The integration of academic and vocational education gained substantial visibility at Southgate and Prairie with the introduction of a career academy, which in both schools was granted an unprecedented degree of institutional legitimacy and material support. Nonetheless, structural changes and a new concentration of resources proved insufficient to create a substantially altered view of the school's place in work education. During the period of our study, there was never an occasion in either school on which reform leaders employed the public forum created by restructuring to raise and pursue questions of school purpose. Rather, the disposition toward work preparation and other expressed aims of secondary schooling became evident primarily in the informal exchanges that we witnessed; in the responses that administrators and teachers offered to reports and proposals made during various meetings; and in the interviews we conducted with teachers, administrators, and students.
Certainly the principal was a strong public relations advocate for the academy, especially in its early days. However, we observed no genuine evidence that the academy's principles and practices were part of the school's broader "rethinking." Although the academy coordinator had individual access to the principal, it could not be said that academy leadership was well-represented in school decision-making forums, or that the staff of the academy enjoyed any particular influence with the staff at large. Structural connections between the academy and the school's house structure remained largely on paper, and the academy's visibility largely a function of the principal's management of public relations with the printing industry. The principal's patronage served to protect and defend the academy's special resources (small class size, common planning time, professional development funds, field trips), not to inspire broader discourse within the school.
With rare exception (mostly reflected in concerns regarding math and science instruction), teachers outside Southgate's academy were less attentive to the educational mission of the academy than to the resource disparities between the academy and other programs. On the whole, however, they reported that the academy represents an advance over previous vocational offerings at the school; they applauded the effort to intensify academic content for all students and to establish links between the academy and a local community college.[4] At the same time, they did not see their own work as requiring a shift toward the integration of academic and vocational curricula or the integration of in-school and out-of-school learning.
It seems unlikely that teachers' support for the academy as a small-scale self-contained program would translate easily into support for a schoolwide change in curriculum and instruction. Among the views we heard, the most crucial--from the perspective of our interest in "fit"--are those that center on acceptance of the academy's vocational orientation and those that indicate the academy's place within the larger school. In one relevant example, reflective of other views we encountered, a widely respected young teacher resisted the principal's efforts to recruit her to a position within the academy. She explained her decision on two grounds: her reluctance to make a move that she anticipated would diminish her involvement and influence with the whole school staff; and her belief that she would be asked to subordinate her "love of learning" to an explicitly vocational focus:
My big reservation--I have a real big one--is that I've been committed to whole school change. I've been really committed to the general population and seeing them go to college, and I've put my heart and soul into that. Philosophically, it's a departure for me. . . . I never really wanted to be part of a school within a school. . . . I've put my heart and soul, I guess, into working with the whole staff, and the whole politics of it all. For four years, that's where my heart's been. I don't know if I'm ready to just go off in a little corner in the school and do my thing.Not yet firm in her resolve, she closed by saying, "I have to learn more about it. I have to learn. Maybe - maybe it's not that way." After speaking with other teachers both inside and outside the academy, she declined the position. In the end, the academy was forced to recruit additional teachers from outside the school.You know, it might be a really neat opportunity for me that I shouldn't shrug away just because of some philosophical difference. . . . I've been real biased against the academies. I mean, I love the idea of teaching a love of learning. Instead of, "Okay, you've got this job in graphic arts. Here's your tie-in." Everything is going to be then filtered through the lens of graphic arts. . . . I guess I don't want to teach humanities through a lens other than humanities. I don't know--it may be kind of selfish, but I - I don't want to be some add-on program to graphic arts.
At Prairie, we found an environment more clearly structured to permit or foster philosophical debate that has (at least on occasion) encompassed questions surrounding vocationalism. Vocational programs, personnel, and students were more fully integrated in the life of the school. From the beginning, the Planning and Restructuring Committee (the main decision-making body of the school) has included the career academy coordinator, who has attempted (with uneven success) to keep issues of work preparation on the schoolwide agenda. The career academy formed a visible part of the school's experiments with assessment, serving as one of three pilot sites for the school's first trials of a Senior Project. A planning subcommittee focused on career-related programs has attracted teachers from a range of subject backgrounds to its monthly meetings--a small group, but one representing science, the arts, agriculture, business, and social studies. Although the school's funded career academy has experienced teacher turnover, openings have been staffed from within the school.
