Download or read book EXAMINING THE EFFECT OF IMPLEMENTING A CAREER ACADEMY WITHIN AN UNDER PERFORMING HIGH SCHOOL written by Will Glaster Artis and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William G. Artis, Jr., EXAMINING THE EFFECT OF IMPLEMENTING A CAREER ACADEMY WITHIN AN UNDER-PERFORMING HIGH SCHOOL (Under the direction of Dr. Travis Lewis) Department of Educational Leadership, May 2021. Career academies provide high school students with an opportunity to complete high school coursework while deeply exploring a potential career field concentration. Such academy models aim to improve high graduation rates and college and career readiness of students. However, the implementation of a career academy program can be challenging and may not always lead to the results intended. This action research study explores the effect of implementing a career academy in a large, underperforming traditional high school. Perceptions of career academy teachers as they participate in the implementation are explored. Additionally, student outcome measures in the form of achievement test scores and conduct reporting serve as indicators of the effect of implementation. The Four Keys to College and Career Readiness Model by David Conley served to guide the career academy implementation process

Download or read book Implementing Career Academies in a Large Comprehensive High School written by Delmas Lee Watkins and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author's abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of high school individuals in implementing and sustaining Career Academies in a large comprehensive high school. The Career Academy is a high school reform model that integrates school-to-work elements in a personalized learning environment. The Career Academy structure provides partnerships between high schools and employers to enhance students exposure to career development and work-based learning opportunities. The Career Academy model has proven to be a successful reform initiative for keeping students in school and positively impacting their post-secondary outcomes. Success is dependent of the contingent on the full implementation including a strong curriculum and instruction component. The researcher gathered information by using the qualitative method to examine the experiences of how one large high school implemented and sustained Career Academies. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with individuals from one high school involved in the successful implementation and sustenance of Career Academies. A case study narrative format was used to document the experiences of individuals involved in the implementation and sustenance of Career Academies. 2 Three conclusions can be drawn from the results of the study. First, high school leaders must have a clear reason for implementing Career Academies. The administrators and teachers in the study are focused on educating all students by providing a challenge integrated curriculum and establishing relationships that prepare them for life beyond high school. Secondly, there must be buy-in to the implementation of Career Academies. The Board of Education and district was supportive to implementing Career Academies. Professional development needs to be continuous and ongoing as improvements and adjustments are made steady implementation. Lastly, the structure and support of Career Academies must be a priority for effectiveness of the initiative. Career Academies do require additional work and, therefore, entail additional expense. Teachers must meet on a regular basis as a team to develop integrated curriculum, coordinate employer involvement, and organize links to college and other postsecondary options for students.

Download or read book Career Academies written by David Stern and published by Jossey-Bass. This book was released on 1992-10-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains the unique design and functioning of the career academy - a vigorous school-within-a-school that focuses on career preparation - and shows how it goes beyond traditional vocational programs to integrate academic and vocational curriculum, raise student ambitions, increase career options, and provide a meaningful learning context for both potential dropouts and college-bound youth. The authors provide education policy makers, administrators, and teachers with step-by-step guidance for setting up career academies. Drawing on their extensive experience in researching, administering, and evaluating career academies over the past decade, the authors offer advice on handling staffing, budgeting, student selection, and parental involvement. They explain how to build effective school-business partnerships by recruiting employers to serve as curriculum advisers, speakers, field trip hosts, and student job supervisors. And they use examples of thriving academy programs to illustrate how career academies are leading the way in bringing rigor and relevance back to the classroom.

Download or read book Career Academy Implementation written by Vikki Williams and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author's abstract: As educational systems are constantly challenged with public demands to decrease dropout rates and increase student achievement, school reform models are spreading as a form of school improvement across America. Educational reform moves in cycles, and the change has moved to smaller learning communities in an effort to improve education. Smaller Learning Communities (SLC's) have attracted currency in the world of education, and many school districts have adopted this transformational model as a means to support students' academic success. Smaller learning communities alter the internal structure of a traditional high school to small schools within a school. One specific model of a smaller learning community, known as career academies, has populated many suburban school districts. School leaders are primary sources for implementing such school reform models. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of school leaders who have experienced the implementation process of career academies. To produce the written research, data were collected, organized, transcribed, and analyzed into emerging themes and patterns through phenomenological interviews using open-ended questions with ten suburban school district leaders. This study yielded factors and barriers experienced by school leaders as they implemented the school reform model: career academies. The results from this study indicated that school leaders experienced many factors and structures towards the change process and several barriers that were challenges during the implementation process of career academies. With implementing the career academy initiative in this study, it is evident that barriers outweighed the factors. School leaders in a suburban school district in Georgia are faced with many challenges as they attempt to implement and sustain career academies. They endure scheduling, financial resources, building structure, changes in leadership, lack of support from superintendent and board members, teacher buy-in, communication, cultural changes, and the district integrating too many initiatives at the same time as issues they face while implementing career academies. As a result, effort to meet the challenges and demands our nation faces in education in the next decade, more emphasis must be placed on a plan to assist and support school leaders and their efforts to practice leadership roles for implementing or transforming schools into SLC models.

