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| 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. |
As urban high school students from similar backgrounds, both "lottery winners" and "lottery losers" could have perceived their high school experiences in much the same way; however, the graduates of the career magnet and the comprehensive high schools in our study differed in their high school educational and work experiences, career choice and development, post-high school work and educational experiences, and peer and family relationships, which points to the influence of the career magnet experience. But even these specific differences must be thought of first more broadly. In most of their responses to the closed-ended interview questions, the graduates of the career magnet high schools were more articulate than the graduates of the comprehensive high schools: they gave more answers to questions when given a chance to make a second or third choice on a scale (p < .01), and their responses were more specific and comprehensive to open-ended questions. The comprehensive graduates, in turn, gave fewer answers and also gave answers that were more socially and psychologically expected and desirable. This suggests that the career magnet graduates had thought more about their experiences and were more aware of themselves and more analytic than their comprehensive high school peers, and probably more realistic and confident enough to give a personal answer to the questions during the interview. In thinking retrospectively about their high school (and post-high school) educational and work experiences, the career magnet graduates displayed a greater understanding of the factors impacting their growth and development. In attributing their successes and failures, they indicated a greater feeling of self-efficacy and a greater willingness to trust their own abilities and skills.
Although the career magnet high schools and the comprehensive high schools in the study were similar in curriculum, teaching practices, school organization, opportunities for school-related employment, availability of counseling, and availability of extracurricular activities, the career magnet graduates in the study retained stronger positive feelings toward their high school than the graduates of the comprehensive high schools. The career magnet graduates were also twice as likely as the comprehensive graduates to indicate that they would choose the same high school again because of its career focus and reputation as a safe school. They were also more than four times as likely to rate their school's reputation as "good to excellent" as their comprehensive counterparts. The comprehensive graduates did not indicate that they would want to return to their high school because of the value of the education it offered; however, they would return because of the appeal of the location, its safety, or the fun they had. What is more, the career magnet graduates felt that their high school maintained a good reputation in the community, unlike the comprehensive graduates who felt that the reputation of their high school was only fair (p < .002). This may be a consequence of selectivity, however, because the career magnet graduates actively chose the school they attended. In terms of this study, we do not know the perceptions of the students who either dropped out or transferred from the career magnet high school to another school, possibly a comprehensive high school. We can assume, however, that those who stayed to graduate shared the common values and perceived common opportunities that characterize these schools.
For the most part, the graduates did not differ in their overall perception of the impact of their coursework on their career development. The career magnet graduates were also more likely to attribute any positive educational (academic and career) outcomes of their high school experience to their occupational classes, which seemed more useful and coherent than their academic classes; although among their academic classes they felt most confident in their English classes. As expected, the career magnet graduates took more career-related courses than their counterparts: they averaged 13.4 hours/credits of career-related coursework during high school as compared with the comprehensive graduates who averaged 5.2 hours/credits (Zellman & Quigley, 1999). Given the school's theme, it is not surprising that the career magnet graduates would assign the greatest real and symbolic value to their occupational courses. For the comprehensive graduates, however, including those also enrolled in vocational classes, it was not clear whether academic or occupationally related coursework (for those who took such courses) was the more valued.
In terms of their academic behavior, the comprehensive graduates cut classes more frequently (once a week) than their career magnet peers (a few times a semester). Concerns about passing courses and graduating inhibited both groups from cutting class, but the career magnet graduates felt a greater peer pressure not to cut class and were concerned that they would upset their parents if they did (p < .05). For the most part, the career magnet graduates never cut their occupational classes.
We found that the career magnet graduates did not report a significant number of contacts with their teachers while in high school. They identified only the teachers in their occupationally related classes as influential in their career choice or development (but not as strongly as predicted). The fact that they are influential is not surprising: The occupational teacher has a longer and more sustained relationship with the student and is associated with a coherent sequence of instruction, which is practical and highly utilitarian. The occupational teacher, someone who has had a career in the area in which he or she is teaching, can be perceived as a master who legitimately can transmit knowledge and competencies to the learning novice, where the academic teachers cannot. The student and the occupational teacher also occupy a common space in the shop, laboratory, studio, or restructured classroom, conducive to more informal and unrestricted interactions. And often, student and teacher are jointly performing a task. These are the ideal conditions for the students to learn a task: to internalize the norms, values, and language identified with work and a particular career; to orient themselves to career exploration and planning; and to develop their self-concept as a worker.
