A growing number of high schools may be on the right path toward keeping students engaged in school and preparing them for further education and a career, according to a report released today by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC). Career Academies — a 30-year-old school reform approach that has expanded to more than 1,500 high schools nationwide — were found to have reduced dropout rates by nearly one-third for students least likely to do well in a regular school environment. Compared with their counterparts who were not in Career Academies, these students also attended high school more consistently, completed more academic and vocational courses, and were more likely to apply to college. "Rarely do we have reliable evidence that a school reform produces such strong positive results for at-risk students," said Dr. James J. Kemple, director of the Career Academies Evaluation. "The reductions in dropout rates and increases in school engagement are impressive accomplishments."

Career Academies produced more modest results for other students and did not improve students’ standardized math and reading test scores relative to the performance of students in regular high school programs. However, the Academies were found to have created a more supportive school environment for the full range of their students and furnished them with opportunities to explore careers and to learn in a workplace setting.

MDRC is conducting this 10-year, multi-site evaluation of Career Academies with the support of the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor and 17 other funders.

What Are Career Academies?

Career Academies are increasingly popular partly because they address major problems associated with comprehensive high schools, particularly urban high schools, where more than one-quarter of the students do not graduate on schedule. They aim to create a more personalized and supportive learning environment for students and teachers, and to integrate academic and career-related courses with supervised work experiences.

Career Academies are distinguished by three core elements. First, they are organized as schools-within-schools – or small learning communities – in which high school students stay with a core group of teachers over three or four years. Each Academy has 100 to 150 students in grades 9 to 12 or 10 to 12. In such an environment, students are able to build strong relationships with peers and teachers. Second, Career Academies offer a combination of academic and vocational curricula and use a career theme to integrate the two. The curriculum usually includes math, English, and social studies or science combined with occupation-related classes that focus on the Academy’s career theme such as business and finance, computers and electronics, or travel and tourism. Students take other elective classes outside the Career Academy structure. Third, Career Academies establish partnerships with local employers in an effort to build stronger connections between school and work and to provide students with a range of career development and work-based learning opportunities such as supervised internships.

The original Career Academies of the 1970s and 1980s were designed primarily to prevent students from dropping out of high school and to increase preparation for work among the "forgotten half" — students who were either unlikely to finish high school or who graduated but did not go on to post-secondary education. There is now widespread agreement that Career Academies should seek to prepare students for both work and college, and that they should include a broad cross-section of students. There are several district, state, and national networks of Career Academies including Philadelphia Academies, Inc., where the Academy movement began; the Partnership Academies in California; the National Academy Foundation; the Career Academy Support Network; and the National Career Academy Coalition. The Academy movement got an added boost through enactment of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunity Act, since Academies were one of the strategies authorized in this federal legislation.

Key Findings from the Career Academies Evaluation

The study includes nine Career Academies around the country and a research sample of approximately 1,700 students. The study sample is composed primarily of students of color: 55 percent are Hispanic and 30 percent are African-American. The students represent a broad cross-section of their school’s population in terms of prior school performance and factors associated with the likelihood of dropping out.

The report distinguishes among three groups of students: those at the highest risk of school failure; those who enter the programs performing well and who are likely to stay in school; and those who are unlikely to drop out but are at some risk of doing poorly. "In order to understand the effectiveness of any school reform, including Career Academies," says Dr. Jason C. Snipes, co-author of the MDRC report, "it is important to recognize the heterogeneity of the student population and the likelihood that some groups of students may benefit more than others from a particular reform."

The study compared students who applied for and were selected to enroll in a Career Academy in 8^th or 9^th grade with students who also applied but were not selected. The latter serve as the control group or benchmark against which the success of the Career Academies is measured. Qualified applicants were assigned to the two groups at random, and both groups were followed throughout their high school years. "There are very few large-scale studies in education that use a design with this kind of rigor and reliability," said Dr. Snipes. "It allows us to measure the true effects of the Career Academies."

