SLCs and Career Academies
Why are these good ideas?
The rationales for SLCs and career academies are several:
- Many high schools are very large today, and students often find them alienating and fail to make connections in them, thus becoming likelier dropouts.
- One of the biggest problems in high schools is boredom, caused in large part by students who don’t see the relevance of what they are being taught.
- Grouping students into smaller units, showing them connections among their subjects, and orienting them to the future can help to address these problems.
- Academies in particular promote connections: among subjects, between what goes on in school and outside it, and between high school and what comes after.
- A number of studies of these approaches have shown positive impacts on such measures as attendance, retention, grades, graduation rates, and employment.
A central question in this context is: How do these approaches relate to more college going? Here is what researchers think:
- SLCs bring students together into a structure that makes them feel more connected to their teachers and other students, and thus more engaged.
- Teachers get to know their students well and take on roles usually associated with counselors, such as helping to guide them toward future goals.
- In career academies students orient their high school coursework toward some future endeavor and learn the value of higher education in their field.
- One longitudinal study demonstrated a statistically significant positive impact on college going among academy graduates.
The United States Department of Education and Education Northwest websites have references to many research studies. One that provides a brief history of career academies and the research done on them is the Career Academies Support Network's Career Academies, A Proven Strategy to Prepare High School Students for College and Careers.
Combining Academic and Career-Technical Courses to Make College an Option for More Students
Stern, Stearns; 2008
Explains rationale for combining academic and career-technical courses to prepare students for college and careers. Summarizes research and describes challenges, with specific reference to California. Stern-Stearns1-21-08.doc (104.45KB)
A Proven Strategy to Prepare High School Students for College and Careers
Stern, D., Dayton, C., Raby, M. Career Academy Support Network, UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education; Updated 2010.
The growth and evolution of career academies; a review of their impacts on students; the role of SLCs and academies in restructuring high schools. http://casn.berkeley.edu/resource_files/Proven_Strategy_2-25-1010-07-07-03-29-28.pdf
Last modified on 12/10/2010