The more central and widely accepted place of specific work-related programs at Prairie could lead one to overestimate the school's acceptance of vocational goals and its willingness to re-examine the schoolwide program. Some teachers advocate the academy program, saying that it is a "step in the right direction" for students who "won't go on to college." Recalling the school's discussions of curriculum integration in the early stages of restructuring, the academy coordinator relates incidents that indicate less than uniform support for work education as one major focus of the curriculum for all students:
The first year, I talked with the librarian about some of the tools I would hope we'd have in the library that would have to do with researching vocational concerns, and she said, oh, our students don't need that.She concludes that "the idea of career preparation is a second-class citizenship goal for the high school curriculum, according to many, according to the majority of the people in the high school." At the same time, she adds,My recommendation was that we use the career ed focus [as a way of integrating within math and science]. Like a pre-engineering focus and pre-health focus, and so on, and work on ways to integrate those concepts across the curriculum. And the division leader laughed at me. . . . It's like, okay, I haven't sold you on this one yet, have I?
Our principal has moved to the concept that we are in the business of career ed. I mean, he publicly states that over and over again now. I think he recognizes that he has to say that, as a leader. That career ed is our business. It's just that there are different methods of getting there.Both of these schools provide evidence of reasonably solid support for a school-within-a-school model that combines strong academics with a coherent introduction to an occupational field. Absent at both schools were the most divisive and overt signals of second-class status that we had come to associate with vocational education elsewhere--the explicit skepticism expressed by administrators or teachers about work preparation ("I don't think it's our job to prepare kids for jobs"), the complaints by vocational teachers that their classes served as a "dumping ground," and the steady decline in staffing or program resources (Little, 1993; Little & Threatt, 1994). The image of vocational education, insofar as it was represented by the career academy, was substantially stronger than it appeared in other comprehensive high schools.
The emphasis that academy teachers placed upon the college preparatory aspects of their program brings home one clear message: in this setting, "academic" knowledge bears a stamp of validity that "practical" or "work-related" knowledge has not achieved (see Lewis, 1993). Acutely aware of what was described as the "stigma that's attached to the word `vocational,'" academy teachers at Southgate emphasized their college-bound curriculum while working to eliminate "the old differentiation between vocational and academic." That the "academic" enjoys greater status in the high school is hardly a new observation, but it underscores the basis on which career academies earn their reputation within these schools. Few academic teachers have the experience of working in fields outside teaching that would enable them to attach to workplace knowledge the same sophistication, complexity, coherence, and dignity that they attach (rightly or not) to the school subjects. Further, most can point to examples of "practical" learning in schools that, by comparison to complex academic tasks, seem simplistic.
Their efforts to deliver on both promises left the academy teachers vulnerable to criticisms of two sorts. First, the academy had to demonstrate that its academic curriculum met the college preparatory standard. At Southgate, academic teachers questioned the administration's decision to staff the academy with teachers assigned to teach two subject areas. At Prairie, concern for academic reputation contributed to the reluctance expressed by English and social studies teachers to incorporate "vocational" content in their courses.
In addition, the academies felt pressure to establish the credibility of their connections with industry. At Southgate, external support from the printing industry and other funders remained contingent upon a credible program of preparation for work in the field of graphic arts. In the original conception of the academy, connections between school and work were to take several forms: extensive curricular links between graphic arts experience and academic study; regular field trips to graphic arts firms; a sequence of structured work experiences culminating in a paid internship during the senior year; and guaranteed employment upon graduation. A steering committee made up of academy teachers, site and district administrators, industry representatives, and community college instructors formed a mechanism for deciding program priorities and mobilizing support--but it also was a mechanism by which industry asserted its interests in the school program. Over time, each of the planned program components proved difficult to realize. (For example, the industry partners were slow to provide internships or other opportunities for structured work experience.) Prairie's academy coordinator created "partnerships" of varying strengths with quite different kinds of firms--a national insurance firm, a major soft drink company, the state highway agency, and others. From these arrangements, the academy coordinator sought field trip and job shadowing opportunities, mentors for the juniors, classroom speakers, and participation in a few special projects (e.g., the soft drink firm helped sponsor a schoolwide "sober celebration" activity prior to graduation). However, the school had no mechanism comparable to Southgate's steering committee to define the form and content of a partnership agreement; the result was a series of quite idiosyncratic ties that required substantial teacher time to create and maintain.
