Students in low-performing schools need special assistance in preparing for postsecondary education and for better-paying jobs. Among the high school reform initiatives studied by MDRC, the Career Academy model is most clearly oriented toward the goal of helping students prepare for a productive future by giving them work-based learning opportunities while in high school.

Career Academies were first developed some 35 years ago with the aim of restructuring large high schools into small learning communities and creating pathways between high school and further education and the workplace. Since then, the Career Academy approach has taken root in more than 2,000 high schools across the country. Operating as schools within schools and typically enrolling 30-60 students per grade, Career Academies are organized around such themes as health, business and finance, and computer technology. Academy students take classes together, remain with the same group of teachers over time, follow a curriculum that includes both academic and career-oriented courses, and participate in work internships and other career-related experiences outside the classroom.

MDRC’s Career Academies study, which tracked students for four years after high school, suggests the following lessons:

• Earnings impacts for young men in Career Academies appear to be linked to career awareness activities and work internships during high school. Young men in the Career Academies group earned over $10,000 more than members of a control group over the four-year period following their high school graduation. Participation in career awareness sessions and work internships most clearly distinguished the in-school activities of Career Academy students from those of their counterparts who were not in the Academies.
  
  
• The potential benefits of partnerships between high schools and employers can be more fully realized when these partnerships are more structured and when schools can designate a full-time, nonteaching staff person to serve as a liaison with employers. Students in Career Academies with more structured partnerships and with full-time liaisons reported higher levels of participation in career awareness and work-based learning activities than did students in Academies where arrangements were less formal and where liaisons also had teaching responsibilities.
  
  
• It may be necessary to improve the academic component of Career Academies in order to raise students’ achievement on standardized tests and help them secure admission to college. Students in the Career Academies did not have higher academic achievement or graduate from high school at higher rates than their non-Academy counterparts, nor were they more likely to enroll in college or earn a credential. Field researchers found that core-subject courses in the Academies were very similar to courses in the rest of the school.

The findings on Career Academies come from Career Academies: Impacts on Labor Market Outcomes and Educational Attainment by James J. Kemple with Judith Scott-Clayton (2004). Additional findings, following Career Academy students for up to eight years after high school, are expected in 2007.