Download or read book Building Better Bridges to Life After High School written by Steven W. Hemelt and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern career academies aim to prepare students for college and the labor market. This paper examines the profile of students entering such academies in one school district and estimates causal effects of participation in one of the district's well-regarded academies on a range of high school and college outcomes. Using rich administrative data from the Wake County Public School System, we find that students who enter contemporary career academies are generally higher performing than their non-academy peers. Further, we document that Hispanic students and those with limited English proficiency are somewhat less likely to enroll than other students, even after we control for differences in prior academic achievement and high school choice sets. Exploiting the lottery-based admissions process of one technology-focused academy, we then estimate causal effects of participation in a career academy on high school attendance, achievement, and graduation, as well as college-going. We find that enrollment in this academy increases the likelihood of high school graduation and college enrollment each by about 8 percentage points, with the attainment gains concentrated among male students. We also find that academy participation reduces 9th grade absences but has little influence on academic performance, AP course-taking, or AP exam success during high school. Analysis of candidate mechanisms suggests that roughly one fifth of the overall high school graduation effect can be attributed to improved student engagement in high school. Tables are appended.

Download or read book The Effect of Career Academies on High School Students written by Chiquita Jackson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this research was to examine the impact of career academies on different aspects of a student’s high school years and to compare those students with their non-academy peers. This study investigated the impact of career academies on student self-esteem, career indecision, attendance, discipline, and achievement. Students within career academies were compared to their non-career academy peers in the aforementioned areas.

Download or read book The Effect of the Involvement Within Career Academies by Elective Participation of Eleventh and Twelfth Grade High School Students During the Implementation Year written by Nancy A. Johnston and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book High School Career Academies written by Nan L. Maxwell and published by W.E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 2000 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Implementing NCLB written by Paul Kimmelman and published by Corwin Press. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author shows readers how to overcome the challenge of implementing NCLB by building organizational capacity through a knowledge model.

Download or read book Making It Happen written by Mary G. Visher and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase "preparing students for college and career" has become so ubiquitous that it has become almost a mantra in educators' discourse in recent years. Whether mentioned in the Common Core State Standards, in the mission statements of high schools, or in political campaigns, improving the college and career readiness of young people is a concept that few can disagree with. Much attention has focused on how to prepare students "academically" for life after high school. But "readiness" also means having the knowledge and skills to make informed choices about careers and postsecondary education options and--once graduated--to successfully navigate both worlds. High schools are expected to teach these skills and knowledge but are rarely given the guidance or tools to do so. With a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, MDRC and its project partner Bloom Associates developed and piloted a program to help schools build or strengthen their college and career exploration programs. Called "Exploring Career and College Options (ECCO)," the program was designed specifically for career academies but can be adapted to fit many educational settings. "Career academies" are schools within schools that enroll up to several hundred students. They are organized by a career theme, such as health sciences or media arts. Besides regular high school courses, career academy students enroll in a sequence of career-technical courses centering on the theme area. Finally, students participate in internships and other experiences in workplaces--which is often called "work-based learning"--to reinforce the connections between what they learn in the classroom and their future careers. An earlier random assignment study of career academies conducted by MDRC demonstrated the effectiveness of the model. Over the years, as the number of career academies grew, the parallel pressure to ensure that all students meet high academic standards inadvertently crowded out time for career exploration activities--the very activities that nonexperimental evidence from the MDRC study suggests may have played an instrumental role in causing the large increases in earnings that career academy participants experienced over the eight-year period following high school graduation. Career academies typically cite a lack of time, skills, and resources as the reason for not offering such activities to all of their students. ECCO is a capacity-building program to help career academies offer opportunities to students to learn about their workplace and postsecondary options through four core components: (1) a series of one-hour in-class lessons; (2) visits to local work sites; (3) visits to college campuses; and (4) a six-week internship offered to all students in the summer before or during their senior year. The curriculum includes guidance for educators on how to arrange and manage students' out-of-school experiences as well as guides for partnering employers. This report summarizes findings from a three-year study of the implementation of the ECCO program. ECCO was launched in 18 career academies in six school districts in three states: (1) California; (2) Florida; and (3) Georgia. The purposes of the study are to document the experiences of these schools in adopting the program and to assess the extent to which, when given support and resources, programs like ECCO can be fully implemented. The study also collected descriptive data to assess the promise of the program to improve student participation in career and college exploration activities and to improve their awareness of postsecondary options. Appended are: (1) Data Sources and Survey Response Analysis; (2) Additional Findings About Implementation; and (3) Additional Analyses of Student Outcomes and Methodological Explanations. Individual chapters contain footnotes. (Contains 38 tables, 12 figures, and 6 boxes.) [This report was written with Marie-Andree Somers.].