Although we uncovered fewer overt signs of stigma attached to these new forms of vocational education, we nonetheless found subtle indications that for most teachers and most students, the pursuit of academic study and work preparation remained quite separate and differentially valued enterprises. The strength of the symbolic support for the academy resided mainly in the administration and in the academy's external constituencies. In both schools, support from non-academy teachers rested less on a concrete understanding of the academy's premises and practices than it did on a rather vague grasp of its dual mission (preparation for both work and postsecondary education). Teachers did not regard the academies as a stigmatizing environment in which to teach, but few seemed to view it as an attractive opportunity. Even with its special resources, Southgate's academy was unable to recruit the required number of academic teachers from within the school's own ranks, and was forced to recruit outside. Prairie's academy also suffered some degree of staff turnover, though replacements were found within the existing school staff.
At Southgate, more than at Prairie, the substance and status of work education remained vulnerable despite manifest improvements. Because special resources such as small class size and reduced teaching load represented high and continuing costs, and because they were a source of resentment on the part of non-academy teachers who saw themselves as carrying a heavier workload, they also made the academy's special status precarious. Further underscoring the academy's vulnerability was the relative absence of occasions on which the academy staff could "educate" colleagues about their aims and accomplishments, or on which non-academy teachers might air their curiosities and concerns. At Southgate, we encountered no opportunities for teachers to tackle the questions of academic and vocational preparation as a matter of schoolwide concern. One might expect that a restructuring environment would open up communication in a school, spawning more frequent, focused, and widespread talk among teachers, counselors, administrators, students, parents, and community members. Yet we observed virtually no structured forum in which academy-based and house-based teachers might discover the commonalities or differences in one another's views and priorities, discuss and debate possibilities, or build upon points of continuity in their respective programs. We found no mechanism by which the teachers and students in the academy, or their community partners, could begin to develop a more widespread understanding of what work knowledge looked like. Despite the proclaimed schoolwide goal to prepare students for "productive work life," we found no evidence that teachers outside the academy had given any explicit attention to what that might mean in their own curriculum planning.
At Prairie, the schoolwide committee structure gave legitimacy to such discussions and provided a forum in which they could take place. Even under these more favorable conditions, however, advocates of work preparation found it difficult to produce any extended consideration of fundamental school purposes and outcomes. Meeting agendas were crowded, typically allotting no more than 20 minutes to individual topics (and often, a mere 5 or 10 minutes). One teacher (not in the academy) recalled the early days of the school and its rallying cry of "academic success for all students":
I think the idea [was] that somehow we could magically make this an academic place where every kid is going to be able to go to college whether they want to or not. It didn't matter how much [the academy coordinator] told us about the world of work. She was one voice, telling us about the world of work. We said, "Be ready for college." She said, "Be ready for the world of work." We said, "Yeah, that's fine, but be ready for college."
We have less evidence that the occupational focus of the academy yields value beyond what the students attribute to the small scale and sense of community, the press for academic achievement, and the close attention and steady encouragement of the team of teachers.[5] That is, we have no data on students' out-of-school work performance during high school or on the postsecondary work or educational record of academy graduates. When asked to write about their career aspirations and about the career focus of the program, approximately one-quarter of the academy juniors named business or business-related careers. The remaining students named a variety of aspirations--various occupations in the medical field, lawyer, psychologist, teacher or professor, auto mechanic, engineer, broadcaster, photographer, athlete, beautician. Some of these occupations have traditionally been pursued in a small-business setting, suggesting that students might reap practical benefits from their business-related training. In several cases, the career choices identified by an individual student are sufficiently different from one another--"social work or data processing"--to make us wonder about the extent to which students attach concrete images to these career labels. Regardless of its precise fit with students' career aspirations, however, the academy appears to induce or reinforce a general sense of "planfulness" among these students at a time when they are nearing transition from high school to work or higher education.
