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In such a large and diverse setting, developing a consistent Tech-Prep program model is very unlikely. Great differences in the populations, resources, and needs of the participating communities, as well as the distances between school districts, make it difficult for the consortium to develop or promote a single Tech-Prep model. Individual districts and even schools within districts have their own idea of what Tech-Prep is and how it should be implemented. Given this diversity, it is not possible to describe briefly the direction of Tech-Prep development throughout the consortium; exploration of the member districts' diverse approaches will require further visits. This initial profile focuses on the dimensions of diversity observed, drawing in particular on the approaches to Tech-Prep found in the two largest secondary districts--Fresno and Clovis--and in Sanger, one of the smallest.
The economy of the large area served by the Tech-Prep consortium poses some challenges to educators interested in preparing youths to enter high-skill occupations. The unemployment rate is 14 percent in the city of Fresno and higher in the more rural communities. Agriculture is still the predominant industry, although some employment growth is anticipated in Fresno's developing manufacturing sector and in health occupations. Most employment in the area is in small businesses.
The consortium's Tech-Prep initiative follows almost a decade of collaboration between SCCCD and surrounding school districts on articulation. In the mid-1980s, the state of California and SCCCD promoted articulation, or 2 + 2, as a way to increase community college enrollment and help students avoid redundant course work. In 1985, the new chancellor of SCCCD made articulation the centerpiece of his five-year plan for the colleges. The district received a small state grant in 1986 to support development of articulation agreements, as well as additional larger grants in each of the next two years. SCCCD worked on articulation with five school districts at first, got expressions of interest from more, and developed a standard process for course articulation agreements. Although the focus of articulation activities was on vocational courses, SCCCD also began to encourage the articulation of academic courses.
These efforts resulted in a large degree of articulation. By the end of the third year of state funding in 1989, SCCD college presidents and superintendents of about 10 local school districts had signed more than 130 articulation agreements. As interest spread to other schools and districts in the SCCCD service area and articulation of academic courses began, more than 150 additional agreements were signed between 1989 and summer 1992, when SCCCD received its first Title IIIE grant and held the first formal Tech-Prep steering committee meeting.2 The college district also pursued a collaboration with California State University/Fresno (CSUF) that would allow students to earn credit for some high school courses, whether they matriculated directly to CSUF or transferred after completing an associate's degree at one of the SCCCD campuses. This collaboration, unusual at the time, was widely promoted by SCCCD as its 2 + 2 + 2 initiative.
As a whole, consortium staff view Tech-Prep as a process, not a program. Their efforts are directed at stimulating educational reforms that will benefit all students in the consortium schools. The consortium has refrained from attempting to formulate a particular model involving a defined set of courses or activities. However, consortium leaders have developed "vision statements" and other materials that identify what all members consider key components of a Tech-Prep strategy. These components include articulation, integration of academic and occupational curricula, applied learning, and the development of course sequences for career preparation. The extent to which individual districts or schools adopt or emphasize these components is expected to vary, and schools have in fact pursued different reforms. Some are content with 2 + 2 articulation, some favor academic interdisciplinary teaching rather than an emphasis on technical preparation or career-oriented course sequences, some view the introduction of applied academics as the major or sole activity, and some are developing career academies.
The consortium has established a standard articulation process that can be initiated by either district or college personnel. Most often, secondary teachers obtain and complete a "Request for Articulation" form from their district, and the district submits it to the college. The relevant college department head arranges a meeting with district staff and the teacher to compare the district and college courses in question. The district may be required to make changes to its course curriculum to align it satisfactorily with the college course. Each agreement, which must be approved by the college curriculum committee, is supposed to be reviewed by the school and the college informally each year and formally every three years. In practice, however, it appears that high school and college faculty have only informal and limited contact after agreements are signed.