Within the school, neither the career magnet nor the comprehensive graduates were likely to talk to a counselor or necessarily attribute any specific influence to the encounter; however, the comprehensive graduates were more likely to report having spent time talking to a counselor about a career or future work than the career magnet graduates and, generally, to get to know an adult while in high school. The career magnet graduates did not connect their counselors, the heads of their houses, or the chairs of the department of their career focus with their career development. As in almost all urban high schools, counselors in career magnet high schools rarely function as career counselors, even informally to any significant degree; however, even teachers administratively designated to foster a school's career focus did not have a direct impact on the students, except indirectly through their influence in the school's curriculum or extracurricular activities.
Both the career magnet and comprehensive graduates engaged in volunteer and community service, although the comprehensive graduates had more experience. The career magnet graduates reported that they became less absorbed with themselves as a result of the experience; the comprehensive graduates thought that they now had more information as a result of the experience. More of the career magnet graduates than their comprehensive peers, however, thought that participating in extracurricular activities affected their thinking (p < .02). In neither case, however, did the graduates attribute a great deal of specific importance in their career choice or development to the extracurricular or volunteer experience or to any single person they encountered in the community.
This was an unexpected finding. Mentors associated with school-related or community experiences, coaches, and teachers identified with extracurricular activities are often sources of influence on the development of adolescents' vocational maturity. Like the occupational teacher in the career magnet high school, they are in a position to directly influence the youth's career development. They are perceived as experts in an area of the students' interest. They also relate in less formal, quasi-social circumstances conducive to open-ended, unrestricted interactions. Again, the youth and the adult are often doing something together, under ideal conditions for the students to use them to assist in their career development. Even so, their influence was not distinctive in this study. The career magnet graduates did not single out any of these adults as having been more influential than they were to the comprehensive graduates. This suggests that despite popular belief in the myth of the influence of a single powerful adult, youth develop a career orientation globally through many sources in their high school experience, without needing to identify any one specific experience or person as the sole source.
We found that the career magnet graduates were significantly less likely to engage in behaviors associated with poor school performance. They were less likely to have been in a fight, to smoke, to drink alcohol, to use drugs, to be pregnant or make someone pregnant, or to be arrested by police on serious charges. Overall, 41% of the career magnet graduates reported these no-risk behaviors as compared with only 19% of the comprehensive graduates. The reduced incidence of academic risk behaviors was the biggest difference in the two groups while in high school. We can assume that the strong academic and vocational curriculum, the belief in the importance of work, and the acceptance of the legitimacy of the social requirements of the workplace characteristic of the career magnet high school experience motivated the students to avoid or reduce any high-risk behaviors.
Given that occupational values form in adolescence, high school students are particularly responsive to work experiences that provide learning opportunities (Mortimer et al., 1992). Because they try to provide high-quality work experiences, many believe that career magnet high schools can be particularly successful in fostering adolescent career development experiences which can have a positive effect on adolescent career development (Stern, Stone, Hopkins, & McMillion, 1990; Wijting, Arnold, & Conrad, 1977).
Many
of the career magnet and comprehensive graduates worked while in high school in
jobs related to their schoolwork, but the comprehensive high school graduates
were more likely to hold a job while in high school (p < .01). In general,
more career magnet graduates than comprehensive graduates reported that they
did class assignments or changed a class project because of their job
experience. What is more, understandably, they felt freer talking about their
job experience in their occupational classes than in their academic classes. On
the job, the career magnet graduates were more likely to work alone
(p
< .01) but also to become more acquainted with and relate to adults more
than their comprehensive peers. The career magnet graduates found the job
experience valuable for career awareness, knowledge of work norms, and the
development of cognitive skills necessary for performance on-the-job and
interpersonal abilities. They felt that their work experience was important and
could be connected to future work (p < .05). In general, as noted
previously, in talking about their job skills and job experience, future career
plans, and the relationship between job experience during high school and in
later careers, the career magnet graduates were more articulate and gave second
and third answers to questions while the comprehensive graduates gave only one.
The comprehensive graduates felt that the work experience only helped them develop specific technical occupational skills, not necessarily knowledge of future careers or work norms. Unlike their career magnet counterparts, they did not connect their high school employment with their future work, nor did it help them develop a concept of themselves as workers or help them understand the demands of the workplace. For them, their current work was a job, not a step toward a career.
