|
| Flaxman, E., Guerrero, A., & Gretchen, D. (1999). Career development effects of career magnets versus comprehensive schools (MDS-803). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |
Since the 1970s, the Board of Education in the large urban school district under study has created a number of career magnet high schools to provide integrated academic and vocational education as a strategy to attract a racially, economically, and socially diverse group of students. They are considered "educational options schools" and they provide a dual curriculum of academic and vocational coursework to prepare students for work without foreclosing their opportunities to attend college and for a career for which they have received initial preparation. These schools operate both as "schools-within-a-school" in zoned comprehensive high schools (currently 95) and as stand-alone career magnet high schools (currently nine). (These numbers frequently change because of the program's evolution.)
Unlike many other magnet schools, these career magnets (sometimes called "academic career magnets") do not have a totally selective admissions policy. Since the 1980s, all eighth-grade students in the city schools can apply to any high school they might choose to attend in any neighborhood in the city, including the career magnets. This especially allows minority parents to exercise choice in their children's education, usually only an option available to middle-class white families. Students are assigned to the magnet schools according to reading scores, although one-sixth of the applicants reading above grade level and one-sixth of the applicants reading below must be admitted. Additionally, in 1987 the Board of Education mandated that one-half of all students must be admitted to a career magnet high school by lottery. Thus, students with a full range of reading test performance are admitted through a selection process, with one-half of any entering class assigned randomly through the lottery. The lottery then has ensured that the student body of the career magnet high schools is representative of the high school student population in the city (Zellman & Quigley, 1999).
Previous studies of the institutional effects of career magnet and comprehensive high schools, made possible by the uniqueness of a database of school records of students randomly assigned to the different high schools, have examined outcomes like grades, attendance, and transfer and dropout rates, and address only a limited number of questions such as those regarding school and post-graduation experiences (Crain et al., 1992; Crain & Thaler, 1999).
The subjects of the study were 110 graduates of four career magnet high schools and four comprehensive high schools. A total of 51 students who attended and graduated from a career magnet school--the "lottery winners"--and 59 who attended and graduated from a comprehensive high school--the "lottery losers"--were included in the study. Because the subjects were drawn from a database for the study constructed in an experimental design format, the graduates were selected in pairs in which one graduate was randomly admitted to a career magnet high school while the other was randomly rejected from the same school, and subsequently attended and graduated from a comprehensive high school. In our study, then, the random selection process assured group equality and eliminated the initial differences between the groups known as selection bias. Since the pairs of graduates were constructed by random assignment and matching, any consistent difference between career magnet and comprehensive high schools can be attributed to the schools they attended. We considered these differences between the groups to be institutional effects.
The subjects were chosen by a careful matching plan. They had to have graduated from high school within the previous two years; have scored in the mid-range on standardized citywide reading tests; and have been enrolled in high school in regular classes, with no special education placement. The potential interviewees were also matched on age and first choice of high school; however, it was not possible to match the pairs by the junior high school they attended, nor was it possible to match them perfectly by gender because two of the four career magnet high schools from which the lottery winners were identified had a substantial female population and needed to match with females attending the comprehensive schools. This meant that males from the other two career magnet high schools were overrepresented in the study. Race and ethnicity were balanced in the selection of interviewees. Out of the 110 students, 72 were female graduates and 38 were male graduates. Their ages ranged from 19- to 22-years-old.
| Demographics | Frequencies | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Sex | ||
| Males | 38 | 34.5 |
| Females | 72 | 65.5 |
| Age | ||
| 19 years | 36 | 32.7 |
| 20 years | 61 | 55.5 |
| 21 years | 9 | 8.2 |
| 22 years | 3 | 2.7 |
| School Type | ||
| Career Magnet | 51 | 46.4 |
| Comprehensive | 59 | 53.6 |
The participants were located through lists obtained from the Board of Education. Permission from the Board of Education was received to interview the students. The graduates were contacted through a letter from their high school counselors and asked if they were willing to participate and be interviewed. Those who agreed were paid $40. The interviewers were graduate students who were specially trained for the study and who matched with the interviewees in race or ethnicity, age, and gender in almost all cases. The interviews were each two to three hours long.
All 110 graduates were surveyed using closed-ended (Likert scale and yes/no) structured interviews; a subset of the graduates (n = 21) were also interviewed in greater depth using a semistructured interview protocol that allowed for follow-up and probe questions, which are being separately analyzed as case studies. The report of the study in the body of this report is based only on the responses of the high school graduates to the structured survey. The interview schedule contained 440 questions with a large number of skips.
The graduates were questioned about their educational, occupational, social, and family experiences from eighth grade through high school, their experience on-the-job while in high school and after graduating, their experience at college or a postsecondary education institution, and their experience at home and in the community. The questions elicited information about the students' experiences in the following categories:
Questions about career identity and career self-efficacy were distributed through these sections. The students also responded to separate inventories to determine the degree of their internal or external locus of control and their responses to stressful life events.
|
| Flaxman, E., Guerrero, A., & Gretchen, D. (1999). Career development effects of career magnets versus comprehensive schools (MDS-803). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California. |
