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  2
Career Magnet Graduation Rates

• Looking for an Answer: Why the High Dropout/Low Graduation Rates?
• What Kind of Students Are More Likely To Drop Out of Career Magnets?
• Using the Lottery Experiments To Identify Traits of Programs with High and Low Graduation Rates
• Analysis
• Results
• Conclusions
• The Lottery and Accountability
• Incentives and Independence: Career Magnets as Charters
• The Seven-Year Curriculum
• References

      Many career magnet programs have lower graduation rates than the comprehensive schools. Only 26% of the lottery winners graduated at the end of the fourth year, while 31% of the lottery losers graduated after four years. This is not because lottery winners are more likely to transfer out of the school district; 16% of lottery winners and 17% of lottery losers leave the school system. The difference is in dropouts. At the end of the third year of high school, 7% of the lottery winners had dropped out of school, compared to 6% of the lottery losers. After the fourth year of high school, 14% of the lottery winners had dropped out, and only 11% of the lottery losers had dropped out. We do not have data on the ultimate difference in dropout rates, since 44% of lottery winners and 41% of lottery losers were still in school without having earned enough credits for graduation at the end of the four years.

      Because lottery outcome is not synonymous with magnet/nonmagnet placement, the results are understated (see Appendix B). We conclude that comprehensive schools are graduating four students for every three that career magnets graduate. The career magnets' lower graduation rate and higher dropout rate are statistically significant and of considerable policy significance. Since our research reveals that the lottery winners were not academically inferior to the lottery losers, the lower graduation rate cannot be explained by a difference in academic ability.

Looking for an Answer: Why the High Dropout/Low Graduation Rates?

      There are good reasons to be surprised by this finding because there are seemingly obvious reasons why career magnets should be more successful at holding students and graduating them than comprehensive schools. Therefore, we need to look at possible reasons why the opposite could be true.

      A fundamental problem with career magnets is the conflict between offering students the best education while providing employers with qualified workers. On the one hand, students need to be educated with a curriculum that moves at their pace and at the appropriate level of difficulty; however, on the other hand, employers need workers who are sufficiently qualified to meet their needs. A student might be able to make satisfactory progress in a high school program, yet might not be able to meet the standards of the workplace where they expect to be employed after graduation. The school is forced to set higher standards to satisfy the demands of its commitment to prepare students for employment than it would if it were providing an education merely sufficient for graduation and admission to a local community college or university.

      Nowhere is the conflict more dramatic than in the area of health. Traditionally, the district's vocational high schools had prepared students for the practical nurse license. However, over time, the number of hours of practice required and the amount needed to be learned made it virtually impossible for students to pass the LPN examination by the end of high school. One solution, which is now widely used, is to replace the LPN license with the Nursing Assistant Certificate, a much more elementary certificate primarily used to qualify people to provide bedside care in nursing homes. The requirements for a Nursing Assistant Certificate can be met in high school, by on-the-job training, or by training done by the hospital workers union. Use of the Nursing Assistance Certificate is one way high schools can provide students with a "success opportunity"--a test they can pass. It qualifies students for low-level work in a hospital setting, and may be viewed as a first step in preparing a student for community college work on an LPN or RN license. Up until the last few years, hospitals had been uninterested in high schools providing nursing assistant training; instead, they wanted schools to develop rigorous academic programs for students who could become college trained RNs. At that time, there was a considerable shortage of RNs, and hospitals would have liked high schools to increase the number of students entering the college nursing pipeline. Many educators were opposed to this, however, believing that they would simply be creating another program where many students would fail.

      Dropping requirements down to the Nursing Assistant Certificate level, however, does not solve all of the problems. Programs must be sure that their students will be "safe" workers in a hospital setting. Because every career magnet that attempts to place interns or graduates is preparing students for a demanding job, the problem of sorting students never goes away.

      In areas where there are no credentials, the problem is even worse. How well-prepared must a secretary, a computer programmer, or an apprentice accountant be to not embarrass the school? There is no clear answer, but the relative payoffs to the school are clear: An annoyed employer can harm the program by not taking interns in the future or by criticizing the school among his or her colleagues, while a student who does not get an internship will not result in any loss to the school. In that situation, a rational decisionmaker will use caution and raise the bar higher to make sure that every student who is presented to the employer is a credit to the school.

      Traditionally, high schools served only the last three grades of high school, and vocational programs tended to use the first year as an "introduction to occupations" year in which students were not in a particular program. They entered a program in their junior year and received a two-year preparation. This is a common strategy still: for example, the Academies of Travel and Tourism, which operate in a number of high schools in the nation, are two-year programs and admit their students at the beginning of the junior year.