The career magnet graduates may have benefited more from their work experience in high school than the comprehensive high school graduates largely because they had an avenue to use it in their occupational classes, although they may actually have had less experience. They had more opportunities to talk about their job skills and job experience, future career plans, and the relationship between job experience during high school and later careers. They also may have used their work experience distinctively to enhance their career development. They not only became more skilled in a task so that they could increase their performance on the job, but, more maturely, they learned work norms and acquired interpersonal abilities. Consequently, they came to be more aware of the demand of a career and could relate their work experience to future work. This explains why the career magnet graduates were more articulate about their work experience during the interview and gave more and fuller answers to the questions than the comprehensive graduates. We can assume that attending a high school with a career focus helped the career magnet graduates turn their adolescent work into a career development experience.
The graduates of the career magnet schools reported that most of their friends were fellow students in their classes who did not live in their neighborhoods (p < .01). More of their social life, then, was centered in the school, with school friends rather than with friends in their neighborhood. For many of the career magnet graduates, leaving the neighborhood (and the possibility of attending the neighborhood zoned high school) to attend the career magnet high school in another part of the city, a necessity for most of the students, meant that they changed their peer group. By contrast, the graduates of the comprehensive high schools had friends in their schools and in their neighborhoods both, and they identified their social life with their neighborhood (Zellman & Quigley, 1999).
Peer groups are a highly adaptive context in which to negotiate the uncertainty of adolescence. Securing one's place in a clique prevents a student from having to confront a much larger, constantly shifting array of peers in high school, many of whom are strangers. This is especially true of students in career magnet high schools. Here students are often brought together from several different geographic areas, and the probability of not knowing someone is higher in career magnet high schools than in neighborhood comprehensive high schools.
The friends of the career magnet graduates had more plans for the future, including college, but especially for future careers, than the friends of the comprehensive graduates (p < .03). In our study, many of these peers shared an academic and career orientation, marked at this stage of development as academic and career plans for the future. The career magnet graduates reported that it was pressure from their peers that influenced them not to cut classes. Within their peer group, the students understood that their high school, in addition to its career focus, was academically demanding, more so than the comprehensive high schools in their neighborhoods (Crain & Thaler, 1999).
Having friends serve as academic and social resources can have a direct and positive influence on achievement outcomes at school (Wentzel, 1991). Several studies have shown that peers in high school can positively influence academic achievement, career plans, future goals, and vocational identity (Alexander & Eckland, 1975; Clasen & Brown, 1987; Delgado-Gaitan, 1986; Johnson, 1987). In general, pressure to finish high school was the single strongest influence from friends that responded to Brown's (1982) survey of adolescent peer pressure; Delgado-Gaitan (1986) demonstrates that peers influence each other to perform to their highest ability. Studies of the interaction between adolescents and their respective peer group indicate that the peer group is also capable of influencing the student to return to school as well.
Perhaps positive peer influence is one explanation for the higher attendance rates found at career magnet high schools. Heebner (1995) suggests that students who stayed in career magnets, rather than dropping out, benefited from the new and varied group of students brought together because they had a chance to continually interact with heterogeneous, career-oriented peers who were more likely to complete high school. Those who stayed in the neighborhood comprehensive schools interacted with many of the same students with whom they attended middle or junior high school.
It is important to note that peer influence is also an important determinant of nonconforming behavior. It contributes substantially to the power of a model presented by Alpert and Dunham (1986) for keeping academically marginal youths in school. These researchers recommend that insulating children from the negative influences of peers should be built into policies aimed at preventing school dropouts. Career magnet high schools offer that possibility: They can insulate students from gang members, drug dealers, and other violent offenders in their neighborhood schools because of their geographically, racially, ethnically, and academically diverse student populations.
Peer influences differ in many urban schools, but in these career magnet high schools, with a more heterogeneous social class mix possible than in the neighborhood comprehensive high schools, students could more easily cross any social class and cultural boundaries inhibiting their academic aspirations or behavior and academic motivation.
