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U.C. Berkeley Awarded Foundation Grant for Career Academy Support Network

by Charles Dayton

The University of California at Berkeley has been awarded a three-year grant of $1.3 million by the DeWitt Wallace - Reader's Digest Fund to create a national Career Academy Support Network (CASN). Housed within the Graduate School of Education, this project will foster the growth and improvement of career academies, which many high schools are now using to prepare students for both college and careers.

The grant was made as part of the Fund's effort to foster fundamental improvement in the quality of educational and career development opportunities for all school-age youth, and to increase access to these improved services for young people in low-income communities.

CASN is designed to help high schools raise academic achievement for all students. Information about best practices in career academies will be distributed to states, districts and schools nationwide. Project staff will work with two school districts (Atlanta, Georgia and Oakland, California) and one state (Illinois) to demonstrate strategies for building local and state capacity to support academies. Improvements and innovations in career academies will be documented and disseminated.

What Is a Career Academy?

A career academy is a high school program in which a group of students stay together with the same teachers for two, three, or four years. Typically, about 50 students are enrolled at each grade level. The curriculum organizes instruction in academic subjects around an industry or occupational theme -- for example, health, finance, computers, media -- and enables students to fulfill requirements for college entrance in addition to acquiring work-related knowledge and skill. Academy teachers work together as a team to coordinate teaching in different subjects, stay in touch with parents, and involve employers, who support academies in various ways including provision of adult mentors and internships for students.

The first career academy appeared in 1969 in Philadelphia, where thousands of students now enroll in academies. In the early 1980s the model was brought to California, starting with two high schools in the Sequoia Union High School District just north of Palo Alto. Based on a series of evaluations that demonstrated significant improvement in student performance, the State of California began replicating the model in 1985, and now supports approximately 200 career academies across the state. Many other academies in California and elsewhere have started on their own without state grants. Also in the 1980s, New York City created the first Academies of Finance, sponsored by American Express, which subsequently joined with other companies to create the National Academy Foundation (NAF). NAF provides technical support for some 250 academies in a large and growing number of states. Most NAF academies are focused on Finance, or on Travel and Tourism.

Strong Track Record

Academies have been evaluated since their inception, and have a strong track record of improved attendance, credits, grades, and graduation rates among participants.[1] Follow-up surveys have shown that about two-thirds of Academy graduates go on for some form of post-graduate training, and that almost all are engaged in some productive activity (either attending some form of college, working, or doing both). Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) in New York City is currently conducting a seven-year, random-assignment evaluation of ten academies in different parts of the country to examine further the evidence of their effectiveness.

Expansion to Entire High Schools

This record of positive results has prompted a number of communities around the country to convert entire high schools into sets of career academies. For instance, a high schools with 1500 students might be organized into five academies with 300 students each. Patterson High School in Baltimore, Maryland, and the William H. Turner Technical Arts High School in Miami, Florida are among the schools that have adopted this whole-school approach to academies.

In Oakland, California, the Board of Education has announced a policy of including all grade 10-12 students in career academies by the year 2000. CASN staff will work alongside Oakland teachers and administrators as they implement this policy. Based in part on experience in Oakland, CASN will provide advice to other school districts that are interested in developing career academies "wall-to-wall."

Project Staff and Partners

The principal investigator on the CASN project is NCRVE Director David Stern. Charles Dayton, who was involved in helping to start the first career academies in California and has worked since then to provide assistance to California academies, will be the project director. Susan Tidyman, who has been the administrator of the Partnership Academies for the California Department of Education for the past for years, will oversee work at the state level. Marilyn Raby, who was the district administrator responsible for creating the first two career academies in California and has been working with NCRVE since 1995 as a Field Consultant, will lead the local initiatives in Oakland and Atlanta.

CASN will work closely with several partners around the country. MDRC will serve as the project evaluator. The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) based in Atlanta, Georgia, which sponsors High Schools That Work -- the largest high school reform network in the country -- is helping to guide the initiative in Atlanta, and will help to build capacity to support academies throughout its network of states and schools. NAF will contribute its expertise in curriculum and the academy development process. The Institute on Education and the Economy at Teacher's College, Columbia, will examine the relationship between work internships and classroom learning.

Career academies offer a strategy for transforming the American comprehensive high school, from its traditional arrangement in college-prep, general and vocational tracks, to a set of self-contained thematic schools which prepare students both for work and for further education. The recent surge of interest in career academies suggests that a bandwagon may be starting to roll. Yet, while the potential benefit is great, so is the risk. Any concept that becomes fashionable is likely to be applied superficially or opportunistically in some places. If the notion of career academies is promoted on a large scale without enough substantive assistance to back up the publicity, the fad could flash and disappear, leaving only disillusionment behind. The intent of CASN is to encourage serious commitment to using career academies to raise academic achievement, and to keep collecting data along the way in order to know how well the strategy is working.

Charles Dayton has coordinated the State of California's academy technical assistance network, and is now directing the Career Academy Support Network.

[1] Evaluations up to 1992 were summarized in D. Stern, M. Raby, and C. Dayton: Career Academies (Jossey-Bass, 1992). Subsequent studies include F. Linnehan: "Measuring the Effectiveness of a Career Academy Program from an Employer's Perspective" (Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Spring 1996); J.M. McPartland, N. Legters, W. Jordan, and E.L. McDill: The Talent Development High School: Early Evidence of Impact on School Climate, Attendance, and Student Promotion (Johns Hopkins University, Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk, September 1996); J.J. Kemple and J.L. Rock: Career Academies: Early Implementation Lessons from a 10-Site Evaluation (New York: MDRC, July 1996); and N.L. Maxwell and V. Rubin: The Relative Impact of a Career Academy on Post-Secondary Work and Education Skills in Urban, Public High Schools (Hayward, CA: Human Investment Research and Education, California State University, 1997).

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