      This traditional structuring of high school was made more complicated for academic career magnets in three ways. First, moving ninth grade into high school meant creating a two-year pre-career sequence of courses before students began internships and most of their career training. The second complication arises from the fact that students are required to commit themselves to an occupation before entering ninth grade and then wait two years to test their choice with real experience. The third complication is that it often takes more than two years to complete enough high school credits to enter junior-year status. The result is that students are in a holding pattern for two or three years after having chosen a career. These complications may explain the high dropout and low graduation rates of academic career magnet programs.

What Kind of Students Are More Likely To Drop Out of Career Magnets?

      There is no easy way to answer this question. Even students in the process of dropping out are not always able to evaluate which of the various pressures was the most substantial. Our best information on this subject comes from asking, "What are the characteristics of dropouts that distinguish them from students that stay in school?" These characteristics differ slightly between career magnet programs and regular comprehensive schools, and in an unexpected way. Table 2.1 shows the eighth-grade factors that predict the graduation rate for lottery winners and lottery losers. The first two factors--eighth-grade absenteeism and middle-school grades--can be thought of as motivational. They reflect a lack of interest or a lack of motivation. The last two--their middle-school reading and math scores--measure cognitive ability.

      The hypothesis is straightforward: The comprehensive high school teaches academics and evaluates students on their academic performance; therefore, it should be difficult for a student with low academic aptitude, here measured by middle-school test scores, to graduate. In contrast, the career magnet school is preparing students for both school and work and requires multiple modes of intelligence. Students need to have good work habits, character, and commitment. The student with weaker scores but a stronger work ethic should be more likely to graduate from a career magnet than from a comprehensive high school. Table 2.1 shows exactly the opposite effect.

      The career magnet, which should be more concerned with multiple modes of intelligence, instead requires higher cognitive scores for graduation.

      This evidence shows that both poor motivation and poor scores predict failure to graduate from high school, but for the career magnet programs the effects of test scores are slightly more important. This data supports our conclusion drawn from visiting the schools that the career magnet schools are academically more demanding than the comprehensive schools. This is surprising. We would expect the dual-focused academic career magnet to utilize the students' multiple modes of intelligence, since it teaches multiple lessons; instead, it is requiring more traditionally measured cognitive ability than the comprehensive school, which is expected to evaluate students solely on academic performance.

      There is an important irony here. The present high rate of unemployment among urban youth means that the student who graduates from a comprehensive high school and does not go on to college has poor employment opportunities. The student with a high school diploma from a career magnet school may have an entry-level position available--in word processing, for example. If the career magnet bestowed a high school diploma on a student with weak cognitive ability but good work habits and word processing skills, it would help the student gain employment as an alternative to college. Yet the career magnet is setting cognitively higher standards for graduation than the comprehensive high school. Higher cognitive standards for graduation lead to a lower graduation rate for students with weak test scores.

Using the Lottery Experiments To Identify Traits of Programs with High and Low Graduation Rates

      We pursued the problem of why career magnets have lower graduation rates by looking at the graduation rates of different career magnet programs to see if programs with low graduation rates have particular characteristics. One of the few requirements placed on these programs by the board of education, and the most important for research purposes, is that these programs are required to offer half their seats to students on the basis of one of three lotteries conducted separately for students with high, average, and low reading scores. In our study, we were thereby able to create evaluations, based on the lottery as a randomized experiment and the responses to a telephone survey of school administrators, to measure outcomes of 18 programs serving students with high reading scores, 35 programs serving average students, and 39 programs serving students with low reading scores--all programs where we had data from the program administrators (some administrators refused to be interviewed). Since many programs had enough applicants at the various reading levels to permit us to create an experimental design for more than one reading group, these 92 experiments are located in only 49 programs.

      Through our analysis, we will attempt to explain the graduation rates for students of these 49 programs. For pretest data, we have seventh- and eighth-grade reading and math examination scores, grades, and attendance data for each student. Students apply to high school at the end of eighth grade, so that seventh- and eighth-grade scores predate the students' choices of high school and predate their lottery assignments.

      Our main source of independent variables is a telephone survey of program administrators in which we asked whether their particular program had various elements in its school-to-work curriculum. In this report, we will use their answers on four topics:

Analysis

      Since each reading level is a separate experiment, our analysis must be done separately for each. We focused our analysis mostly on the average group, which represents not only two-thirds of the district's students, but also the performance of typical low and moderate income minority students. We analyzed the data in two ways.