The conditions under which students receive articulated credit are intended to encourage them to pursue degree programs at SCCCD. To receive credits for a high school vocational course, students must earn a grade of C or better in that course, complete 12 college credits, and maintain at least a 2.0 college grade point average in the courses in which they earn these 12 credits.3
However, students so far rarely take advantage of the potential benefits of articulation, largely because they lack information or encouragement to do so. Among students who are eligible to receive advanced credit (those who have received a grade of C or better in the high school course), many, particularly those enrolled in business programs, retake the introductory, articulated course at the college level rather than enter a more advanced course. Consortium staff and high school administrators believe that use of articulation is low because teachers do not encourage students to seek credit. Many teachers do not consider a C grade in their articulated high school course equivalent to the same grade in a college course. The teachers are reluctant to encourage students to skip over entry-level college courses, for fear that students will be unsuccessful and their own teaching competence will be questioned. Some teachers have suggested raising the minimum credit-granting grade to a B or using competency exams to confirm students' skills. However, consortium staff have argued that the articulation process equates the college and high school courses; because C is an acceptable passing grade at SCCCD, it should also be acceptable for granting advance credit.
Consortium staff have recognized the low use of articulation agreements and are beginning to think about ways to address this issue. One complicating factor is that students who earn an associate of arts (A.A.) degree at SCCCD usually graduate with more than the required number of credits. This suggests that students may be insensitive to the monetary or time costs of earning credits beyond the minimum requirement and thus may not respond to the "time-shortening" advantages of articulation.
Consortium staff are interested in going beyond simple articulation of courses to develop articulated sequences of courses, or career pathways, that define courses from 11th grade through the community college. Some preliminary efforts were under way by school year 1993-1994. The Tech-Prep steering committee had drafted a description of the process for developing Tech-Prep pathways; the process includes labor market studies to select target career areas, education and industry input to develop competency lists for each specialized program within a broad pathway, and modification or creation of secondary or postsecondary courses as necessary.
Fresno Unified and Sanger Unified districts, both chosen by SCCCD as pilot sites for Tech-Prep, have adopted plans for career pathways or clusters. In fall 1993, Fresno district staff had just begun to identify the vocational courses that would be appropriate for five broad career clusters: (1) agricultural technologies; (2) business technologies; (3) consumer and family studies technology; (4) health technologies; and (5) industrial technology. Three of Fresno's six high schools were beginning to implement at least one career pathway each, which students generally would enter in ninth grade. The Fresno district has an ambitious goal: to have career clusters in place in all schools by about 1998, with specialized strands within each cluster that will link more directly with college programs, and potentially to have all students choose a cluster to guide their course selection.4 The district's commitment to this goal is underscored by its dedication of all Perkins funding to Tech-Prep planning and implementation. Sanger, a much smaller district, was working enthusiastically on planning pathway sequences for secondary and postsecondary courses in automotive technology and agriculture. It expected to implement Principles of Technology labs and cross-curricular teams in school year 1994-1995. Few, if any, other districts were taking specific steps in fall 1993 to implement career pathways.
School districts in the State Center Tech-Prep Consortium face some of the same challenges as other consortia to implementation of career pathways. First, students have few slots in their schedules for vocational courses or other career-specific electives. In 1984, the state increased academic requirements for a high school diploma, narrowing students' options for vocational courses or other electives. Around the same time, Fresno Unified shortened the school day from seven to six periods, further limiting opportunities for electives. As a result, most students are unable to fit vocational courses into their schedules until their senior year in high school. Second, the small rural schools do not have the resources necessary to offer students much more than the basic academic curriculum required by state regulations. They have limited vocational offerings and are in many cases too isolated to bus students to larger schools for vocational courses.5 The small rural schools also find it difficult to release teachers for staff development activities, because each teacher performs multiple school functions, and it is not always possible to find substitute teachers. Finally, cutbacks in community college funding have resulted in overcrowding and waiting lists for some programs--particularly SCCCD's health programs--that will make it difficult for students to complete their chosen pathway. Fresno Unified administrators intend to seek special priority in college program admission for Tech-Prep students, but the outcome of that quest is uncertain.
