Legislative Principles

2. In secondary schools, all students--including those who expect to attend four-year colleges or universities, as well as students at risk of not completing high school--can benefit from having the option to pursue a career-related course of study that integrates academic and vocational content with work-based learning.

Historically vocational education and academic education have been badly divided, to the detriment of both. The 1990 Amendments to the Carl Perkins Act took a first step toward ending this division with the requirement to integrate academic and vocational education. New Federal legislation can now encourage the further development of these integrated programs where they already exist, and can promote their more widespread diffusion. A worthy goal would be for every public high school student in the nation to have the option of pursuing a high-quality career-related course of study.

The further development of secondary school programs can proceed along several lines.

The integration of academic and vocational education would continue, with the goal of moving secondary schools from less thorough forms of integration (e.g., applied academics courses, or collaboration between two teachers) toward forms of integration in which a number of teachers collaborate to create an occupationally focused program. These programs might take various forms, including career academies or schools-within-schools, career-oriented clusters or majors that every student in a particular high school could elect, or occupationally oriented magnet schools.
Career academies, majors, and magnet schools would focus on a broad range of occupations and many aspects of an industry, rather than specific entry-level jobs as has been true in traditional vocational education. The career theme could be defined in terms of related occupations (e.g., health occupations) or as occupations within a given industry (e.g., those related to agriculture, which includes scientists and managers as well as farmers) (Hoachlander, 1994).
The goals of work-oriented education would be broader than those of either traditional academic or vocational education: they would prepare students either for employment after high school or postsecondary education, or for the combination of employment and further education that has become so common. Courses that teach only job-specific skills for entry-level work right after high school would be eliminated, unless they can be incorporated into a broader course of study that provides knowledge and competence necessary for the long run.
This approach to work-oriented education would require changes in academic and vocational instruction. Quite rightly, vocational teachers have complained that the burden of integrating academic and vocational education has often fallen entirely on them so far. In subsequent development, academic subjects would change as well, incorporating more occupationally relevant applications, examples, and projects, as well as themes that are important to broadly defined occupations.
The pedagogy in high schools would also change in favor of teaching based on current conceptions of learning, more student-centered instruction, small-group and cooperative instruction, project- and experience-based learning, and other practices that have been more common in the best vocational education (and also in the most elite academic education).
These integrated high school programs would explicitly create links to postsecondary institutions of all kinds, extending the practices associated with tech-prep programs, and dispelling the notion that these are programs only for the "non-college bound." The danger in limiting programs to the "non-college bound" is that they will be viewed as second-best. Students segregated into non-academic programs, whether they be vocational education, general education, or special education programs, are frequently given a watered-down curriculum and teachers who have low expectations for their achievement (Oakes et al., 1992). Also, students placed into "lower" tracks tend to be disproportionately poor or minority (O'Neil, 1993). Tracking and other forms of homogeneous grouping increase social segregation, deny many students the opportunity to learn from more accomplished students, and contribute to substandard outcomes (Maddy-Bernstein and Coyle-Williams, in press). To avoid these adverse outcomes, instructional objectives should be identical for all students, as embodied in newly developing skill and knowledge standards for occupations and academic subjects. (See principle 7.)
Resources are required to provide teaching materials, equipment, and curricula that accommodate the individual learning methods of all students. The 1990 Perkins Act began to provide the framework to eliminate dual tracks by supporting the integration of academic and vocational programs and concentrating resources on students with special needs. When coupled with individual student assessment and appropriate pedagogy such as cooperative learning and a curriculum based on realistic projects, this approach can include students who reflect the race, gender, disability status, and other diverse characteristics of the general population (Eagle et al., 1989; Phelps and Wermuth, 1992; Baker, Wang, and Walberg, 1994-95; Staub and Peck, 1994-95).
In conjunction with classroom instruction, various work-based learning opportunities would be provided in businesses, school-based enterprises, and nonprofit or public service agencies. Providing tangible goods and productive services gives students a chance to confront real problems with immediate consequences for people other than themselves. In addition to knowledge and skills specific to a particular kind of job, students also develop generic work skills (Stasz et al., 1992; Raizen, 1989), including the ability to take charge of their own learning in a work setting. And they can use the workplace as a laboratory to test ideas and concepts from their classes in school.
The kind of secondary education described here implies a new legal definition of vocational education. Federal law has defined vocational education as preparation for "occupations requiring other than a baccalaureate or advanced degree." However, this definition is out of date because some occupations that are incorporated into clusters would require baccalaureate or advanced degrees (e.g., doctors in a health cluster or engineers in a manufacturing technologies curriculum).

This vision of career-oriented high school options is consistent with numerous other strands of high school reform (Andrew and Grubb, 1995). These include the proposals to create "focus schools" and charter schools (Hill, Foster, and Gendler, 1990); the increased interest in magnet schools; the "restructuring movement" that allows individual schools greater control to create schools with a particular emphasis; the shift toward more active teaching methods; the call for small schools or schools-within-schools (Meier, 1991); and the general interest in integrated curricula (e.g., Jacobs, 1989). What we are proposing is that, among the other curricular options available, every student should have access to at least one option that is career-oriented. As John Dewey declared, "education through occupations consequently combines within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method" (Dewey, 1916, Ch. 23, p. 309).