      Step A: The correlations, computed at the program level, between the extent of each career program component and the "program effect," and the performance of applicants to the program who were lottery winners compared to the performance of lottery losers among the applicants--both adjusted for seventh- and eighth-grade academic performance--were evaluated. This is the "perfect" experimental result in that it is unbiased. Being unbiased, it includes students who were randomly selected into the "experiment" and "control" groups but did not actually experience the "experiment" or "control" treatments. As already discussed, some lottery winners (29% for whom we have students outcome data) did not attend their first choice academic career magnet program, and some of the lottery losers (18.3%) received the experimental treatment because they were able to attend the academic career magnet because they were selected by the program (see Appendix B).

      Step B: Next, we computed mean test scores from the individual data file, comparing individuals who won and lost the lottery, but separating those winners who did not go to the program and also those losers who did go. These tables are no longer an unbiased experiment, but they provide a test to validate the significant program-level correlations done in Step A, and they give us our best estimate of the magnitude of the effect.

      Procedure for Step A: We compared the ability of the programs to graduate their students by computing for each program the graduation rate of the students who applied to the program and won the lottery to the graduation rates of the applicants to the program who lost the lottery. We took several steps to make the most accurate comparison between different programs. First, we compared the graduation rate for all the students who won the lottery, whether they actually entered the program or not, to the graduation rate for all the lottery losers, including even those who were picked by the program--this meant we preserved the randomness of the lottery, getting an unbiased measure of the "graduation power" of each program in comparison to the other programs the students might attend, and thus a good measure of the difference in graduation power between the different academic career magnet programs. (This technique does underestimate the differences among the programs, as shown in Appendix 2; however, it eliminates any bias caused by discarding well-qualified lottery losers getting into some of the schools and perhaps some highly qualified lottery winners choosing not to enter some schools because they were invited to attend a more prestigious school, for example.) Because the students are sorted into separate lotteries depending on test scores, we might have (if the number of applicants is large enough) two or three separate measures of the "graduation power" of each program. We found in some programs that students with high test scores who won the lottery were more likely to graduate than were high-scoring applicants who lost the lottery, but applicants with low test scores did not increase their chances of graduation by winning the lottery. For other programs, we found the opposite: The high scoring students did not increase their graduation chances by winning the lottery, while the students with low scores did.

      Second, we adjusted (using multiple regression) for any difference between lottery winners and lottery losers in seventh- and eighth-grade test scores, absenteeism, and grades. Since the lottery is random, differences should be small; however, the slight benefit of removing random error in the lottery drawing is worth computing the regression equation.

      Third, we correlated characteristics of the programs with our measures of their "graduation power," doing separate correlations for each of the three reading levels, since these are separate lotteries. Since the proper statistical significance test should use the number of programs (49) as the degrees of freedom, not the number of students (7,987), we correlated the "graduation power" of each program with the various measures of the program's management, resources, and practices. (Since these programs vary in size, we weighted the data for each program based on the number of winning and losing students using a formula suggested to Armor (1972) by Frederick Mosteller for aggregate data.) The apparent effect of each program was measured by computing a graduation rate or dropout rate, adjusted by regression for seventh- and eighth-grade standardized reading and math scores, grades, and absences. The mean for all students who applied to each program as their first choice and lost the lottery was subtracted from the mean for all first choice winners to the same programs.

Results

      At the aggregate program level, we found a negative correlation (-.565, p = .001) between graduation rates and the amount of job placement. This is a comparison of all lottery winners and lottery losers who had applied to each program. This is the proper comparison to test for significance but far too conservative to estimate the actual magnitude of the program effects. Table 2.2 shows an estimate of the effect of the higher graduate job placement rate on graduation rates of students in the average reading group based on the individual data file. In Table 2.2 and the following tables in this chapter, this is our best estimate of the effect of the extent of career placement.

      The figure in the lower right-hand corner, 43%, is the graduation rate for students who had applied to a program that did not have a strong placement component and who were not admitted by lottery. In the lower left-hand corner, 38% is the graduation rate for students who had applied to the same career magnets, won the lottery for admission, and attended the career magnet school. The difference of 5% implies that students who won the lottery were less likely than those who lost the lottery to graduate from high school within five years.

      The figure in the upper right-hand corner, 42%, is the graduation rate of students who applied to programs with a high placement rate but who lost the lottery and were not school selected. Finally, the number in the upper left-hand corner, 34%, represents the graduation rate of students who applied to these same high-placement-rate programs, won the lottery for admission, and entered the program.[1]

      The students who applied to the career magnets with high placement rates and lose the lottery have the same graduation rate as lottery losers who applied to the career magnets with low placement rates. This is a surprise. One might have expected the students who were interested in high school programs with high placement rates to be less interested in college and less interested in education generally; they would then have a higher propensity to drop out from a regular comprehensive high school. The catalogue that middle-school students use to choose programs usually does not describe post-high school employment opportunities, so it may be hard for students to choose on that basis. More likely, nearly every middle-school student plans on going to college, so whether the school offers employment after high school is irrelevant to them.

