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Policy Framework
Career Academies were first developed some 35 years ago with the aim of restructuring large high schools into small learning communities and creating better pathways between high school and further education and the workplace. Since then, the Career Academy approach has taken root in an estimated 8,000 high schools across the country. The proliferation of Career Academies, along with their continuing relevance to high school reform policy initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels, has been fueled by MDRC’s random assignment evaluation of career academies. This study tracked a sample of students for 12 years and found strong and sustained impacts on students’ labor market outcomes, most notably earnings, especially for African-American males. These positive impacts occurred without any detrimental effects on education outcomes, such as graduation from high school or postsecondary enrollment.
Operating as schools within schools and typically enrolling 30-60 students per grade, Career Academies are organized around such themes as health sciences, law, business and finance, and pre-engineering. Academy students take classes together, remain with the same group of teachers over time, follow a curriculum that includes rigorous academic courses as well as career-oriented courses, and participate in work-based learning activities. Since the end of the School to Work Opportunities Act, however, academies have struggled with providing work-based learning and career exploration experiences to their students, particularly the capstone internship experience. This is an unfortunate trend since the impact of academies on earnings found in MDRC’s evaluation suggests that these experiences likely played an important role in the positive results.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
The Career Academies Project: Linking Education and Careers (CAP) began in 2009 and is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences of the federal Department of Education. The project grows directly out of the previous MDRC study and the documented need to strengthen the work-based learning component of academies along with enhanced college and career exploration opportunities. The goal is to develop and pilot a cohesive program consisting of curricula, resources, guides, and professional development to be embedded in academies to ensure that all students understand the connections between what they learn in school and their future, make informed decisions about college and career, and acquire the skills to succeed in both.
In addition to program development and implementation, MDRC is conducting research to address the following questions:
- To what extent did the academies implement each of the intervention’s components with fidelity? Which factors promoted or impeded full implementation?
- Did the intervention increase the academies’ capacity to provide high-quality career development and work-based learning opportunities?
- Did the intervention hold promise for improving key outcomes for students, including engagement, awareness of college and career options, and acquisition of 21st century skills?
- What structures and resources need to be in place at the academy, school, and district levels for CAP to be scaled up and sustained?
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
With the help of Bloom Associates and in partnership with the National Academy Foundation and ConnectEd of California, the program is now fully developed and is being piloted in 18 career academies in five cities: Atlanta, Miami-Dade, Hillsborough County, Los Angeles, and Oakland.
Data are being collected to measure both implementation and the promise of CAP to influence the key student outcomes. In addition to regular site visits during which school leaders, teachers, students and employers are interviewed, MDRC administered a student survey and a survey of employer hosts, collected student class rosters to measure retention, and collected time-use logs completed by coordinators to assess the level of effort needed to deliver the program as designed.
The program consists of several components including: a paid, part-time site coordinator, professional development, curricula, and resource guides to support a set of out-of-classroom activities, such as career exploration visits, internships and college campus visits.
What's Next
The following deliverables will be submitted in 2012:
- A final report. The report will include site characteristics, implementation findings from the pilot and scale-up phases, survey results, outcomes data from the pilot phase, and recommendations.
- Guides and curricula. All materials developed for the project will be made available to both IES and the public, including curricula, guides, resources, and evaluation tools.
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