Question 3: Did the Schools Enable Teachers To Bridge the Two Worlds of Academic and Vocational Teachers?

Both schools have attempted to restructure in ways that create new opportunities for collegial work among teachers. By its design, the Southgate plan would enable teachers to bridge the gap between the academic and the vocational in two ways: by staffing career academies with full-time academic and vocational teachers whose schedules permitted daily collaboration; and by locating career academies within the wider house structure of the school. A Southgate teacher identified the highlight of her experience in the academy as "the professional synergism" that permeated the first year's collaborative work. Prairie's academy structure also gave academic and vocational teachers a common purpose and daily opportunity for collaborative planning, and tied the academy to an interdisciplinary structure (the "divisions").

The evolution of new ties between academic and vocational teachers proceeded along two paths in these schools--one that followed the development of the academy itself, and the internal relationships between academic and vocational teachers; and a second that charted the individual and collective relationships between academy teachers and their colleagues outside the academy.

At Southgate, the collaborative environment that was forged within the academy with some considerable success in its early stages proved more difficult to sustain when the program undertook rapid growth in its second and third years. As the program doubled and then tripled in enrollment, with the addition of each new student cohort, the pioneers found it difficult to supply each new group of students and each newly hired teacher the same conditions that the first cohort had enjoyed. By the end of the second year, teachers were confronted with the possible loss of their common planning period and their summer curriculum development stipends. Reductions in professional development resources exacerbated these problems, as generous subsidies for attending outside conferences and institutes were cut back. In the eyes of one of the newcomers, the original teachers had been "treated like royalty," but "now it's business as usual."

More crucial, however, were two developments that resulted, over time, in high turnover among the academic teachers. The first development was the rapid increase in program size and scope; the founding teachers who had treasured their intimate working relationship now had to make room and time for others, at precisely the time when the program development burdens escalated dramatically (e.g., adding a workplace internship component to the program). In the eyes of the teachers, the program's burdens began to outstrip the felt benefits. The second and less tractable development, despite the effort to recruit and hire teachers who appeared compatible with the academy's mission, was an evolving split over curricular priorities (and associated expectations regarding program development and professional development). The split was not between academic and vocational specialists, but between the founding team members and those academic teachers who were later arrivals. Although teachers throughout the school were being asked to develop a more integrated curriculum, the emphasis on integration between the academic curriculum and work-related applications was unique to the academy. Increasingly, the academic newcomers felt themselves to be beleaguered defenders of what they considered to be curriculum integrity consistent with the program's claims to be a "college prep" program.

According to the published plan, the Southgate academy was located within one of the school's academic houses. In practice, there was little interaction between the academy teachers and their colleagues elsewhere in the school. Physically, the academy was located in renovated facilities on one edge of campus. Academy teachers tended to gravitate to the graphic arts room and the other large, airy classrooms in the same building, rather than spending time in the house offices. Meeting as an academy group quickly became habitual among the original teachers, a habit supported by a common planning period each afternoon. Rarely did a representative of the academy join the regularly scheduled house meeting, and never did all the academy teachers attend. Nor did any teachers from the house routinely enter into the discussions among the academy teachers, although the house head and house counselor attended meetings when asked.

The separation between the academy and the school-at-large opens questions about Southgate's schoolwide goal to prepare students for a "productive work life." Had there been regular contact between academy and house teachers, one might have anticipated some discussion about how that goal might be realized through the school's curriculum or through the community service and senior project opportunities that were under consideration.

Prairie's academy, from its beginning, displayed an uneasy accommodation to the dual mission of career and college preparation, and the close integration of academic and vocational curriculum. What joined the academic and vocational teachers, and created something of a genuine team ethos, was the shared belief that the program's small scale, team organization, and curricular focus provided an important climate of support for students. In its coordinated approach to recruiting, supporting, and monitoring student progress and well-being, the group looked and acted like a team. Yet philosophical agreement continued to elude them. Team members were divided (not entirely along academic-vocational lines) in the goals they expressed for students, and the ways in which those goals played out in the classroom. Such divisions are not unusual among high school teachers, but rarely are they made the focus of collegial exchange. In this instance, the formal expectation that there be some form of integration served to make teachers' views and preferences public, and to bring deeply felt differences to the surface. In one example, the teachers wrestled over the premises and imagery attached to "total quality management" as a framework for organizing the academy's work. Objecting to the idea that students should be "satisfying `customers,'" an English teacher expostulates: "They're not there for me. They don't have to sell me. They have to convince me--they have to convince themselves--judging against a standard, that something is a good piece of work." The conversation unfolded this way:

Coordinator/business teacher: There's another term we could use--stakeholders. Someone who has a stake in the student's learning.

