Community-Connected Learning - Jobs for the Future - Company Profile - Industry Overview

School Administrator, August, 2000 by Adria Steinberg

Personal Relationships

* Small learning communities.

In a very real sense, all kids go to small schools. Deborah Meier, herself the founder of several small schools, often points out in her presentations that young people deal with the anonymity of large schools by identifying with a group of friends and often a particular subpopulation of students (the jocks, the burnouts, the artsy ones, etc.) But as Meier also emphasizes, most of these small schools are lacking in adults and decidedly unacademic in focus.

The size of the learning community appears to be particularly important for students who are traditionally least successful in school. Smaller, more personal schooling environments make it possible for a student to form real relationships with adults, who know the student well enough to build on his or her strengths and interests. Such learning communities also encourage conversation and collaboration among teachers as they work toward more student-centered, active learning in the classroom.

School-to-career reformers have translated the call for small learning communities into a strategy for reorganizing large comprehensive high schools into career academies or clusters organized around real-world themes. Students move with a small cohort of peers and a single group of teachers through a course of study that centers on such areas as communication and the media or health care and medicine.

From suburban Marin County, Calif., to urban Dade County, Fla., large schools are finding that career clusters can make their programs more personal and coherent, and the smaller, more flexible groupings make it easier to collaborate with external community and work partners. The attraction of career academies is not hard to explain: They promise a meaningful context for students' academic work across several disciplines, a culture of high expectations derived from real-world standards and a structure and opportunity for exploring the world of adults.

* Safe passage to adulthood.

Young people in the United States come of age in a society that lacks a well-developed set of policies and institutional connections to help them make the transition to adulthood. Although most teen-agers hold jobs and many enroll in some form of post-secondary education, these institutions do not work in concert with the high school.

For the most part, school systems do not see their responsibility as reaching into the years beyond high school. With far too many students to serve, high school guidance counselors are barely able to keep up with the college application process of their seniors. High schools usually publish information on students' college-going plans, but do not have the staff or funds to do any kind of follow-up. In short, young people do not get the guidance they need, especially given the complexity and size of the post-secondary sector and fluidity and insecurity of the labor market.

To create a more seamless environment for young people, high schools in some communities are forging stronger links with colleges. For example, New Hampshire has developed career learning standards that include high performance skills such as communications, problem-solving and teamwork and is working with four school districts to pilot a competency-based transcript designed to give post-secondary partners information that encompasses both academic achievement and achievement of the career learning standards.