Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | Career and Technology Education: It's Not Just "Vocational Education" Anymore, page 2

Chattanooga

Founded on a bend in the Tennessee River, Chattanooga is located in the southeastern part of the state. A little farther south, and Chattanooga would be the fourth largest city in Georgia instead of the fourth largest city in Tennessee. Chattanooga was once located at a critical juncture on the Western and Atlantic Railroad, and for decades it thrived as a railroad hub connecting East to West. Surrounded by mountains rich with coal and iron, it was also a thriving industrial town, and its reliance primarily on industry and to a lesser extent the railroad carried it through good times and bad--post-war revivals and the Great Depression--up until the 1960s. By then, the train had been eclipsed by the automobile, and the city's industrial and manufacturing base had dwindled to a fraction of its former self, leaving behind a stream of contaminants that in 1969 earned Chattanooga the dubious honor of being the most polluted city in the nation. The city acted quickly to clean up the environment, but it continued to face economic woes, and with the onset of the Civil Rights movement, racial tensions ran high. Since the early 1990s, however, there's been a renaissance of sorts in Chattanooga, one that includes a revival of the city's downtown area, an expansion of the service sector and efforts have been made to bridge the gap between the city's black and white populations.

Against this backdrop, city and county leaders voted in 1996 to merge the two school systems serving students in the city of Chattanooga and surrounding Hamilton County, and Superintendent Jesse Register was lured away from his job at the Iredell-Statesville schools in North Carolina to run the new school district known as Hamilton County Schools. "They were two 20,000-student school systems," he said, "one urban and high poverty, the other suburban and middle class." One was also largely African American and the other largely white, and Register inherited a pending desegregation complaint from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights demanding that he integrate the schools. Hence one of his first reform efforts was the creation of a pupil assignment plan that included the creation of 15 magnet schools aimed at drawing white and black students across their traditional boundary lines. "It was either that or busing," he said, "and [busing] didn't make sense with the landscape, the rivers and the mountains."

Since then, Hamilton County school administrators have implemented several initiatives to improve the quality of their schools and facilitate a merger that still--nearly ten years later--encounters undercurrents of resistance. "There are still people in this county," Register said, "who would like to see it run the way it used to be." But he must contend with the reality at hand, and to do that he's recently adopted a two-pronged approach. One, he convinced the school board to implement a unified diploma, becoming one of the few public school systems in the country to do away with a more traditional three-tiered system that puts the college-bound kids on one path, vocational kids on another and a third group of kids on a track that's somewhere in-between. Beginning with last year's entering freshman, all high school students in Chattanooga and its suburbs will be prepared to enter college when they finish high school.

The second part of Register's most recent reform effort is a multimillion-dollar overhaul of all seventeen high schools. So far the price tag is an estimated $20 million, including $8 million from Carnegie Corporation's SNS initiative. In Chattanooga, a key component of the SNS work is vocational education--a term that harks back to the days of "home ec" and auto shop. Today, vocational education is much more sophisticated and educators refer to it as career and technology education, or CTE. "We had two vocational high schools," Register says, adding, "The biggest problem was that they were inaccessible, and we didn't think we had a very good idea of what career and technology education should look like." The two vocational schools were created in the late 1960s, and they became dumping grounds for kids who struggled with academics. They also removed students from what educator Valerie Copeland Rutledge calls "all the regular parts of school." Rutledge taught in Hamilton county schools for twenty years before she became director of the Teacher Preparation Academy at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and she saw firsthand how the vocational program used to work. "It created a divide," she said. Voc ed students could not participate in the gamut of school-wide activities that define the high school experience--student body elections, pep rallies, etc. "When all of these things were going on," she says, "they were at vocational school or on the bus going to vocational school."

Register and his staff now have a much better sense of what career and technology education should look like. It should take the form of a career academy, meaning it should be a small school setting, and it should foster a sense of belonging for students who might otherwise feel lost on a large sprawling campus. The academy should offer classes in all core subject areas as well as a range of career-oriented options, and it should have strong ties to the business community, much like East Ridge does with the AGC of East Tennessee. In addition, school administrators require that each academy be designed to attract students who reflect the demographics and academic achievement of the school as a whole to ensure that it doesn't cater to a skewed number of students from any given race, ethnicity, or any particular rung on the grading scale. Beyond these parameters, however, it's up to the individual school to determine what kind of academy it wants, how many it wants and the timetable for creating each one. East Ridge is moving slowly and deliberately with two academies--one for ninth graders and the Construction Academy. But Central High School opted for a much faster track. It started with one ninth-grade academy in the 2003-2004 school year and added three more theme-based academies last year. For the current school year, there will be a total of twenty-seven academies--including seven ninth grade academies--at twelve of the county's seventeen high schools.

Next page: Beyond Chattanooga

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