      Regardless of whether the program one applies to places more or fewer graduates, students are more likely to graduate if they do not win the lottery for admission and do not attend a career magnet program. They are also more likely to graduate if they begin high school in a comprehensive school. In addition, the fact that the difference between lottery winners and lottery losers is greatest in the first line suggests that the graduation rate from career magnet schools is especially low in those programs with a high placement rate. This pattern is confirmed by the program-level analysis: The .565 program-level correlation presented in Table 2.2 is not biased and is statistically significant.[2]

      Other findings are also consistent with Table 2.2. For example, programs that place many of their graduates in employment have a higher ninth-grade dropout rate for average reading-group students (program level r = .39, p<.02).

      Circumstantial evidence suggests possible reasons why schools that emphasize finding employment for its graduates may have fewer graduates. Table 2.3 shows that all career magnets, but especially those with high placement rates, have greater ninth-grade absenteeism. The effect of winning the lottery and attending a career magnet program with low levels of placement is to increase one's first year absences from an average of 12.6 to 14.3, a gain of 1.7 days; however, for those who use the lottery to get into programs with high placement rates, the difference is an increase from 14.4 to 17.6, a gain of 3.2 days. (To minimize error introduced by long tails in the absenteeism distribution, in this and the following tables, the means shown are, in fact, the antilog of the mean of the natural log of the number of days absent.)

      Although this table shows a large difference in days absent, the program- level correlation is not significant. We do get statistical significance when we use a related variable, however. Program heads were asked, "Some schools focus on college preparation, some focus on college preparation geared toward particular careers, and some focus on career preparation. Which one of these best describes your program: college preparatory, college preparatory with an emphasis on a career in . . ., or career preparatory?" They were then asked, "Does your program prepare students to work if they choose to upon graduation?" Finally, the program head was asked, "In addition to the high school diploma, does your program offer any special certification, license or diploma that is not offered to the rest of the school?"

      Only 10% said that they were college preparatory and did not provide students any preparation for work; another 10% said that they were purely career preparatory, not preparing students for college. Eighty percent of the programs said that they did both college and career preparation; four-fifths said they prepared students for work, and four out of seven said they offered a special certificate connected to career training. When we correlated the amount of program emphasis upon career and the number of days absent in the first year of high school, we found that those that emphasized career placement had significantly higher absenteeism (r = .33, p = .05).

      The second-year data also show high-placement programs having higher absenteeism. Table 2.4 shows a high absenteeism rate during this second year of school for students who win the lottery to attend high-placement programs, and the program-level correlation, .609, is highly significant. These results are not the result of any bias in the lottery. Lottery winners to programs emphasizing placement actually have significantly lower absenteeism in the eighth grade (r = -.382, significant at p = .03) than do lottery losers who selected the same programs, so the high absenteeism presented in Table 2.4 occurs despite having to adjust for an eighth-grade self-selection bias towards low absenteeism.

      The number of credits earned towards graduation is also quite low in both years (program-level correlation with placement is -.70 in the third year and -.58 in the fourth, both significant at p < .001). The combined effect of the high dropout rate and the inability of students to pass enough courses results in a large number of students who are unable to graduate at the end of four or five years.

      After visiting many programs, we concluded that programs emphasizing employment after high school had two problems. First, they had to set higher standards for their students, which made graduation difficult and school alienating. Secondly, they postponed career education until the third year, partly to wait for students to mature and partly to give the program time to screen out students who seemed least able to do the work for which they were to be trained.

      Why do students in career magnet programs with high placement have high absenteeism, fewer credits earned, and a lower graduation rate? We can only speculate because we have no direct data from a large enough sample of tenth-grade classrooms, but it is possible that by tenth grade, students are both bored and frustrated--bored by the relatively small amount of career content in their classes and frustrated by the high level of difficulty of those classes. Such difficult courses are likely to be used by school staff to identify those students who are most likely to be suitably qualified for internships, career-related jobs, and the advanced classes to prepare them for employment.

      It is also possible that third and fourth year students are not earning credits because the demands of career classes are too great (since the school staff is concerned that its students are well-qualified for employment) or because students are overloaded with the combination of internships, part-time work, and their schoolwork.

