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When Edwin Diaz took over as superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District two and a half years ago, he immediately found himself looking for answers. Of the four secondary schools in the district, John Muir High School, in particular, was struggling mightily. Saddled by declining test scores and subpar graduation rates, Muir had gone through six principals in seven years and was in danger of being closed.

Desperate for a solution, Diaz turned for help to an Irvine-funded high school reform program known as Linked Learning. (See box below.) This promising educational approach connects strong academic learning in the classroom with a variety of real-world experience, including work-based learning and internships. Dropout rates have fallen and academic achievement scores have risen in the hundreds of schools across the state that have adopted it.

Using Linked Learning as his guide, Diaz decided to have Muir completely reorganized. Beginning last year, the school was reinvented around three academies based on different industry themes, or “pathways” — one devoted to arts and media, one to business and entrepreneurship, and one to engineering and environmental science. While students in the three academies continue to fulfill state requirements in courses such as English and math, their classes are now set in the context of their industry theme, an approach designed to show how the fundamentals of algebra or physics, for example, are used in real-world tasks like building bridges or designing buildings.

“High school reform is kind of stuck right now. Everyone is trying to make the existing structure just a little bit better, but that’s going to get you only so far,” Diaz says. “Our belief is that to really transform the high school experience, to achieve breakthrough results, we have to impact student motivation. Kids have to be excited and interested in what they’re studying. They have to see the relevance and
meaning in their course work. That’s why we’re
doing this.”

Large-Scale Implementation

Muir appears to be on the road to recovery, but for Diaz, the school’s ongoing reinvention was just the beginning. Pasadena Unified was among six California school districts selected last year by Irvine partner ConnectEd to receive $7.25 million to implement Linked Learning not just within one school — but across an entire school district. (For a list of participating districts, click here.) In the next two years, Diaz and the other superintendents who received the grants will be working on developing between six and eight new pathway programs in schools across their districts.

The effort, called the California Linked Learning District Initiative, is being managed by ConnectEd, an independent organization established by Irvine to advance the Linked Learning approach, and could be a first step toward statewide implementation.

Such large-scale implementation is dauntingly complex and fraught with challenges, but Diaz and the other superintendents, now one semester into the initiative, say that’s to be expected for any long-term effort aimed at real reform. One challenge they could not have fully anticipated was the economy’s effect on school budgets. Since Diaz arrived in Pasadena, his district’s annual general fund has dropped from $205 million to $175 million, and he was forced to find another $20 million in cuts in December. But even that hasn’t diminished his drive for change.

“It’s a challenge keeping the enthusiasm for change, when at the same time class sizes are getting bigger, there are fewer resources, and you’re asking people to do with less,” he says. “But maintaining the focus on continuous improvement is essential, even if financial times are tough.”

Beyond the fiscal constraints of the moment, many superintendents are also bumping up against the inherent diversity of schools in any given district, each with its own specialty programs and way of doing things. In some ways, Diaz has found, it was easier to begin implementing Linked Learning in a school like Muir that had already begun to reinvent itself. It has proved more complicated to find a way to create a new health academy in nearby Blair High School, for example, which is home to a respected International Baccalaureate (IB) program with its own rigorous curriculum for the 11th and 12th grades.

Educating Parents, Supporting Teachers

As expected, Diaz regularly finds himself having to educate parents about the virtues of Linked Learning — and its ability to coexist with an IB program in a school like Blair. Often that means pushing back against the specter of old-school tracking systems. “It can still be difficult for the community to understand we’re not talking about the old vocational education model,” Diaz says. “That’s not what this is. We are implementing rigorous courses of study for everyone. You have to be exposed to pathways awhile to really understand that.”

Diaz’s job has been made a little easier by the fact that Pasadena schools have some experience with school-within-a-school, academy-style learning. For years, most of the district’s schools have had at least one California Partnership Academy, a program that offers students a series of themed electives which, like Linked Learning, integrate academic and career-tech education. But because the CPAs were never district-wide — or nearly as expansive as Linked Learning — the learning curve among teachers and parents alike has still been steep.

