Comprehensive Secondary Schools

Acknowledgement This preliminary research is possible thanks to a grant from the Dean of Education Office at The University of Western Ontario. The grant program is set up to give faculty members the opportunity to formulate larger research grant proposals as well as investigate issues related to policy and planning in formal education. In this instance I want to pursue a historical and present day analysis of the comprehensive secondary school as an institutional form in Ontario. Comprehensive schools (often referred to in Ontario as Composite Schools) are schools designed to balance a practical and academic curriculum so that the diverse learning styles and interests of students can be met. My interests are professional as well as personal in that I am a product of the Ontario schools. As an institutional analyst, however, I am becoming cynical about schools as instruments for public purposes. How is it that policy and practice in school systems has a momentum impervious to rational and critical ideas/change? Disappointed that I could not study two reputable and intriguing schools in London, Ontario I turned to two I didn't know that well, one in Paris, Ontario, the other in Brantford. Ironically, one of the alumni vignettes in our study features a student who attended one of the London schools. The locations turned out to be beneficial in an unexpected way. I met and recruited two partners local to those communities – Beth Gurney, a town newspaper editor and Kate Carter, a professor of literature at Laurier University. Both are professionals in their own right who brought different frames of reference and fresh perspectives to the project. At this time period, coincidently, I was teaching a graduate course on research methods at the university. Re-familiarizing myself the research methods literature required that I study, among other things, the advantages and disadvantages of ethnographies in education research. The result was the confirmation of two important critical insights that guide the research and reporting. First, most quantitative research in the educational sciences over the last forty years has been undistinguished (Wolcott, 1988) in its impact on theory and practice. Second, a relatively little utilized qualitative research methodology from the field of anthropology may have the potential to overcome the first insight/problem. It should be noted that the report is formally structured when, in fact, this is a preliminary study only. A more formal case study of a school or …