The Chancellor's Office of California Community Colleges and SCCCD have been actively promoting the use of CORD and AIT applied academic curricula for all California Tech-Prep consortia and for all State Center Tech-Prep Consortium schools. At the request of the Chancellor's Office, SCCCD holds the state license for CORD materials and is responsible for coordinating related teacher training and curriculum dissemination. SCCCD established guidelines to ensure that consortia take teacher training seriously and use it effectively. SCCD sends curriculum materials to consortia only after the directors and teachers attend an orientation session. In order for staff to attend training sessions, the consortium administrator has to agree that the team to be trained will include two secondary teachers and one postsecondary instructor. During summer 1993, SCCCD conducted one-week training sessions for more than 400 teachers from around the state. Despite the training requirements, SCCCD followup a few months later--in the first year of CORD course implementation in California--indicated that few were actually teaching the courses for which they had been trained.
Implementation of CORD courses was limited, it appears, by teachers' resistance to replacing their entire courses with the packaged curricula. Although teachers generally endorsed contextual learning, relatively few felt that the CORD curricula alone fully met the teachers' instructional and content needs. Consortium staff also believe that some teachers are reluctant to identify certain courses as "applied," out of concern that the courses will be viewed as appropriate for only certain groups of students, thus creating a distinct program track.
To accommodate these concerns, the consortium is promoting universal adoption of an applied approach to all academic classes and the use of CORD materials as curriculum supplements rather than as a core curriculum. As a result, applied instruction can be implemented in any manner or not at all in the consortium schools, at the option of local district or school staff. School administrators and consortium staff agree that the effects of promoting applied academics are often difficult to identify in some classrooms. However, the new California frameworks in math, science, and language arts are encouraging applied approaches to academic subjects. Over time, this effort may lead to wider interest in and adoption of applied curricula and methods of instruction.
The consortium has also promoted interdisciplinary teaching and projects and supported them with staff development opportunities. In several consortium high schools, teams of teachers have been formed that span academic subjects and sometimes include a vocational area. These interdisciplinary teams intend to develop a curriculum for each subject area that is linked to the other subjects represented on the team. In Clovis West High School, for example, a team developed a cross-disciplinary project for school year 1993-1994, in which a small number of students used class time in each subject area to develop a joint proposal to address overcrowding at Yosemite National Park. The team included instructors of math, English, science, and automotive technology. The team teachers have also worked to integrate CORD materials and approaches into traditional math, science, and English classes to some extent. Scheduling difficulties caused first-year curriculum integration efforts to fall short of the ideal, however. The first group of students identified to work with a teacher team--those enrolled in the automotive course--were not clustered together in the academic courses using the new curricula. The team at Clovis West agreed that block scheduling of courses and clustering of students are vital to the team's effectiveness.
The consortium has also sponsored other activities to promote interdisciplinary instruction. For example, the consortium scheduled an "automotive in-service day," in which consortium staff, college auto faculty, all ROP auto instructors, other vocational instructors of automotive technology, and state auto repair licensing officials worked on developing competencies and course materials that would help students meet certification and licensing standards. The staff who attended also worked on ways to integrate the vocational curriculum with academics. At Duncan Polytechnical High School in Fresno--a vocational high school--the building trades and air-conditioning courses were redesigned to incorporate modules from CORD's Principles of Technology course; some modules are team taught by the vocational and academic instructors.
To a limited extent, applied curricula have been introduced at the postsecondary level as well. CORD applied academics materials have been adopted to varying degrees by SCCCD faculty. Some faculty have incorporated CORD's Applied Math I into their college developmental-level classes. It should be noted that the same curriculum is being used in grades 9 through 11 in several of the other consortia discussed in this report.
