgate, curriculum was focused on preparing "all students to use their minds well:"

To us, using one's mind well is the integrating force behind a thinking, meaning-centered curriculum in which we use California Curriculum Frameworks as a vital resource. We stress depth over simple coverage. We are seeking an interdisciplinary, inquiry-driven core curriculum because we believe that real understanding and problem-solving require an integration of different skills, knowledge, and disciplines. (Southgate House Plan, 1988-1993)

Nonetheless, it would be easy to overestimate the schoolwide commitment to an integrated curriculum if one confined the evidence to school documents and the reported views of administrators and house heads. Among the larger pool of teachers, we uncovered substantial disagreement about the worth, nature, and extent of curriculum integration. As one Southgate math teacher recounted,

There was a tremendous push to put math and science together, and [the science chair] and I worked together very well, but [we] also understood that math, by itself, is a science, and it supports the other sciences, but you couldn't have a math class tied with biology and [still] teach the math curriculum. . . . You know, the study of mathematics is by itself, it stands alone.

Perhaps most telling, even teachers who supported a measure of cross-subject integration balked at the idea that a premium be placed on concepts or skills with a work-related or other out-of-school application. A Southgate math teacher maintained the following of the math curriculum:

There isn't anything you can throw out. You can't say, "Well, if you can't find an application for it, let's throw it out." Because this application may come [when you are] an advanced math student, but you need the building blocks beforehand.

In successive years, however, the Southgate academy suffered from conflicts over the preferred nature and extent of curriculum integration. In the first year of the academy, the three original teachers had prided themselves on attempting both cross-subject integration and integration of academic and vocational content. They were united in their philosophical commitment to the academy's premises. The two young teachers who joined the academy in its second year after an external search, and who assumed responsibility for the 11th-grade curriculum, did not enter with the same philosophical disposition. Nor did they have the opportunity to spend concentrated time prior to the school year learning something of the academy's history, and working out what the 11th-grade curriculum might entail. Concerned with what they understood to be their obligation to supply "college preparatory" academics, the new teachers resisted pressure from both the 10th-grade teachers and the industry partners to concentrate on integrating their curriculum with the graphic arts focus. In a strategic planning session involving the industry partners, the history teacher pressed the case:

We need some resolution of the philosophic problem: Can we provide an advanced academic education and a career education at the same time? . . . There's the issue of "natural" integration points. I can do freedom of the press, but there are a lot of things in history that are not graphic arts. And I'm opposed to doing integration that's a stretch. Are we cheating the kids because we're not doing enough integration? Or because we're doing too much? There are philosophical issues that are not resolved.

I don't really think that integrating everything is a good way to teach because I think then you lose out on a lot of the important information that needs to be taught, and that you're going to have kids who are going to leave lacking basics that they need. They'll know their graphic arts and maybe they'll know the history of graphic arts, and maybe they'll know a little bit about the chemistry, but they're going to miss out on a lot of other stuff that needs to be taught. And I've found it extremely difficult with the math that I was teaching. You can't integrate a lot of the math in graphic arts. There's proportion, there's percentages, and there's basic arithmetic and multiplication. But all this other stuff you have to teach isn't in [graphic arts], and it's hard to integrate it.

At Prairie, efforts to join English and social studies were widespread in the school; math and science, though both engaged in innovative curriculum development projects, tended to proceed independently. Like their non-academy colleagues, the English and social studies teachers assigned to the career academy used their adjoining rooms and flexible block schedule to organize a small number of interdisciplinary projects for their cohorts of 10th- and 11th-grade students. From their perspective, however, the main advantage of the team-based staffing and the shared responsibility for a single student cohort was the opportunity to know students well. Their work was joined principally not through curriculum but "through the kids themselves." In regular staff meetings, academy teachers shared observations about individual students and agreed on strategies for keeping attendance and performance high. Parent phone calls were frequent, and students were well aware that their progress was being monitored collectively by the team. (Students were generally appreciative of the team's close scrutiny; even those who had been resentful at first were gradually won over as they saw their grades improve.)