The implementation difficulties experienced by the career academies were not unusual, and parallel those described elsewhere (see Andrew, 1995; Pauly, Kopp, & Haimson, 1994; Stern et al., 1992). Our aim here is not to dwell on implementation challenges associated with academies, but to suggest that (1) the academy's dual mission helped to secure the support of a wide range of constituencies, but was difficult to achieve uniformly; (2) the scale of the implementation task tended to isolate the academy from the rest of the school, even at a time when the environment may have been most open for broadening the integration of academic and vocational education; (3) the academy's continued isolation was exacerbated by the absence of an effective forum for schoolwide discussion of what whole-school "restructuring" might mean; (4) school-level leadership acted to support the academy as one of several parallel ventures in reform, but stopped short of promoting larger scale discussions or changes.
Enduring differences in teachers' goals for students--or the "big picture," as some characterized it--tended to revolve around the legitimacy of work preparation in the high school (though they were often treated as if they centered on the value attached to academic subject matter). For the business teachers, the big picture places work preparation in the foreground. As one business teacher relates,
I think the biggest disservice we can do to a student in high school is not prepare them for the world of work. . . . I think every curriculum needs to be tied to the world of work somehow. And we need to really apply all of these classes and all of these things to modern society . . . versus how much U.S. History do they know or how many works of Shakespeare have they read.The business teachers were united in this view; the academic teachers varied in their outlook, though all of them supported a program that supplied a curriculum focus and that increased students' postsecondary options. For at least one of the academy teachers and for several of his colleagues outside the academy, the "business" emphasis was ideologically problematic. In particular, he expressed reservations about the unquestioning attitudes toward business and industry that he encountered among the business teachers:
We don't get students to interrogate enough the type of system they are in and what role work plays in that situation. . . . This business thing, their pedagogy is "learn the skills that are going to make you a good business person, a good worker," but it's not really getting you to interrogate the society you live in and make changes in society. It's kind of like "go along with the status quo." And I have problems with that.These differences in what constitutes the "big picture" were well-known and often discussed in meetings of the academy teachers (though rarely in any public forum outside the academy). In the short run, decisions were reached and accommodations made. The teachers worked together to plan curriculum projects, develop the academy's mentor component, and assess students' work. In the longer run, the differences contributed to turnover among the academic teachers.
In effect, career academies gained acceptance within the school to the extent that they came to look more like academic programs. However, the mainstream academic curriculum did not, in turn, come to reflect an increased interest in the vocational utility of a high school education. One rare exception was a junior-year research project conducted in one pair of English and social studies classes at Prairie, in which students were asked to imagine themselves in a career five years after high school, and to conduct interviews and library research that would give them a clearer understanding of what such a career choice would entail. On the whole, however, we did not find academic teachers or departments reconsidering how curriculum, instruction, and assessment might give greater prominence to work-related outcomes.
[4] This is not to say that teachers are uniformly accepting of the amount of academic instruction that students receive or the criteria on which academic credit is awarded, especially in math. However, some of the criticisms expressed are a consequence of Southgate's staffing pattern, which calls for academic teachers in the career academy to instruct in two subjects. This arrangement is not typical of academies in the state.
[5] To address the question of "added value," Robert Crain and his colleagues at Teachers College, Columbia University have been conducting a study of graduates from selected career magnet and comprehensive high schools in New York City. Their preliminary analysis, as yet unpublished, suggests that graduates of focused career magnet programs are more likely to demonstrate group problem-solving ability, and are more likely to credit their high school education with supplying them with marketable skills (Anna Allen, personal communication, April 3, 1995). This analysis, when complete, will also compare postsecondary rates of employment and college attendance for the two groups.