English teacher: The student is the primary stakeholder. The fact that they come to school on time is not for me, it's for them. My job is to present the best that I can to them. Do homework not because I tell you, but because we're engaged in a particular project.

Social studies teacher [finding the imagery of parents and teachers as the student's "customer" to be acceptable]: I think this is a way to get kids to think about why they're here. I agree that the student is the primary customer.

English teacher: I won't stand in the way if you agree on the language of customer, but I think this is an important philosophical point. . . . It's not just terminology. This is a bigger discussion about education, and whether it's going to be student-centered or whether it exists to serve external purposes.

At Prairie, unlike Southgate, the academy teachers all maintained close ties with their subject departments. These affiliations helped to pull the academic teachers toward subject-specific interests and activities or, in the case of English and social studies, in the direction of interdisciplinary planning independent of a career focus. In the full-day interdisciplinary planning sessions we observed, the academy's English and social studies teachers participated actively in discussions without ever once mentioning potential curricular links to the world of work. In interviews, they cited pressures from the department as a reason for resisting projects that built on the integration of academic and vocational content and outcomes; to do so would cost them time needed for curriculum coverage expected by the department (or more likely to be approved by the department).

Most of the discussion about integration of academic and vocational education took place within the confines of the academy--but not exclusively. The school's Career Technology Subcommittee included teachers from the arts, science, and social studies. It would be an overstatement to say that concerns regarding career preparation were widespread, but they were visible outside the academy in ways that we did not find at Southgate. Progress was slow, and long-standing stereotypes proved difficult to displace. Despite widespread acceptance of the career academy program at Prairie, the academy coordinator had difficulty in stimulating wider interest in vocational links. She reported,

I've always been in position to give input, but my viewpoints aren't listened to. There's a point where sometimes I think I get ignored. Why I get ignored may have to do with some of the other prejudicial feelings that I sometimes feel across the campus in terms of where my "place" is. That's that funny little thing about high schools. Like, how would this person [know]? She's a vocational teacher . . . it's really weird.

Teachers nonetheless encountered certain impediments to professional community. First, the academies assembled teachers with quite different backgrounds, subject specializations, and educational philosophies. Although they tended to share support for the basic goals of the academy, teachers were not necessarily in agreement about how those goals should be achieved. Teacher turnover in both academies was greatest among the academic teachers. Academic teachers who left the academies responded to what might be termed "pushes" and "pulls." Among the forces that pushed them away from the academy were the extraordinary time demands for program development and coordination, and the philosophical bind created by competing curriculum priorities. In particular, teachers 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 or structured summer internships). 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 embodied a dual mission.

Other forces pulled teachers toward the subject department. This was especially the case at Prairie, where teachers were tied to subject departments (English, social studies, math, and business) and to interdisciplinary divisions, each with its own agenda and demands. Among the external pulls were the subject background they held in common with colleagues, and the subject resources available within a department or larger divisional structure; the consolidation of time demands (one less set of meetings); and the relief from trying to accomplish (and explain) a curriculum that achieves both academic-vocational integration and interdisciplinary connections. At the same time, the pull of the academy itself was substantial, at least for some, and decisions to leave did not always appear to come easily. Perhaps the central point is that the professional ties we witnessed at Prairie served less to bridge the two worlds of the academic and vocational than to reveal and intensify teachers' divided loyalties. The conditions that attract teachers and students to these newly configured programs, that underlie their stability and success, and that frame their relation to the larger school, thus deserve greater attention--especially in light of the convergence of multiple reform activities.

Finally, the "bridging" of separate teacher communities in both schools was complicated by the multiplicity of activities pursued under the broad banner of restructuring. Many teachers participate in more than one of these activities--interdisciplinary teams and within-subject projects, schoolwide committees and out-of-school networks, a long list of professional development events, and more. It is not immediately clear what philosophical glue holds these various activities together. In the absence of a common philosophical thread, and given the many reform roads available to travel, teachers tend to follow the paths best known and most appealing to them. Quite apart from the fatigue factor, which figures substantially in teachers' accounts ("we're being `meetinged' to death," or "I'm having to withdraw from some of this stuff"), teachers' intellectual interests, social ties, and emotional commitments all figure in the investments they make--and in their decisions to sustain or abandon those investments over time.