by Lucy Hood

Blending academics, career training and technology leads to an educational experience that's light-years away from the "home ec" and "shop" classes of past generations.

East Ridge High School

Jesse Henson is a quiet student, the type who easily falls through the cracks. He doesn't cause trouble, doesn't skip school, and he doesn't call attention to himself. For years, he's shown up--first at McBride Elementary School in Chattanooga, then East Ridge Middle School and now at East Ridge High School--and all that time, year after year, he consistently brought home failing grades. He studied, he said, and he tried to do the work, but his grades were so low that no one ever believed him. It wasn't until he entered the Construction Academy at East Ridge at the beginning of his junior year that his grades started to improve, and now he credits the program with dramatically changing his life. "I used to make 40s and 50s," he said, ultimately squeaking by in most of his classes with a barely passing grade, "and now my lowest grade is a 78."

Henson is one of 14 students in Denise Hearn's Construction English class, where she's foregone Shakespeare and other works of literature in exchange for technical reading, instruction manuals, office memos, and other forms of reading and writing that her students are likely to use on the job as designers, contractors or welders. "I love literature," she says, "and I'd love for the kids to have a passion for it. But they don't." What they do have is a need to learn practical skills that are relevant to their daily lives, so that's what she teaches, and the results, she said, have been dramatic. "I get more class discussion with these students than I ever did with most of my other classes."

Hearn, who teaches English and social studies, was the kind of teacher who stood up in front of the classroom and lectured. "On a regular basis," she says, "kids were telling me this is boring." But she didn't want to deviate from the way she had been doing things for twenty years, she didn't want to leave her comfort zone and she was resistant to the changes that came when East Ridge High School implemented the Career Construction Academy three years ago as part of Carnegie Corporation of New York's Schools for a New Society (SNS) initiative, which is designed to foster large-scale change in urban schools. With additional support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the five-year initiative--which emphasizes the idea that in order to improve education for all students, entire school districts must reinvent the way they deliver education--is providing $60 million to seven school systems around the country. Chattanooga is an SNS site; its East Ridge High School was the first campus in the Chattanooga school system to create a career academy--a school within a school that combines rigorous academics with vocational education. Twelve of Chattanooga's seventeen high schools now have one or more career academies, and each new academy breeds a new group of converts, people like Hearn who have become true believers in this new educational hybrid where a thesaurus and a welding torch go hand in hand.

East Ridge was an unlikely place to start a reform effort of any kind. Not all that long ago, the student population was almost exclusively white, and the surrounding community had a reputation for discriminating against minorities, says former principal Cheri Dedmon. That was before the 1996 merger that brought the largely African American population of Chattanooga city schools and the largely white population of Hamilton County schools together under one superintendent. Since then, East Ridge has become more diverse. Of the 900 students who attended last year, more than a fifth, or twenty-two percent, was African American, and eight percent were English language learners representing seventeen nationalities. But Dedmon, who retired in May, said there are still reminders--often in the form of Confederate flags displayed in front of neighborhood homes--that the school and the community it serves did not appear to be fertile ground for change.

Even so, change has come, not only in the form of racial and ethnic diversity, but also in the form of academic diversity, and that change is attributable in large part to a man named Ron Tanner, president of Chattanooga-based C&I General Contractors. Tanner is also active at the national level in fostering workforce development programs for the Association of General Contractors (AGC), and he was looking for a way to expand the pool of qualified electricians, plumbers, carpenters and bricklayers when he approached Hamilton County School administrators four years ago. He wanted them to know that there are well-paying jobs for high school graduates in the construction trade, but the work is hard, and they require strong academic skills. "You talk to anybody who is going to hire someone," he says, "and almost everyone is going to say, 'I want them to be able to solve problems and to be able to communicate.'" And so it was that Tanner and Dedmon started to talk. Initially, with each clinging to his or her respective form of jargon, Dedmon said, the talks progressed very slowly. "It took a long time to realize we wanted the same thing," she said. In the end, they created what has become an award-winning vocational program that does just what both of them wanted to begin with: it prepares students for the workforce, it prepares them for apprenticeships and it prepares them for college.

As for student Zac Collins, he wanted none of the above. He simply wanted to be out of school. He'd failed the fourth and seventh grades, and being "out" of school for him meant dropping out. And that's what he would have done, he says, if it hadn't been for the Construction Academy. "I would've gotten my GED, if anything," says Collins who admits that he's made mistakes in life. He failed the fourth and seventh grades, he says, because he was lazy, but he also has a very genuine dislike for academics. "I don't like school," he explains. But he does like the hands-on work of welding, carpentry and other practical skills he's learning in his vocational classes. And, he knows that "if I want to take vocational classes, I have to uphold my end here in the academics." Collins plans to graduate in December, and when he does, he intends to go to a technical college, maybe join the U.S. Navy. He's intrigued, he says, by the idea of underwater construction--upgrading bridges and deep-sea oilrigs.

Another student of the Construction Academy at East Ridge is Felicia Lee, who also feels that the real-life-oriented classes have given her both an academic boost and a vision of her future--she hopes to become an architect. Of her experiences in the Construction Academy she says, "When you have things you get to work with hands on, it makes you more interested and excited about going to class." Felicia, who struggled through the earlier grades of school, adds that before she entered the Construction Academy, "I didn't care, I didn't want to go to school, I didn't want to learn. But now, I feel that I've progressed a lot."

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