      Table 2.7 shows that lottery winners in programs with a strong emphasis on placing graduates are 5% more likely to transfer to another school by the end of their third year of high school than are lottery winners in programs with a low level of emphasis on job placement or no placement facilities at all. In the fourth year, the transfer rate is 5% higher (r = -.54, p = .001, table not shown).

Setting Quotas for the Program's Junior Year
      The need to select students who, in the eyes of the program staff, can meet the demands of a program's junior- and senior-year career preparation often results in dropping all but a small proportion of students from the program. One business program we visited ranked all its second-year students, whether admitted by lottery or school selection, and kept the thirty highest ranked students of the ninety who had entered the program in ninth grade. The rest became regular students of the comprehensive high school. We should not exaggerate the harm done; the students have not been relegated to a dustbin bottom track because the comprehensive high school in which that program is housed has a good reputation. We interviewed the director of another finance academy and heard an identical story; the program graduates only 34 students, the number of seats in one classroom. Other students remain in the program but do not get into internships or advanced classes. Over half of the programs we visited used some variation of this process of setting a fixed size for its junior class and then admitting enough students to make sure they had enough talented students. In the third case, the class size was limited by technological resources to only twenty. The programs all chose to admit a considerably larger number of students, guaranteeing that most students entering the program would not be allowed to finish it. The dropped students were provided the opportunity to continue in high school either by being in the program in name only and taking the same sort of courses that any other high school student would take, or by being provided an alternate set of courses in a "safety net" program. Whatever the solution, the fact remains that when admissions decisions were being made, they were made by counselors who knew what percentage of these students would finish the program to which they were being admitted. Several program heads said that there were no dropouts from their program, but they were most likely referring to the third and fourth years, when their student body had already been drastically winnowed down.

      One program claimed to allocate the same number of seats in each grade, ninth through twelfth. Asked what their dropout rate was, the program head announced that it was zero; it had to be or else the upper classes would be underenrolled. Clearly there must be some exaggeration here, but they were under self-imposed pressure to hold on to as many students as possible from ninth through twelfth grades.

      In our interviews (Flaxman, Guerrero, & Gretchen, 1997; Heebner, Crain, Kiefer, & Si, 1992), we met a number of students who came to realize that they had no interest in a particular career once they had learned a little more about it: "I thought I would like accounting, but it turned out just to be all math. I wound up hating it." Other students talked about planning a different career while they were in high school studying for a career in which they had already lost interest. It seemed that many of these students were able to learn a lot about careers and themselves in the process of making a change. We often concluded that being trained for what turns out to be the wrong career ended up being a better educational experience than they would have had in a comprehensive high school. This does not mean, however, that the students themselves understand this as they are going through the turmoil of adolescent career-identity-formation at the same time.

      Moreover, it may take students more than two years to reach junior-year status, when internships and the academic career focus begins. As a result, and this is probably true of other urban districts, reliable graduation statistics require waiting until students have had the opportunity to be in high school seven years. The number graduating "on time" at the end of four years is small--only about 40% graduate that quickly. This mirrors the pattern in college, where graduation rates can be estimated only after students have had time to drop out and return, to carry reduced schedules because of working, or to take the high number of courses required for graduation in a particular major. Many college programs frankly admit that it is not possible to complete all the requirements in eight semesters. This same pattern is appearing in high school as academic standards are being continuously raised by state legislatures and through pressure from the federal government. Raising the performance bar by requiring students to pass multiple tests for graduation and (in the programs we studied) adding more coursework and internships slow down graduation. Students are not rushing to graduate so that they can take high paying jobs at the age of 18--there are very few such jobs--but there are more part-time jobs for high school students, which also tends to delay graduation. Furthermore, the increased pressure on all students to graduate from high school means that students who fail courses are under great pressure to remain in school and retake classes, which can also lead to added years of high school.

      One factor that may increase dropouts in career magnet programs is the stretching of the number of years between entering high school and achieving junior-year status, when internships and career courses become available. The student who cannot accumulate enough credits or pass enough examinations to move quickly to junior-year status is at high risk of dropping out, and this could be a major explanation for the high absenteeism of students in the first two years of the career magnet schools.

      Most educators, including program administrators, showed a genuine commitment to all of their students, and this came through in our interviews. They were proud of their low dropout rate, although they often calculated the rate by looking only at seniors, rather than the entire period of time students spent in their program. Those staff and administrators who ran a program with a low four-year dropout rate were proud of their accomplishment. On the other hand, the program administrator of the finance program discussed above justified his willingness to discard two-thirds of the students admitted to the program at the end of their second year by arguing that they probably were not very interested in finance but used it as a device to get into a better comprehensive high school than the one in their own neighborhood. This comment, which is part truth and part rationalization, was heard often enough to make it clear that program administrators knew that dropping students is a moral act. Others talked about taking risks such as selecting a student for an internship despite his or her sometimes poor performance in the past. We watched teachers select the weakest student in a group to be its leader in an effort to bolster the student's self-esteem.