“For many staff members, unless they were part of the California Partnership Academy, they don’t really know that much about it; it was just the program ‘over there,’” Diaz says. “Anytime you engage folks in doing something new, you have to point out the connections, make them explicit and provide the relevant professional development. Approaching the change as a whole district reform effort is difficult when the schools are so different.”

As Diaz expected, staffing issues, especially, are proving to be one of his thorniest challenges. To create Linked Learning programs across the district, curriculum leaders at each school are now working with teachers to build pathway courses in their subjects, while also integrating career themes with grade-level and content-area standards. This requires extra training and careful planning on his part. Teachers are also being asked to manage new relationships with the industry partners that are becoming more involved in the classroom. Helping a group of students schedule summer internships while also lesson-planning for a new class is a difficult balancing act for many teachers.

“Reaching out and bringing in business and community members takes significant management,” Diaz says. “There’s a great sense of collaboration, but when the teachers go back to the school to implement new strategies, they need support. For us, getting the support down to the school level is what we have to address right now.”

Long Beach’s Fast Start

As part of the district initiative, the six superintendents have begun meeting regularly to compare notes on their progress. This fall, district leaders and their staffs took a field trip to Long Beach Unified, one of the districts that has been moving the fastest toward districtwide implementation. Because Long Beach has relied for years on small learning communities to help manage its mammoth high schools, with their 4,000-plus students, the infrastructure was already in place across the district for a transition to Linked Learning. Long Beach currently has 35 pathway programs up and running or being put into place in its ten high schools.

“The district initiative is layered on top of what we’ve already been doing,” says Chris Steinhauser, the Long Beach superintendent. “Even in this terrible economic storm we’re in, our parents aren’t seeing this as one more thing. They’re seeing it as a tool to enhance what we’re doing.”

Outsiders credit Long Beach with moving quickly and effectively in particular to get buy-in from principals and teachers as soon as they received the grant — and then giving the leaders at individual schools the flexibility to implement the programs as they see fit.

“It was very revealing for us when we went down to Long Beach. Teachers were talking about this like they had a say in what’s going on,” says Erik Rice, a senior associate at the School Redesign Network, a Stanford University-based group that received an Irvine grant to support district superintendents as they implement the reforms. “Many of the other districts are still wrestling with how to create champions for this program.”

In some ways, the relative success of the hands-off approach in Long Beach may serve as a template for implementing Linked Learning elsewhere. “We’ve always been very good about saying, ‘You guys want to dream a dream, great. Then come to us and we’ll see if it works,’” Steinhauser says. “If you went out right now to three different schools in our district, you’d see three different implementations. They’re all shooting for the same outcomes, but they’re doing it with their own flair.”

All Shapes and Sizes

As a result, Linked Learning programs in Long Beach are emerging in all shapes and sizes. One school, Renaissance High School, has become a single, wall-to-wall pathway devoted to arts and media. Other schools in the district have between six and eight pathway programs available. Principals and teachers are juggling different ways to integrate AP courses into pathway programs. Several unpopular pathways have been scrapped and replaced by more popular ones.

“What I really love about this system is that it’s capitalism at work,” Steinhauser says. “If something doesn’t work, then we can get rid of it. If it’s working really well, then we can replicate it. There are many ways to the top of the mountain.”

Even in Long Beach, though, the scope of changes still to come is daunting. School leaders are working to make sure their pathways meet state standards, while also wrestling with budget cuts and the complicated transition from traditional scheduling to block scheduling, a feature of many pathway programs. Like other districts, teacher training and curriculum integration are still in their early stages in many schools.

“As with so many things, it’s an issue of time and money,” Steinhauser says. “But we want to show how a system can be changed. What’s good about this is we’ve adopted it, and we’re not changing the focus.”

In Pasadena, Diaz agrees. For the sake of teachers, especially, he is insistent that the emphasis be on long-term sustainability, not just flash-in-the-pan reform. “Teachers at the secondary level have been burned before. We receive initial funding to implement some new idea, but then the funding runs out and the program goes away,” he says. “Sustainability is a big deal for us. A culture shift throughout the district takes time, but that’s where the power is.”

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