Vocational and academic education are, particularly in the urban comprehensive high school, two different worlds, separated organizationally, physically, educationally, and socially. The formal organization of the school and the patterns of isolation or involvement that develop among colleagues reinforce the separation between vocational and academic teachers. Academic disciplines have higher status, command greater institutional respect, and compete more successfully for resources. These differences are sustained by the value attached to the two different student bodies in the two curricular tracks. The social and organizational isolation of most vocational teachers is exacerbated by the physical separation and programmatic fragmentation in secondary schools.
Vocational facilities are in different parts of the school from academic classrooms.
Often, there is no single space that is either large enough to hold the disparate teaching groups or congenial enough to attract them. Despite the obstacles, meaningful collaboration is taking place in some urban high schools. Support for teacher collegiality and collaboration has six dimensions. For teams to be effective, leadership must be broadly distributed among teachers and administrators. In some schools, for example, teachers are given reduced teaching loads in exchange for leading curriculum development work.