      While some programs take pride in their demanding standards, others take an equal amount of pride in holding students in school who might otherwise have dropped out. The director of a veterinary science program said that providing students with an opportunity to take care of animals gave them a strong incentive to stay in school; although sending a small number of students to high-quality colleges was important to the staff, it was clear that helping students graduate was also a clearly defined part of the program's mission.

      The evidence of trying to keep students and the discomfort in talking about dropouts is important because it shows that policymakers have a large reservoir of commitment to draw upon, if they can only devise strategies that will reduce the cost of keeping the weak students. All program administrators would like to find a way to place their most gifted students in industry or a good college and still encourage their weaker students to remain in school.

      Employers are being rational when they demand that schools send them only their best students. Students with stronger academic skills generally make better employees. Since career magnet programs must evaluate students in order to decide which ones qualify for internships, it seems inevitable that the academically stronger students will have the advantage, and the academically weaker students will be passed over. While this does not mean that academically weaker students must drop out of career magnet programs, it does mean that a special effort has to be made to keep them in the school. Preference for high-achieving students may be inevitable, but a low graduation rate for low-achieving students is not.

      How do students who do not make the grade finish their schooling? We were surprised at the complexity of the answer to this question. In some programs lodged in comprehensive schools, program administrators stated that they were not permitted to expel a student from school simply because they have not been selected to stay in the program. Even though the student had come from a distant neighborhood, he or she would remain in the school rather than return to the neighborhood school; however, other program administrators in the same situation said they were required to return them to their neighborhood school.

      Certainly, forcing students who had not been selected for career training after their second year in high school to return to their neighborhood schools would be expected to increase the dropout rate. Students who change schools are more likely to drop out, and this is as true for career magnets as for students in other schools in the district. In situations like the finance academy discussed above, where two-thirds of the students do not remain in the actual program after their sophomore year, those who remain in the same building will have friends in the classes they take after leaving the program--either comprehensive students they knew from previous classes or extracurricular activities, or other dropouts from the program. Thus, their chances of staying in school are higher than if they were to change schools.

      Buildings made up entirely of career magnet programs have a different problem because they have no place to send students who have been dropped from their program. Some of these programs do not drop weak students; instead, they modify the program to accommodate the students. For example, one business program retains its weak students but assigns them to in-house internships, where they work as clerical staff within the school. Obviously, this kind of internship has less of an emotional lift for students, but it avoids dropping them from the program.

      Other programs successfully use technology to keep students in school. A good example of the latter is an accounting program in a career magnet school that has high standards and expects nearly all of its students to go on to college. Students who have difficulty with accounting are "pulled out" into a remedial accounting class in which computers are used to help students understand the abstraction behind more difficult mathematical formulae. According to the program administrator, this enables students to catch up and join the rest of the class by the following year.

      As students reach these frustrating last years of high school, trying hard to accumulate enough credits for graduation or to pass mandatory examinations, their career counselor may be giving them useful advice and moral support, perhaps urging them to stay in school by pointing out that there are careers in this field that do not require high-level academic skills. Table 2.9 shows the lower dropout rate of students who won the lottery to enter schools with more career counseling compared to those who won the lottery to enter a program that had less.

Adding an Academic Career Focus in the Early Grades
      Some career magnets have tried to maintain student interest during the lower years of high school by creating introductory courses in keyboarding and computer work. Others have devised ingenious ways to incorporate the academic career focus into elementary courses (such as teaching aerodynamics with a strenuous paper-airplane competition). Others introduce career-related material into some of their academic ninth- and tenth-grade courses. Some use a variety of guest lectures and visits to work sites as a way of introducing students to their future careers. These techniques seem promising. We have no hard evidence that they succeed, but they merit a more thorough evaluation than we were able to do.

Career Counseling
      Although our only positive findings that career counseling is valuable was for students reading below grade level in the seventh grade, we believe career counselors are also valuable for the average student as well. If students feel from their first class in a field that that career is not what they thought, a career counselor can reassure them that their original interests in their field were not based on misconceptions. If they are frustrated by not having enough hands-on career work, a counselor may be supportive and encourage them to do career-related work after school. If students really are locked into a career they are uncomfortable with, a career counselor can encourage them to look at a particular career as a short-term plan, a way of supporting themselves while they go to college. Since most high school students hope to go to college, this is a strategy with wide utility; a number of students we interviewed talked about using their present career training as a way of paying their way through school, or as a back-up career if their long-term goals do not work out. Some of the teachers and counselors in career magnets encourage this sort of thinking.