Download or read book Manufacturing Employer Engagement with High Impact Work based Learning Programs of Career Academy High Schools written by Christopher R. Neff and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Career and Technical Education provides the education and training to develop skills for the future workforce from local to global communities. Career academies are one model for education, aligning academic, CTE, and work-based learning programming. Manufacturing employers, identifying a skills gap as a local challenge to hiring talent to fill current skilled positions, particularly in the Midwest, held certain beliefs to engaging with a local school district implementing career academies at the high school level. This qualitative grounded theory study identified a practical theory related to business and education partnerships, namely Opportunities to Engage. Decision makers and hiring employers of various sized manufacturing companies provided input on the perceived benefits and barriers to partnering with high schools implementing robust work-based learning in a career academy model. Partnerships between employers and high schools are vital for the success of CTE. Implementing work-based learning within a career academy model requires communication, commitment from key leaders, collaboration between the workplace and school district to be successful. Addressing these barriers and capitalizing on the benefits identified by the employers can lead to impactful programming that addresses the workforce needs and provide high school students meaningful experience and career development.

Download or read book Rigor and Academic Achievement written by Linda Kyees and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this study was to determine if students who attended high school Career Academy classes, as part of Career and Technical Education, showed greater academic achievement than students who attended traditional high school classes. While all participants attended schools in the same school district, and were seeking the same goal of graduation with a standard diploma, the Career Academy students had the benefit of all classes being directed by a team of teachers who helped them connect their learning to their desired career through collaborative learning projects and assignments. The traditional high school classes taught each subject independent of other subjects and did not have specific connections to desired career goals of the students. The study used a causal-comparative research design and the participants included 1,142 students from 11th and 12th grades who attended 9 high schools in a diversely populated area of central Florida with 571 enrolled in the Career Academies and 571 enrolled in traditional classes. The 10th-grade FCAT scores served as the dependent variable. All students attended similar classes with similar content, making the primary variable the difference in academic gains between students participating in the Career Academy design and the traditional design classes. Using the Man-Whitney U Test resulted in the Career Academy group achieving the higher scores overall. This resulted in rejection of the first null-hypothesis. Further examination determined that the 10th-grade FCAT scores were greater for the average students group, which comprised the largest portion of the participant group, also resulted in rejection of the second null-hypothesis. The gifted and at-risk student group scores resulted in failure to reject the third and fourth null-hypotheses.