Under pressure from the academy coordinator, Prairie's English and social studies teachers agreed to participate in a special state-supported project to develop curriculum that would more closely integrate the academic and vocational strands of the program. (The math teacher declined to participate, though not for reasons tied specifically to the purpose of the project.) This state project funded the academy team to participate in a series of two- and three-day meetings with teams from other similar academies. Over time, the project became the focus of escalating tensions within the academy; the more familiar the academic teachers became with what their colleague in business valued as "integration," the more steadily their acquiescence turned to indifference and then to opposition. The differences in perspective and priorities that were acknowledged but muted in their daily work (perhaps because each could see that the others shared a commitment to the students) were intensified in the curriculum workshop setting, where it became clear that the intended "product" was one that not all could accept. As one of them summed up: "We never could pull that together because we couldn't have the same vision or outlook about it, and the same commitment."

Thus, the career academy stood out as the single location in each school where teachers gave explicit attention to linking academic and vocational content, but the academy itself was beset by conflict over the extent to which content should be "integrated" within the school curriculum. Further, both academies were thwarted in their efforts to establish genuine work-based learning opportunities for students, or to link out-of-school experiences more tightly to school-based instruction. At Southgate, time pressures and other setbacks resulted in several failed attempts to develop "modules" that would structure students' workplace learning experiences and tie them to school-based instruction. Summer internships were successfully arranged for only a fraction of the students. At Prairie, the academy relied mainly on individual matches with outside "mentors" to acquaint students with work and workplace environments. Arranging the mentor matches consumed large amounts of teacher time and yielded only partial success. (Journal entries written by students suggest that only about one-third of the students found the mentor relationships rewarding, another third were partly satisfied, and a full third were frustrated and disappointed when their hopes were not realized.)

Curriculum integration--both within the school program and in the design of workplace experience--has proven perhaps the most difficult and contentious challenge faced by the academy teachers. Academic teachers were attracted to the academy by its small scale, its commitment to student success, and its special resources (small class size, field trip opportunities, additional planning time). Most were less certain, on the whole, that the program's purposes would be achieved by elaborate attempts to "integrate" academic coursework with the content derived from vocational fields. Two of the four academic teachers at Southgate expressed frustration with persistent pressures to integrate more of their curriculum. Two of the three academic teachers at Prairie (English and social studies) participated regularly in the state-sponsored curriculum integration planning meetings, but did not express much satisfaction with the progress they made.

The problems of achieving a curriculum integration strategy can be cast in part as an issue of policy or philosophy ("Is it the right thing to do?") and in part as an issue of capacity ("Does this group of people have the knowledge and the other resources to do it?") With regard to policy or philosophy, teachers were divided. Some teachers (the founding three at Southgate, and the vocational specialist at Prairie) espoused a vision of a fully integrated curriculum. Other teachers expressed reservations, arguing: (1) that one prepares a student better for a career by using the academic discipline as a vehicle for honing students' intellectual skills and work habits, and for building their confidence as learners; (2) that too much integration will result in eliminating many of core concepts and topics that teachers believe are important, thus "watering down" the academic curriculum; (3) that integration also tends to narrow the curriculum, sacrificing some broader, nonvocational, purposes of education (such as social and political awareness), and (4) that integration of course content may not be as desirable or as feasible as connecting "through the kids" (i.e., by activities done in common, by all teachers getting to know the students well and sharing a commitment to them, or by monitoring student progress).

The capacity of teachers to achieve an integrated curriculum rested in part on their individual and collective knowledge and skill, but also on other kinds of material, organizational, and social resources that range from sufficient planning time to parental acceptance. On the whole, and not surprisingly, teachers did not know much about one another's subjects, and often found it hard to imagine any but the most superficial forms of linkage. (Southgate's founding humanities teacher, who felt comfortable with all the core subjects and saw integration everywhere she looked, was an exception.) Multiple demands on their scarce planning time and infrequent professional development opportunities compounded the difficulty of achieving even those forms of integration that all could accept.