Shifting Programs
      Sometimes a school can simply move the student into a program with a different focus. Students who looked forward to a health career but are missing school because they cannot stand the sight of blood might, for example, do well in a program that trains them to work in a medical office.

Incentives: What Governments and Markets Can Do
      Students of government and educational policy usually complain about the overregulation of schools, but in the case of career magnets, the role of government has often been helpful, and there are certainly examples of how schools and programs, when left alone, fail to serve all their students well. In many cases, government action may be beneficial in an unexpected way. In the past two decades, critics of government have argued that the market is a better source of incentives because clients can "vote" for programs that seem most helpful to them. In this section, we mention a few examples of governmental and market incentives that have affected, or could affect, career magnet programs.

      One of the factors intended to work to the advantage of low-achieving students is the Perkins Act's requirement that the schools receiving vocational education money educate their students in "all aspects of the industry." The phrase, inserted in the bill as a result of the lobbying efforts of the Center for Law and Education, was intended to make sure that vocational students were prepared not only for the bottom rung of a particular industry but were also taught about the technical and managerial side of the work as well.

      While every bricklayer cannot become a private masonry contractor, the school should at least not stand in the way of their students' effort to move up the career ladder of an industry. Perkins has had no effect on career magnets because these programs receive no vocational education funds; if they did, each career magnet would feel pressed to make sure that it had programs covering a wide range of activities within its chosen industry.

      In the absence of federal pressure, student applicants have exerted market pressure. Many choose career programs with a precollegiate flavor. In response, some program administrators and staff have developed programs or sets of programs that hold out the promise of college to all while at the same time making sure that they have courses appropriate to a wide range of student abilities. The easiest way of doing this is to teach students about a range of careers within a single broad industry. Thus, for these programs, focusing on all aspects of an industry can be used as a recruiting tool, offering preparation for high-quality post-college employment. Such a broad academic career focus can also benefit students who are not skilled enough to obtain a college degree or a high-quality internship. If schools provide information and internships in some of the intermediate and lower-level positions in their field, students will be able to begin at the bottom even if they cannot jump-start their careers by obtaining a college degree. This also means that programs that train students in all phases of an industry will necessarily have a "safety net" career line of training that could keep potential dropouts in school.

      A stress on all phases of an industry also encourages students to think about related fields that require different skills. Industries can accommodate a wide range of student interests. For example, even a highly technical field such as engineering has room for people with strong interpersonal skills and less interest in analytic work.

Incentives: School Size
      When some entire high schools became career magnet buildings, the schools became large enough to accommodate a group of related programs, and some school planning committees took advantage of the opportunity to teach all phases of an industry. The schools that did this seem to be the most successful. The one total career magnet school that is an exception, creating four unrelated programs within the same school building, has had more difficulty holding down its dropout rate. In another example, local and state governments required programs to take a quota of students with low reading test scores; this created an incentive for some programs to develop anti-dropout strategies, including creating safety net alternatives.

      When the city Board of Education agreed to allow comprehensive schools to create career magnet programs, the incentive was to keep the programs small, since schools usually have little empty space in which to work. As a result, comprehensive schools were unlikely to develop dual-focus or safety net programs.

Incentives: Targeted Budgets
      School district administrations (and, more commonly, the state or federal government) create incentives by providing separate streams of funding dedicated to specific tasks or specific groups of students. For example, a large number of high schools provide a special education version, or non-English language version, of the career magnet program created for regular students. We also noted that the computer-assisted accounting program grew out of a special district fund for reducing dropouts.

Conclusions

      Our most important conclusion is that these career magnet high schools have a lower graduation rate than do comprehensive high schools. We have uncovered three explanations for the lower graduation rate in the career magnet schools:

      We have identified three strategies that seem to reduce the dropout rate: First, and most important, is the creation of a safety net that can catch those students who are dropped from a program. Second, the dropout rate seems to be lower when students are involved in individual and group projects. Third, dropout rates seem to be lower in schools that devote more resources to career counseling.

      While all three efforts are important, the creation of the safety net is most important because of the large number of students who are dropped from programs--in fact, if not in name--and have no other program to enter.