Download or read book Helping Students Make the Transition Into High School written by Marie-Andrě Somers and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs)--also called Freshman Academies--have attracted national attention as a particularly intensive and promising approach for supporting a successful transition for high school freshmen. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school within a school. NGAs have four core structural components: (1) a designated separate space within the high school, (2) a ninth-grade administrator who oversees the academy, (3) a faculty assigned to teach only ninth-grade students, and (4) teachers organized into interdisciplinary teams that have both students and a planning period in common. The theory of action behind NGAs is that when these components are employed together, they interact to create a more personalized learning environment where ninth-grade students feel less anonymous and more individually supported. This, in turn, should help students succeed in school and stay on track to high school graduation. NGAs have shown promising results when employed as part of a whole-school reform model, but in these cases schools have received external support from a developer to create and sustain them. A growing number of schools and districts have been experimenting with NGAs on their own, but the little research that exists on their effectiveness is limited to anecdotal accounts. This study, which is based on a quasi-experimental research design, examines the effect of NGAs on students' progress toward graduation, their academic achievement, and their behavior in several school districts in Florida. The sample for this study includes 27 high schools that created NGAs between 2001-2002 and 2006-2007, along with 16 comparison high schools that serve ninth-grade students with similar characteristics as students in the NGA schools. As context for understanding the impact findings, this study also looks at the extent to which the key features of the NGA model were implemented in the NGA schools in the study and how this differs from the structures and supports in the comparison schools. The key finding is that the NGAs in this study do not appear to have improved students' academic or behavioral outcomes (credit earning, state test scores, course marks, attendance, suspensions, or expulsions). The findings also suggest that it can be difficult for schools to fully implement the components of the NGA model without expert assistance: Three years after their creation, only half the NGAs in the study had all four structural components of the model in place. Nationally, school districts continue to create NGAs, and recent efforts to implement them have incorporated various enhancements that are intended to strengthen and improve their implementation, but little is known about their effectiveness. Because students' experience in ninth grade is an important predictor of their future success, these efforts to create and improve NGAs should be examined in future studies. Appended are: (1) Technical Information; and (2) Beyond the Sunshine State: Ninth Grade Academies in Other School Districts. ["Helping Students Make the Transition into High School: The Effect of Ninth Grade Academies on Students' Academic and Behavioral Outcomes" was written with Janet Quint.].

Download or read book Evidence Summary for Career Academies Top Tier Evidence Initiative written by Coalition for Evidence-based Policy and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U.S. social programs, set up to address important problems, often fall short by funding specific models/strategies ("interventions") that are not effective. When evaluated in scientifically-rigorous studies, social interventions in K-12 education, job training, crime prevention, and other areas are frequently found ineffective or marginally effective. Interventions that produce sizable, sustained effects on important life outcomes tend to be the exception. The Top Tier Evidence Initiative seeks to assist policy officials in identifying interventions meeting the Congressional Top Tier evidence standard, defined in recent legislative provisions as "well-designed randomized controlled trials [showing] sizeable, sustained effects on important outcomes." The summary of evidence presented in this report is based on a systematic search of the literature, and correspondence with leading researchers, to identify all well-designed and implemented randomized controlled trials of Career Academies. The 9 Career Academies studied in this summary operate within large high schools in low-income, urban areas, and have three distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are organized as small learning communities (150 to 200 students) to create a more supportive, personalized learning environment; (2) They combine academic and career and technical curricula around a career theme; and (3) They establish partnerships with local employers to provide career awareness and work-based learning opportunities for students. Each Academy typically focuses on a specific field (e.g., health care). Students are recruited to attend, and then must submit an application. Approved applicants enter a Career Academy in 9th or 10th grade, and are taught by a single team of teachers through grade 12. Among key findings are an 11% increase in average annual earnings ($2,460 per year), sustained over the eight years after scheduled high school graduation. The effect was concentrated among men (who experienced a 17% earnings increase), and was not statistically significant for women. This summary of the evidence identified one such study--a large, multi-site trial--described in this report. Strong evidence of effectiveness applies to the Career Academy model evaluated in this trial as opposed to other types of Career Academies. The Panel of experts finds that this intervention meets the Congressional Top Tier evidence standard. Intervention benefits and costs are discussed.

Download or read book Examining the Effectiveness of a Career Academy Program Using Multiple Measures of Job Attitudes and Job Performance written by Francis X. Linnehan and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Career Academies written by Kelly Scott Christensen and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using empirical data collected at three sites through semi-structured open-ended interviews, field notes, and public documents, this researcher gathered rich descriptive data leading to an in-depth understanding of the central research question "What processes enabled the development of dual enrollment, career academy partnerships between selected high schools and community colleges in Nebraska?" This researcher selected sites with the goal of discovering and understanding the decisions and actions with in each case to provide a unique perspective to help close the knowledge gap and extend current research. Participant data included ten secondary, postsecondary and emerging informants who are key to forming the collaborative processes related to career academies.

Download or read book Career Academy Students Perform Better Than Other Students During High School written by Florida. Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: