Crain, R. L., Allen, A., Thaler, R., Sullivan, D., Zellman, G., Little, J. W., and Quigley, D. D. (1999). The Effects of Academic Career Magnet Education on High Schools and Their Graduates (MDS-779). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

CHAPTER  7
Conclusions

• Explaining Success: The Role of Careers in Adolescent Development
• The Design of Career Magnet Programs and Students' Experience of High School
• Implementing Career Magnets: The Easy Part
• Implementing Career Magnets: The Hard Part
• References

      In this last chapter, why our randomized experiment found both the negative and positive effects of these career magnets will be discussed. The successes will be looked at first, and then the failures.

Explaining Success: The Role of Careers in Adolescent Development

      To a much greater extent than their comprehensive school counterparts, career magnet alumni say that their parents will support them for college. In addition, they take more college courses, earn higher wages, and rein in the seemingly inevitable companion of adolescence--reckless behavior. At age 20, the alumni of career magnets report that they smoke less, drink less, study and work more, and generally take themselves and their lives more seriously and more confidently than the alumni of comprehensive schools. These striking positive outcomes of career magnets show the great power that high schools have to alter the development of adolescents and even affect their families.

      If one views not attending college, or not taking it seriously and not doing a good job of accumulating college credits, as deviant behavior, then the Magnet Model appears to combat that sort of deviance as effectively as it reduces alcohol use. In adolescent development, deviance is in large measure a response to one's failure to successfully accomplish the developmental tasks of adolescence. Career magnet programs, by providing hope and support, make those developmental tasks easier to accomplish.

      The presence of an academic career focus seems to create a setting where students can be provided the support they need to build an occupational identity. In Chapter 6, Anna Allen conducted her analysis within the framework of the literature on adolescent development, which focused particularly on the formation of identity. In Allen's analysis of the life history interviews, career magnet students are much more likely to have moved through the indecision of adolescence to establishing a career identity. It seems likely that faith in their own competence, plus their belief that they have successfully chosen a career, explains their higher rate of college success. If so, low-income youth may especially benefit.

      The adolescents in the schools we studied have good reason to be pessimistic. They do not have family businesses or connections, and they have little knowledge of what good jobs might be available. For these students, the distinction between "job" and "career" is of great importance. Many of these students believe that their only hope is to live a life considerably different from their parents, and in a considerably different neighborhood. The job at the corner grocery store, or even a steady job at working class wages, will not change their life. College and an opportunity in business or health care may give them the chance they need.

      In contrast, the comprehensive high schools attended by students in this study still seem to resemble the high schools described in Cusick (1973), and in Wiseman's (1968) documentary, "High School." There seems to be little about these traditional comprehensive high schools that prepare students for adulthood, and nothing that deals with their fears about the future. Adolescents have reason to be fearful--their own adulthood is a risky, unknown territory.

      A good career magnet will also be a warm environment. As it attempts to provide good career preparation, it will almost instinctively create a supportive environment, and for most teachers, creating that sort of environment for students will be highly satisfying. Allen concludes that "a network of sustained caring relationships, high expectations, and opportunities to develop and use workplace competencies were common to all Identity Achieved and Moratorium graduates."

      Allen's findings, based on an extensive analysis of a small sample, help us understand the statistical analysis of the larger samples. For adolescents, developing a career goal is an important part of creating an identity, and the career magnets give students an identity that serves as a foundation to support their relationship to their school. Their career identity may also be the basis of their avoidance of adolescent escapism in drinking, smoking, and other risky behavior. It may give them the commitment to approach their parents about college funding, and the self-control that would encourage their parents to invest in their future.

      One valuable point of departure are two near-classic books by Philip Cusick (1973, 1983). In the first, he argues that the high school is designed to reward scholarship. However, since most students will not be rewarded as scholars, the school provides an alternative reward system to attract the loyalty of a second group of students, which is made up of inter-school athletics and the fraternity/sorority-like social whirl of service clubs and student government. This system leaves out most students: those who are neither "brains" nor "popular." If it seems surprising that career magnets can be so effective, the root of our surprise may reside in our failure to recognize the hiatus-from-development model of today's conventional high schools.

      High schools are the only large educational institution serving adolescents or adults that are not primarily vocational in purpose. The high school has taken a more academic view of its mission than has higher education and seems to be failing at this mission. As the number of students intending to graduate from high school has increased dramatically, the mission has also come to seem inappropriate. The high school is only college preparatory for some, and it is under pressure to raise its academic standards to meet the escalating standards for college admission. It provides vocational education to others, but the high-paying skilled crafts jobs are disappearing in the United States, and the technical training required for many jobs has increased beyond what the high school can do. The argument is made that all students need an academic education because of the increasing demands for cognitive skills at all levels of industry; however, for the past several decades, a lot of students have not responded to that message. Abstract academic education not connected to a specific career--even when coupled with a happy experience participating in an adolescent society of sports, performing arts, dances, and dates--can be satisfying only to those students who are certain they will get a four-year college degree that will meet their career-preparation needs. For the rest, whose future looks uncertain and remote, the school can seem irrelevant and a waste of precious years.

      In Cusick's later book, The Egalitarian Ideal in the American High School (1983), he argues that the school that wants to reduce its dropout rate will often try to reach this alienated majority by easing academic pressure and being "friends" with students. Cusick tells an anecdote, no doubt horrifying to many of his readers, of the dean who calls a student in because of her poor performance and winds up admiring pictures of her new baby. Contrasted with this traditional kind of high school, the career magnet could honestly command the loyalty of its students and legitimate the authority of its faculty by offering students an opening to a future career that does not require them to be part of the academic, athletic, or social elite.

The Design of Career Magnet Programs and Students' Experience of High School

      Unfortunately, in many career magnet programs, that goal is not achieved for all students, and perhaps not even pursued. Even the most successful programs do not create the Waldorf-school-like closeness between teacher and student; and Sullivan and Little, in Chapter 4, have convincingly shown that even successful students did not receive the care and attention we might expect. Sullivan and Little ask a simple question: "What do lottery-winning students really experience in their career magnet programs?" Their analysis documents considerable implementation failure: The career magnet programs seem to fail as often as they succeed; they often do not create a strong sense of community or a coherent academic-career program; and students report being admitted into a career magnet program only to find no program when they get there. Had the sample included high school dropouts, it is possible that we would have found even more poor-quality programs.

      In some respects, this is encouraging, since it suggests that one need not demand dramatic change in teacher-student relations or in the behavior of teachers generally. What does matter is persuading students that they have a real opportunity to enter a career. Career magnet programs do this by providing students with skills that they recognize as valuable and by telling them directly that the opportunities are there. The internships and jobs close the deal by giving them experience in a work setting so the formerly remote and distant occupation can become familiar.

      Nonetheless, the question raised by Sullivan and Little is serious: "When is a career magnet merely `false advertising'?" as one assistant principal described these career magnets. Obviously, they were not all "false advertising"; the research found a number of programs that fit the definition of a career magnet. Furthermore, the overall positive effects of the career magnets make it clear that some students received something special. But the question is, "Which students?" After Sullivan and Little completed their analysis, we went back into the field to try and learn when a program existed only on paper. We found that the programs were always "real" but did not necessarily include all the students who were supposed to be in them. In other instances, we found that the program was somehow split so that some students got the full benefits of the career magnet experience and others got less.

      One explanation is that programs designed to integrate academic and career teaching are difficult to create and maintain because they run contrary to the culture of high schools. A high school teacher's community is partly in the department, which is invariably discipline-based. There is no reason to expect those identities and communities to fall apart, to be instantly replaced by an integrated academic career focus. It can happen, but it will require considerable effort.

      A second explanation is a shortage of money. It may be that some students are not offered the program they are supposed to receive because there is not enough money to go around. We do not know whether the educational benefits to all students would be greater if resources were shared equally; however, even if there were reason to believe that equal allocation of resources would in the long run be optimal, unequal allocation will continue unless schools are tightly regulated. Educators take pride in running good programs, and most would find much more satisfaction in creating a very good program for a select group than in providing an average education for a much larger number. There is little prestige attached to teaching high school, and, after enough years, there is more boredom than stimulation. Lortie (1975) observes that every older male high school teacher he interviewed had either a second job or a demanding hobby. For some of the program staff we interviewed, the program was their demanding and rewarding second job, where they could administer, organize, meet with business clients, and attend professional meetings. Even so, these teachers could receive these rewards only by teaching strong students who can hold internships with high-status employers.

      This points out a major risk with magnet programs in that their reputations may be based not so much on their true successes but, rather, on their ability to attract good students whose success would make the program look good even if they did not really receive a better education. Their high student performance will usually allow magnets to escape close scrutiny. This cuts both ways: Just as some problems of these magnets go unnoticed, so do some of their remarkable successes. The result is unfortunate; we are unable to press for improvements where they are needed, and unable to learn from the accomplishments of these programs.

      The results of this study must be considered in the light of another unexpected finding. While the research showed that career magnets that made heavy use of computers saw gains in achievement test scores of considerable magnitude, that was the exception. In general, the career magnet's test scores were slightly lower than those in the comprehensive schools. For decades, educational research has been driven by a single-minded belief that the sole function of the school is to raise test scores. In fact, this study convinces us that the primary goal of the school should be to prepare adolescents to succeed in adult work and higher education. The schools that did this well did so without raising test scores. This research has convinced us that test scores are over-rated as a measure of the quality of education. Our conclusion--that test scores were not markedly lower in the career magnets--should reassure educators who feared that introducing a new focus into high school would create an achievement decline.

Implementing Career Magnets: The Easy Part

      The other encouraging finding from this analysis is that the benefits that occurred did so without much change inside the classroom and no radical change in the overall structure of the school. The three successful schools whose graduates we surveyed were well-run, older, well-established schools with a history of good leadership. All three had attracted good teachers and had created a commitment among its staff to the school's academic career focus. The study found little integration of careers with the academic classroom, however, and not much evidence that academic material was incorporated in their career preparation. The programs were successful without even being exempted from district rules regarding teacher recruitment.

      For policymakers, this suggests that effective school-to-work programs can be created for at least some students without subjecting the high school to the more radical surgery suggested by advocates of privatization of schools, vouchers, charter schools, or apprenticeship models. The Magnet Model described in this study as a type of school-to-work for the college-bound may be the most practical answer we have today.

Implementing Career Magnets: The Hard Part

      However valuable the integration of academic and career work--and there is a large body of literature that demonstrates the value--integration occurred almost nowhere in the schools we studied, and the likelihood of it happening on a large scale seems small. We see little evidence of integration in programs that have been running for as long as two decades.

      It is also clear from this research that bringing careers into the high school will not automatically raise the graduation rate. Both employers and colleges want only the best students, so there will always be pressure on the schools to devote their resources to high-level training for a minority of students. Since local and state educational authorities have not paid attention to the graduation rate in these programs, it should not surprise us that their dropout rate is high. This does not mean that this is an insoluble problem; there are career magnets with low dropout rates. We think the problem is one of politics and oversight. Higher graduation rates might mean that these high schools will be training some students who at the end of four (or five or six) years may still be unqualified for entry-level work; yet, providing an integrated education may be a better answer than putting them on the street as dropouts.

      The low graduation rate is a troubling finding. Much of our study dealt only with graduates, and only a minority had graduated five years after entry. Of the graduates, perhaps only half of the supposed career magnet students had been in a program that would meet a reasonable standard of what a career magnet program should be. How should we interpret the coexistence of what appears to be success from one point of view with what is clearly failure from another? There are two plausible hypotheses:

      Based on field visits, readings of the data, and contacts with higher-level administrators, we are inclined to say that both hypotheses are right. Other studies have tended to focus on exceptional schools, and we have done that here in part of our study; however, we have also studied schools and programs within schools that are clearly not exceptional, and even in the exceptional ones, our interviews with a random sample of students give us insights that other studies do not often get.

      School districts that wish to create exceptional programs, or use this model of career magnet education, will need to use outcome-based evaluation and take administrative action to correct the kinds of program failures we have found. There are good reasons why these failures occurred and why one would expect these kinds of failures in every school district trying to apply this model. Research in this area frequently points out the problems caused by central office bureaucracies that limit building-level initiative; however, the research presented here indicates that we also need to be concerned about governance that fails to prevent local administrators from letting programs fall apart, or that discards some students in order to serve others better.

      Reading our data in this way, we conclude that the career magnet programs we studied are a promising model. They are inexpensive; they are attractive to both students and teachers; and if implementation is moderately well done, they have high payoffs for many students. Effective implementation is not automatic, however.

References

Cusick, P. A. (1973). Inside high school.New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston.

Cusick, P. A. (1983). The egalitarian ideal in the American high school.New York: Longman.

Lortie, D. (1975). School teacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wiseman, F. (1968). High school (documentary). Cambridge, MA: Zipporah Films.

Crain, R. L., Allen, A., Thaler, R., Sullivan, D., Zellman, G., Little, J. W., and Quigley, D. D. (1999). The Effects of Academic Career Magnet Education on High Schools and Their Graduates (MDS-779). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.