Articulation efforts have led to some shifts in vocational-technical courses in the consortium schools. Most often, aligning secondary and postsecondary courses has produced changes in high school rather than college courses. Fresno Unified administrators report that some vocational courses have been upgraded as a result of this process. The modifications made by various high schools to ensure that their course teaches the same competencies covered in the first-semester college course to which it is articulated have resulted in greater standardization in vocational curricula across consortium schools. A positive outcome of this process, according to one college instructor, is that students from different schools are more likely to have learned similar material when they reach the advanced technical course at the college. As a result, the college instructor's course preparation and instruction can be more focused.
Consortium staff have emphasized development of career awareness and direction as an objective, but each district and school addresses this objective in its own way. Some new initiatives are being developed: for example, Sanger, Clovis, and Fresno High Schools are introducing a program that links students with businesses. In grades 10 through 12, small groups of students participate in field trips and job shadowing to expose them to different careers, to complete mock job applications, and to develop resumes and portfolios. Volunteers from area firms such as Dow Chemical conduct seminars for students and serve as occasional mentors.
There are two main groups that govern the consortium--a steering committee and a 2 + 2 + 2 coordinating committee. The steering committee, which meets monthly, includes consortium staff, the superintendents and principals of the five districts originally targeted to pilot Tech-Prep, relevant college deans and department chairs, and administrators of the ROP offices. This high-level group was intended to include only individuals who could commit to and carry out policies or decisions agreed to at the meetings; teachers or counselors, who would need approval before implementing any activities, were excluded. Teachers, counselors, and college faculty are, however, included in the coordinating committee. This committee has existed since the early work on articulation began, and its membership has remained fairly stable. The function of this committee seems primarily to keep all of the consortium partners aware of consortium activities and to provide a forum for discussing issues or problems.
The ongoing work of the consortium is entrusted to a staff of about eight. No staff salaries are paid from the consortium's Title IIIE Tech-Prep grant, because the consortium sought to institutionalize Tech-Prep by encouraging partners to commit financially to the consortium's work. Almost all staff members were either college staff or were hired by the college specifically to assist in Tech-Prep implementation. One person who works nearly full-time on Tech-Prep is from the ROP office; another is from the Fresno Unified School District. Salaries of five consortium staff are paid by special grants the consortium received from the state Department of Education and the Chancellor's Office of California Community Colleges. One of these grants involved developing career pathways in the industrial technology area, and the other involved creating outreach and guidance materials for statewide use. Consortium staff produce a newsletter to update members on consortium activities and upcoming events, act as a curriculum clearinghouse, and provide other forms of technical assistance.
Tech-Prep funding, not required to support consortium staff, is instead used to promote staff development. Most of the consortium's $60,000 Title IIIE grant for 1992-1993 was used to pay for release time of secondary and postsecondary personnel to attend staff development sessions, and for outside experts to provide technical assistance and staff training.
Independent of the Tech-Prep steering and coordinating committees, separate advisory committees for occupational programs at the secondary and postsecondary levels have existed for some time. The ROP administrators are trying to strengthen these committees, promoting the idea of having college faculty and secondary teachers form joint advisory committees for occupational programs. ROP is also requiring the committee for each program it funds to maintain a ratio of three business representatives for each teacher, and to hold at least two meetings annually, in an attempt to revitalize these committees and infuse them with an employer perspective.
2 The number of college courses involved, however, was much smaller, because SCCCD counts articulation with each course in each high school as a separate agreement. For example, forestry courses in Sierra High School and Duncan Polytechnical High School, linked to the same introductory forestry course at the colleges, count as two agreements.
3 Articulation to CSUF lacks these incentives. Although students must earn a B or better in the high school course to receive credit at CSUF, there are no other minimum requirements for the awarding of credit, at least for vocational courses.
4 District staff acknowledge, however, the likelihood that smaller schools will be unable to offer specialized strands because of limited resources and vocational offerings.
5 Moreover, courses funded by the state's ROP must be staffed by credentialed instructors, and recruiting such teachers is difficult for small rural districts. Although vocational courses funded by districts do not require specially credentialed teachers, most small districts cannot commit the required resources for a sustained period.
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[VI. Gainesville, Florida]