Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | Career and Technology Education: It's Not Just "Vocational Education" Anymore, page 4

Central High School

Eric Summer will be a senior at Central High School when classes resume this fall, and it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if he was the first one through the door when the first bell rang on August 15. "I've never in my life wanted to end my break and be in school," he said. "I almost don't want my summer break to start. I want to go straight into senior year." Summers is enrolled in the humanities academy at Central, where each circular wing of the 36-year-old building now has an academy that caters either to the ninth grade or one of three vocational themes. It started with a ninth grade academy two years ago, and going on the idea that what's good for the ninth grade is good for everybody, the school went to wall-to-wall academies last year. Now, students in 10th, 11th and 12th grades may choose between three career-oriented academies. One is Math, Technology and Science, which includes coursework in three pathways--engineering, environmental science and allied health; another is the Humanities, Fine Arts and Communications Academy, which includes courses in fine arts, journalism, public relations, creative writing and criminal justice; and the third is Technology, Communications and Business, which offers classes in marketing, information technology, finance and accounting. In addition, all three vocational academies provide classes in the core subject areas, but math, English, science and history often have a career focus.

The biggest difference for Summer, once a withdrawn, lackluster student, was the sense of belonging provided by the academy, and the astute eye of English teacher James Pinon, who knew how to reach Summer, draw him out and tap into his strengths. "You're not just a number anymore," says Summer, who last year was the junior class president. A staunch Republican, Summer now has plans to study law and become a politician. Another entering senior who has found a calling in Central's career academies is Nathan Newton. "I really want to own my own company," he says: a landscaping business, "probably here in Chattanooga." The inspiration for Newton's entrepreneurial spirit stems from his classes in the business academy, where he credits three teachers in particular for encouraging him to participate not only in class, but in various clubs and competitions. Last year, for example, he was vice president of Future Business Leaders of America and president of Distributive Education Clubs of America. "Before we were just a number," Newton says. "Now, in business school, we're all associates."

Central High School had 1,060 kids last year. Of those, thirty-nine percent were recipients of free or reduced-price lunch, forty percent were African American and sixty percent white. But just as important was the geographic breakdown: fifty percent suburban, twenty percent rural and thirty percent urban. Just ten years ago Central was suburban and rural, but not urban, and it catered to a largely white student body. It's one of the places where some people would like to go back in time to the days when there were two distinct school systems and bringing the two worlds together has not always been an easy task. But one of the things that has helped create a sense of belonging is the academy concept, and one of the most immediate payoffs has been a dramatic drop in discipline problems. In the first semester of the 2003-2004 school year, there were 342 suspensions; during the first semester of last year, there were 142.

The benefits of going to wall-to-wall academies now seem obvious to administrators and the vast majority of teachers at Central, but a mere two years ago during the year-long planning phase, that was not the case. High school teachers tend to work independently, explains Finley King, lead teacher at Central's business academy. They're not known for working together, he says, and they're not used to being accountable to each other in a team-like setting. So, "you start moving classrooms, and you get some disgruntled teachers." One of those was Ora Moore, who had been teaching in Chattanooga schools for thirty-six years. She could not envision moving into the leaky portable building where she now teaches English to business academy students. For most of her career, she'd been teaching sophomore English, and she had absolutely no desire to change. The humanities academy with a focus on language arts, she thought, would have been acceptable, but she almost quit when she was assigned to the business academy. "It was very disconcerting to me," she says, comparing it to being stranded in the Tennessee River. "I don't like water, and I don't know how to swim," she explains. "And I didn't know if I was going to drown or not."

Moore did not drown. In fact, she flourished. She now teaches English 10, 11 and 12, each with a business spin. When she teaches Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, for example, she emphasizes the entrepreneurial roles of the two leading women in the play. For writing assignments that call for comparisons and contrasts, she asks her students to go shopping and to create a visual and oral presentation examining the pros and cons of two similar products. And her 10th graders practice their writing skills with business letters and office memos. "Kids do like it," she says, "and it does help them." As for Moore herself, she's gone from skeptic to advocate in one short year. She likes the cohesive and cooperative nature of the business academy faculty, and, ironically, she likes her newfound freedom. Since she's the only English teacher in the academy, she pretty much develops her own curriculum. Even the portable classroom has its perks. "If we do away with the leaking roof and the ants," she says, "it's kind of nice to be away from the noise of the big house."

Lucy Hood is a freelance writer living in Washington, DC. She has written extensively about education for the past nine years, winning state, national and international awards for her reporting. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she also worked as a correspondent in Mexico and Central America.