These are the new report’s main findings:

• Among students at highest risk of school failure, Career Academies significantly cut dropout rates and increased attendance rates, credits earned toward graduation, and preparation for post-secondary education.

Nearly one-third of the high-risk non-Academy students in the study dropped out of high school, and only about one-quarter had earned enough credits to meet their school district’s graduation requirements by the end of 12^th grade. The Career Academies cut this dropout rate from 32 percent to 21 percent (about a one-third reduction) and increased the percentage meeting graduation requirements from 26 percent to 40 percent. Many of these students had entered the programs already behind in their coursework; the Academies helped them make up enough of the initial gap in credits earned to meet their district’s graduation requirements.

• By providing particularly supportive school environments, some Career Academies were able to extend positive effects on school engagement to both high-risk and medium-risk students (together making up about three-quarters of the Academy students).
• Among students least likely to drop out of high school, the Career Academies increased the likelihood of graduating on time. The Academies also increased the number of career-related courses these students took without reducing the likelihood of their completing a basic core academic curriculum.

Limitations of the Career Academies

While the study indicates that Career Academies can make a difference with some student outcomes, it also shows that the programs, in their current form, have limitations. The Career Academies did not change standardized math and reading test scores relative to the scores for the non-Academy students. The report also points out that some students became less engaged in school (relative to their non-Academy counterparts) if they attended Academies that did not complement their career-related curriculum and work-based learning activities with high teacher expectations and personalized attention.

The Next Hurdle for Reform

The MDRC report is being released at a time when education policymakers and practitioners are pursuing a number of strategies for improving American high schools. "Career Academies encompass the core features of many high school initiatives aimed at transforming high schools into nurturing, but demanding learning environments which prepare students for both college and careers," says Dr. Kemple. "The results show that the Academies can make a strong contribution."

At the same time, the report points out, Career Academies must build on the effective organizational enhancements they bring to high school reform efforts if they are to improve standardized test scores. "Increasing student retention and engagement is necessary but not sufficient to improve student academic performance, at least as measured by standardized tests typically used by school districts," said Dr. Kemple. "Raising test scores is likely to involve aligning the Academies’ curricula with the growing emphasis on clearly defined performance standards and providing teachers with incentives and instructional tools to deliver on such standards." The report also notes, however, that programs like Career Academies may need other assessment tools to capture skills students acquire from integrated curricula and work-related learning.

The Career Academies Evaluation

The Career Academies Evaluation, begun in 1993, was designed to provide policymakers and educators with reliable evidence about the impact Career Academies have on students’ success in high school and their transition to further education and the labor market. The participating Academies include a range of technical, service-oriented, and business-related career themes and are located in small cities and large urban school districts.

Applicants were assigned to the Career Academy or non-Academy group at random, ensuring that the two groups would have similar kinds of students (and, because the programs had more applicants than they could serve, providing a fair way to fill the limited number of Academy slots). Since there were no systematic differences initially between the two groups in the study, differences that subsequently emerged can be attributed with confidence to differences in their exposure to the Career Academies. This type of design, used on a large scale, is rare in education research, but is widely acknowledged as the most rigorous way to evaluate many social programs and education reforms.

This report follows the students through the end of the 1997-98 school year, when the last students in the study sample reached the end of their scheduled 12^th grade year, just before they would have graduated from high school. The evaluation will follow them for up to four more years to measure high school graduation rates and longer-term effects on post-secondary enrollment and graduation, labor market success, and other outcomes.

Who Is Funding the Career Academies Evaluation?

The evaluation is being funded by the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor, DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, Ford Foundation, Commonwealth Fund, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Rockefeller Foundation, George Gund Foundation, Grable Foundation, Richard King Mellon Foundation, American Express Foundation, Alcoa Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk (co-directed by Johns Hopkins and Howard Universities), Westinghouse Foundation, Citigroup Foundation, and Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation.

About MDRC

The Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization with 25 years’ experience designing and evaluating education and social policy initiatives.

The new report is titled Career Academies: Impacts on Students’ Engagement and Performance in High School. The authors are James J. Kemple and Jason C. Snipes.