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Vo-Tech Students Raise Their Academic Sights

Type: Example from Schools Author(s): Kathleen Cushman Source: Performance. No. 1. January 1994.

Hodgson Vo-Tech High School
2575 Summit Bridge Road
Newark, Delaware 19702
(302) 834-0990

Principal: Steven Godowsky
Public secondary (9-12)
980 students, 80 teachers
Teaching load: 1:115
30 percent minority students
Suburban location
CES member since 1991

The young workers who graduate from this school must first prove they can research, expand, and defend their ideas, knowledge, and abilities through an ambitious project.

HODGSON IS A VERY DIFFERENT school these days from the one that graduated Theresa Tucci as a cosmetology major back in 1978. Sitting in the teachers' room now with her colleagues, Tucci ticks off the changes. Once a "shared-time" vocational-technical school with students taking academic classes elsewhere, in 1985 Hodgson began to offer a full academic and vo-tech curriculum. But two other such schools competed for students in this working-class rural county that sprawls south of Wilmington, and without a sense of identity and vision Hodgson found its enrollments steadily declining.

Then in 1989, when Steven H. Godowsky became principal, teachers began discussing ways to incorporate into their practice the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools. In the years since, the staff has agreed on a major initiative to integrate academic with vocational studies in heterogeneous groups of students. A culminating public graduation exhibition, required of every senior, has become the school's warranty that its diploma means something demonstrable. Hodgson parents and students work closely with teachers on planning and study committees. A new schedule reduces teachers' student load so they can know their charges better. The "tone of decency" that is one of CES's Nine Common Principles has become a top priority. And students who were once at the bottom of the heap are out-performing their peers in academic high schools around the state.

"We wanted to provide important and meaningful work for our students and a positive climate in which they could do it," says Godowsky, and his faculty seconds him. "We ask more of kids, but we give more, too," says Tucci, recalling her own indifferent student days at Hodgson. Jerry Abrams, who has taught horticulture here for eight years, cites another important change. "The Ávokeys' and the academic teachers used to be two different camps," he says. "Now we are all generalists. We all have the same goals for students."

The Senior Project

Those goals are made very explicit in Hodgson's trademark graduation exhibition, the required Senior Project that integrates academic and vocational learning in a public demonstration of mastery. It arose from a growing conviction among the staff that students would rise to higher expectations, and that workplace demands for employees who could think justified a push for more depth in student learning.

Now all seniors must complete a written research project in a field related to their career goals, must create some product that demonstrates their understanding, and must defend their work before the probing questions of a graduation committee.

The project merges traditionally academic areas like research, writing, and higher-order thinking skills with the vocational tradition of assessing competency through performance. A visit to Hodgson's library early in the school year provides vivid evidence of how the experience of these vo-tech students has changed: at computer terminals throughout the room, kids are searching sophisticated data-bases for materials relating to their year-long projects. One girl, who works part-time at a local health clinic and aims to be a medical secretary, prepares interview questions for her report on the government's WIC program for maternal and child nutrition. An electrical apprentice describes his project on hydro- electric power sources in the coming decade. A boy combs the on-line catalog for materials on 19th-century woodworking tools, and locates a rare book from the state university collection.

Once a classroom-sized hole in the wall with a skimpy and outdated collection, Hodgson's spacious new library stands as a striking symbol of the school's new direction. "When we moved from teacher-centered to student-centered pedagogy, focusing on projects and research, it became the most important place in the school," Godowsky notes. "You'd never expect in the old days to find a group of vo-tech teachers arguing about who gets to use the library!"

Teachers move from station to station throughout the long-block period, coaching students on method, format, substance. Hodgson's vocational and academic staff alike share a pragmatic emphasis on work habits; not only are research topics firmly linked to career fields, but so are matters like neatness, punctuality, and attitude. Throughout the day there's a sense that staff and students are in it together: math teachers regularly sit in on shop classes; English teachers help with resumes and interview skills.

Evidence That It Works

By all available measures, Hodgson's students are doing better than they ever have before. Attendance has steadily increased since 1990 and is now at 95 percent. Despite a yearly enrollment growth of 50 to 75 students, the number of serious disciplinary offenses has dropped sharply, to less than half what it was three years ago; and everyone takes more note of minor matters like tardiness.

Grading standards have become tougher, Godowsky believes; but the number of students making the honor roll in all four marking periods more than doubled between 1990 and 1993, and almost 10 percent of Hodgson kids made high honors last year. "This is a group where academic achievement has traditionally been regarded as less important," the principal says. "Now it's cool to do well; we're pushing kids to work hard, achieve, and feel good about it."

Delaware's new Interim Perfor-mance Assessments were given statewide for the first time this year, and Hodgson students did their school proud. "If you merge the top two performance categories in the writing assessment," Godowsky says, "we have the highest percentage of kids Áexceeding standards' and Áapproaching standards,' of any public high school in the state." In math, too, Hodgson scored well above the other vo-tech schools in its district. And extensive testing by the Southern Regional Education Board showed substantial improvement across the board from 1990 to 1993.

But this school likes best to point to real-life demonstrations of success?like the low-achieving student who, in his graduation exhibition, fielded the visiting state superintendent's question about his construction project's roof with a lucid explanation of the Pythagorean theorem. Recent Hodgson graduates drop in for visits often, visibly proud of where their schooling has taken them. These are kids, as Ted Sizer would put it, "doing what they're not supposed to do," and with their entire community organized behind the effort.

This resource last updated: May 14, 2002

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