Community College and Secondary School Collaboration on Workforce Development and Education Reform

Catalyst, The, Spring 2004 by Orr, Margaret Terry

Some colleges started these activities in the middle grades. One college combined various activities into a multi-year sequence for local high school students. The most intensive awareness activities were organized as teacher training programs, which gave a few teachers and college faculty paid work experiences in business and industry, to help them see first hand how some technical fields had changed and how selected academic and technical skills were used in the workplace.

Improving students' preparation for postsecondary technical education. All four colleges provided training for secondary school teachers on integrated academic curricula. Curriculum development efforts engaged all participants in a joint effort to improve the technical education programs, and gave business input in designing programs that met their workforce development needs. In some high schools, college preparation and a career focus were required for all students. In addition, the general track was eliminated, and students had to take at least one algebra course in a Tech Prep program.

The colleges used a variety of strategies to communicate their standards, including administering college placement tests to high school students, and sharing college placement test results with school officials. At the time of the site visits, only a few teachers were administering the college placement tests to their high school students. Nonetheless, community college officials thought that these assessment activities were illuminating for the high school teachers, who were surprised to learn how poorly their students were performing on community college assessments.

Three of the community colleges used either the WorkKeys or DACUM (Develop a Curriculum) models to evaluate industry skill requirements, match these with their program competencies, and highlight needed adjustments. This information, while useful in upgrading the college courses, only indirectly affected the high school courses. At the time of the interviews, only one community college was planning to share the information from their competency assessments with local high schools; two others may have shared the information as part of their collaborative curriculum teams.

Simplifying student transition into community colleges. To simplify the transition process, the colleges and local school districts aligned some of their courses. As a result, high school students could earn some college credit and enroll in community college courses for high school credit (known as dual enrollment, because students earn both high school and community college credit for the same course).

As part of Tech Prep, all four colleges and their participating high schools identified career-cluster areas around which they organized the high school course work and work-based learning experiences. These career clusters were then articulated with the colleges' technical degree programs. The high school career clusters were broadly defined (e.g., business, engineering and health care), while the community college degree programs were narrowly defined for selected jobs.