The graduates of the career magnet high schools and the comprehensive high schools experienced their parents' interest in their educational future very differently. More than the comprehensive graduates, the career magnet graduates believed that their parents thought their going to college was the most important part of their plans for the future (p < .01). The comprehensive graduates reported that while their parents thought going to college was a good idea, their family had few financial resources to send them to college, and they should not expect to be supported if they chose to attend (p < .01). The career magnet graduates felt that their parents believed that it is important for the family to make sacrifices to send them to college, specifically that their parents would pay their expenses and support them if they attended a state or city college (not a private college), pay their tuition and books while they lived at home, and occasionally give them money. Of all the students' feelings about their high school experience, and its possible contribution to their career development, parent support was most powerfully associated with the students' career magnet experience (Zellman & Quigley, 1999).
Family members are also among the most important forces in preparing youth for their future roles as workers. Sociologists, psychologists, and child development researchers all agree that the family exercises a powerful socializing force on the youth work experience (Hotchkiss & Borow, 1996). Among the family influence factors that affect career decisionmaking and career development, family socioeconomic status and parent education are particularly significant. The socioeconomic status of the family helps to shape values, educational expectations, and career aspirations, all of which are important to career development. Individuals from better-educated, higher income families expect to attain significantly more education and aspire to higher status occupations.
The variable found to have a particularly strong effect on educational plans and occupational aspirations is parental education level. Lower levels of parent education can hinder adolescent career development. Mortimer et al. (1992) found that low socioeconomic status parents are less likely to have completed high school than higher socioeconomic status parents and are less likely to have gone to college. Students who come from families with limited education, then, are less likely to go to college or achieve a professional occupational goal (DeRidder, 1990). In general, the disadvantaged students who attend career magnet high schools tend to view college as something out of their grasp, both financially and educationally. They do not have the funds to begin school right away and, since money is of paramount importance, they opt for a paying job out of high school rather than a college education. Low-income students also often have genuine and justifiable fears about unemployment and economic failure. In this situation, as Heebner, Crain, Kiefer, and Si (1992) speculate, a student may avoid thinking about the future because obtaining professional training is economically and perhaps even cognitively out of reach. Many inner-city students do not have the luxury of deferring paid work in favor of advanced schooling and internships and plan to stop formal schooling after they receive their high school diplomas in order to get a paying job. What may have helped the career magnet graduates in our study overcome their fears about their economic future and to become more motivated to go to college and to be confident about the economic returns of the investment was the perception of the potential support of their parents.
Thoughts about the future--college, the world of work, the benefits of a career, and personal independence--occupied the minds of the career magnet graduates during high school; these thoughts were less so in the minds of the comprehensive graduates. No clear sense of the plans of the comprehensive graduates for the future emerged from their answers to the survey questions. More of the career magnet graduates planned to go to college than the comprehensive graduates did who postponed such thoughts. Of those graduates who attended college after graduating from high school, the career magnet graduates took more college credits (p < .009). They also said that they had already declared a major, unlike the comprehensive graduates. The career magnet graduates left high school believing that they were good at something which could help them in the future, and found that taking tests and other inventories were useful in learning about their skills and abilities.
Most of the graduates quit their high school jobs right after graduating, but the comprehensive graduates did so at a greater rate (p < .04). There was, however, no significant difference in the number of months the career magnet graduates and the comprehensive graduates worked in the first, second, or third job after graduation. Of those working in their third job after graduation, however, the career magnet students were more likely working full-time and the comprehensive graduates part-time. What is more, after graduation, career magnet graduates indicated a starting wage that was one dollar higher per hour ($7.27) than the comprehensive high school graduates ($6.28). Their current wages varied in the same way: $8.00 for the career magnet graduates as compared with $7.01 for the comprehensive graduates (Zellman & Quigley, 1999).
To a degree, economic factors affected the thinking of the two sets of graduates. The comprehensive graduates tended to feel a need for security in any job they held. The career magnet graduates appeared more ambitious: They were more willing to forego security in a job if it led to higher-level work later which paid more money. Currently, more career magnet graduates wanted to follow professional careers than the comprehensive graduates, who were also interested in technical and management careers.
A question remains, however. Most of the graduates of both the career magnet high schools and the comprehensive high schools were not enrolled full-time in college, and even the career magnet graduates, who had accumulated more credits and declared a major were still part-time students, working full-time in work not necessarily related to their current education or future careers. For the career magnet graduates, it meant that despite their increased educational aspirations and targeted vocational training, they were still having economic problems reaping the benefits of their ambitions.
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| 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. |
