Promising Practices in Tech-Prep:
Local Solutions to Common Problems (1996)

Chapter 1 of the Report

Tech-Prep is an education reform model that requires local innovation and creativity, but its practitioners can also benefit from the ideas of others. The original formulation of the Tech-Prep model envisioned a cohesive sequence of academic and vocational courses, incorporating applied approaches to instruction and extending "seamlessly" from high school through community college programs to technically oriented careers (Parnell 1985; and Hull and Parnell 1991). Elements of this early Tech-Prep concept are now incorporated in local Tech-Prep consortia that operate under very diverse circumstances; however, as a result, they place quite varied emphasis on different aspects of the early Tech-Prep model. How the Tech-Prep concept evolves in a consortium is likely to depend on the characteristics of the community, the history of other local school reform efforts, the financial resources available for new programs, and the flexibility and adaptability of administrators, faculty, and other staff members in high schools and their postsecondary partners. In grappling with their own challenges, however, local consortia develop approaches and find solutions that can be useful to others facing similar circumstances. This paper presents examples of such local innovations, identified in the national Evaluation of the Tech-Prep Education Program.

The National Evaluation of Tech-prep

The national evaluation of Tech-Prep includes both broad analysis of Tech-Prep implementation progress throughout the United States and in-depth examination of the approaches to Tech-Prep and successes achieved in selected local consortia. The national-level analysis is based primarily on comprehensive annual surveys of all consortia in the United States, conducted each fall from 1993 through 1995. These surveys have documented the methods and resources used to foster Tech-Prep development, the program models implemented, aggregate levels of student participation and progress to postsecondary education, and challenges local consortia face as they create Tech-Prep programs. A survey of all state Tech-Prep coordinators was also conducted in fall 1993 and will be administered again in fall 1996.

In-depth studies have been conducted of Tech-Prep development in 10 local consortia of school districts and community colleges:

• Miami Valley Tech-Prep Consortium (Dayton, OH)
• Career Quest (Dothan, AL)
• Central Illinois Consortium (East Peoria, IL)
• State Center Tech-Prep Consortium (Fresno, CA)
• Santa Fe Community College Consortium (Gainesville, FL)
• Capital Region Tech-Prep Consortium (Hartford, CT)
• Southern West Virginia Community College Consortium (Logan, WV)
• Mid-Willamette Education Consortium (Salem, OR)
• Northwest Arkansas Tech-Prep Consortium (Springdale, AR)
• Tech-Prep West (Springfield, MA)

These consortia were selected in 1993 to reflect the diversity of Tech-Prep program settings and the stages of development the programs have reached. The evaluation team sought nominations for the in-depth studies of local consortia that had either made substantial progress in creating key components of Tech-Prep or had developed and started to implement plans that reflected a thorough understanding of Tech-Prep objectives. Nominations were invited from all state Tech-Prep coordinators, an evaluation advisory panel that included state and local educators active in developing and monitoring Tech-Prep initiatives, and other researchers who had studied early Tech-Prep implementation in local sites around the country. The evaluation team, in consultation with the U.S. Department of Education (ED) then chose 10 sites from among these nominees. This paper is based on information collected during three rounds of annual visits to the in-depth study sites beginning in 1993, as well as insights gained from analysis of the national survey data.

Four Challenges Consortia Face

This paper highlights how some of the local consortia studied in the national evaluation have addressed four challenges that are probably encountered in most places in which Tech-Prep development is under way:

1. How to make time in school-day schedules for hands-on, contextual learning so students can apply theoretical concepts to practice

2. How, despite high student-to-counselor ratios, to make the most of existing resources and get students to plan their educational path with future career goals in mind

3. How to sustain fruitful collaborations between high school and community college faculty, beyond the initial links formed to create curriculum articulation

4. How to promote students' interest in technology and its central place in careers to which they might aspire

These challenges are certainly not the only issues local Tech-Prep consortia must confront, nor are they the only ones to which we have observed energetic, carefully developed responses. We chose these four challenges for this paper because, in at least one of the evaluation sites, we saw either unusual practices or unusually well-implemented approaches to address each challenge. Furthermore, these practices appeared potentially relevant for many other consortia. How these practices ultimately affect students' success could not be measured, so we hesitate to label these practices "effective." However, we saw clear indications in our site visits that the approaches described here can mitigate some commonly identified barriers to improving students' performance in school and in their later educational and career attainment.

The practices described in this paper, and the problems they address, are related to each other. Getting students to think about their postsecondary education while still in high school, and encouraging high school and college faculty to work together in ongoing relationships, can help students make successful transitions after high school graduation. Making students more aware of technology can broaden the career options they might envision and, thus, support the efforts of counselors to help them make informed choices. Efforts to acquaint students with technology might be most practical if schedule changes are also made that expand the time for hands-on learning. Although the problems and solutions discussed in the following pages arise from a study of Tech-Prep implementation, the practices described are just as likely to be relevant to the coordinators of local partnerships formed under the federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994. Many changes associated with Tech-Prep also figure importantly in the legislation and in the plans of local School-to-Work partnerships: development of applied curricula, expansion of opportunities for career exploration and career counseling, the formulation of individual student plans based on career interests, and the close collaboration of secondary schools and postsecondary education and training institutions. The ideas this paper presents may be as useful to local School-to-Work coordinators as to Tech-Prep coordinators.

In the following four sections of this paper (chapters 2-5), we first present a brief one-page overview of the problems, the innovative approaches to addressing them that we observed, and the issues that arise in implementing these solutions. In the remainder of each chapter, a fuller description of these elements is provided, along with supplementary materials from the relevant sites illustrating some of the features described in the text. Information on how to contact the local Tech-Prep consortia (and in some cases schools) mentioned in the report, for further information, is provided in Appendix B at the end of this volume.

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Chapter 2: Making Time for Tech-Prep (34K)

Chapter 3: Expanding Counseling Resources (47K)

Chapter 4: Sustaining Collaboration Between Secondary
and Postsecondary Faculty (31K)

Chapter 5: Promoting Student Interest in Technology (375K)