The Lottery and Accountability

      The area's public high schools are loosely coupled to higher levels of government. This research project has found that there are important roles for the government to play. First, gathering statistics is important. The fact that there are good statistics on the number of students passing required tests, and poor statistics on graduation rates for each program is an important reason why a great deal of attention is paid to the first and a lot less to the second. In the absence of good data, each program administrator we interviewed assumed that he had a relatively high graduation rate compared to other schools. Like Lake Woebegone children, every program administrator thought his or her program was above average.

      The lottery admission strategy provides an excellent opportunity for administrative oversight of the program. It is rare in education to have a clear "bottom line" accounting system to determine the success of a particular school. The lottery provides precisely that opportunity. The fact that academic career magnet applicants who win the lottery are more likely to succeed in college (at least, this is true for the four career magnet schools we studied in detail) indicates that these programs are successful. The lower graduation rate of the students who win the lottery as opposed to those who applied to the same programs and lost the lottery presents an opportunity for higher-level administrators to ask for action. As with most other school districts in this country that serve low-income minority areas, the district's schools are often indicted for the poor test scores of their students while, in fact, they may be doing an excellent job of "adding value" to the performance of their students. Conversely, schools that serve a middle class nonminority population may brag about the high rate of graduation and college placement among their students while actually providing these students with little more than they brought with them from home.

      There are other areas where higher-level administrators might play a role. For example, this research project has found that some schools succeeded because they had linked multiple programs. A school board planning to stimulate the growth of career magnets could provide technical assistance on the value of this approach. The central office can also be helpful by developing a student record system that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of schools-within-a-school by recording the name of both the school and the program in which a student is enrolled. This would allow the administration to identify successful individual programs within an otherwise poorly performing school, or vice-versa.

Incentives and Independence: Career Magnets as Charters

      Some of the strength of career magnet programs derives from the fact that they are much like charter schools. Program directors have the opportunity to fulfill their own vision of what a high school experience should be like. They do not have as much control as they need or would like, especially in recruiting staff, but they have control of their curriculum in important ways. They have "ownership" in a way that other educators--even high school principals--do not. As a group, program heads are ambitious, know they are competing for students, and are committed to creating exciting educational environments.

      But it is apparent from the schools' experiences here that the free-market model has its downside. Programs do compete for students; they "advertise" in the school districts high school directory. But they compete for quality, not quantity. Programs want large numbers of applicants so they will have a large pool to pick from when they select half of their entrants. Similarly, they also want a large entering class of ninth graders so that they will have a large pool from which to select its small junior class. Program heads do not attempt to "maximize their profits" by increasing enrollments. Instead, they maximize their satisfaction if they can feel they have "made a difference" with a group of students, preferably talented, whom they know personally. Because there is little incentive for program heads to increase the number of students who complete their program, the system seems to expand mostly by new programs being created. There are over 130 career magnet programs and several hundred other types of programs. The impersonality of the traditional high school is surprising; we interviewed teachers who were nominated by students as their "most influential adult" in school, only to find that the teacher was unable to recall the student at all. The same is true in the larger career magnet programs, which may have several hundred students. All this suggests that the smaller career magnet programs should be more successful because the program head will have more personal contact with all the students, increasing both the students' sense of being supported and the program head's sense of satisfaction. In Chapter 4, Sullivan and Little find evidence supporting this hypothesis.

The Seven-Year Curriculum

      The large number of older students in high school presents some important challenges to the school. Given the high unemployment rate among disadvantaged youth and the rigorous academic standards applied in the these high schools, it is only logical that more and more students will be using a fifth, sixth, or seventh year to complete their high school requirements. It is not clear to us whether this situation has been recognized as either an opportunity or a problem. In our discussions with school administrators, the role of the high school as a seven-year school has not come up. The issue should be put on the public agenda of secondary education.

References

Armor, D. J. (1972). School and family effects on black and white achievement: A reexamination of the USOE data. In F. Mosteller & D. P. Moynihan (Eds.),On equality of educational opportunity (pp. 168-229). New York: Random House.

Flaxman, E., Guerrero, A., & Gretchen, D. (1997). Career development effects of career magnets versus comprehensive schools(MDS-803). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California, Berkeley.

Heebner, A., Crain, R. L., Kiefer, D. R., & Si, Y-P. (1992). Career magnets: Interviews with students and staff (MDS-386). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California, Berkeley.

[1] The percentages in the table are not literally results from a randomized experiment, since they are a simple summing of all students who applied to all low-placement or high-placement career magnets. The percentages are not adjusted for the number of lottery winners and lottery losers in each of the separate programs; however, the results are quite close to the adjusted differences used in the unbiased aggregate program level correlations to test for significance.

[2]Program-level data also gave the true number of degrees of freedom, 35 (the number of programs), and not 6,096 (the number of cases in Table 2.2).

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.