Career and Technical Education (CTE) has predominantly existed parallel to academic education. Recently however, CTE and academic instruction have begun to intersect and merge. This confluence can be very beneficial for students with disabilities. Careful planning for both academic and CTE instruction is critical. It allows for students with…

"Career Academies" is a dropout prevention strategy for youth considered most at risk of dropping out of high school. Students in the program take both career-related and academic courses and acquire work experience through partnerships with local employers. "Career Academies" integrate rigorous academic curricula with career…

Volusia County (Florida) Schools' Career and Technical Education (CTE) program has a high school graduation rate of 95 percent. That beats the districtwide rate of 78 percent. That's not all: The 4,500 students enrolled in 33 different career programs at 10 high schools have higher grade point averages in general and do better in Advanced…

Using a causal-comparative design, this quantitative study investigated whether or not the curriculum integration of academic subjects with career and technical education classes affected secondary students' academic performance as assessed by scores on standardized tests. The purposive sample was drawn from students in Trade and Industry classes…

What do we know about the impact and implementation of Career Academies? This paper provides answers to this question. Career Academies have been around for over 30 years. Their original design stressed facilitating the school-to-work transition. In the early 1990's the focus began to shift to preparing participating students for both college and…

Students preparing for college and careers need access to career-focused programs of study that combine challenging academic content and intellectually demanding career/technical (CT) studies. Schools wanting to raise student achievement can create career-focused programs of study that connect a solid academic core with a sequence of CT courses.…

This newsletter includes vignettes about schools that are effectively integrating academic and career/technical (CT) studies to help more students find meaning in their learning and to motivate students to make great effort to achieve. This is part of a series of newsletters describing best practices for implementing the "High Schools That Work"…

Career academies are specialized high schools that blend challenging academic courses with realistic work experiences. An academy's curriculum organizes academic instruction around an industry or occupational theme and enables students to complete college preparatory courses and acquire work-related knowledge and skill. (Author/JOW)

Career and technical education has always been able to change with the times. New technologies and new educational challenges have made such change necessary. Sometimes a school must reinvent itself and undergo a rebirth as part of that adaptation. That is what has happened at the former St. Louis Career Academy. In the 2004-05 school year, the…

This document presents the basics of the career academy, a method of integrating vocational with academic educational systems and of providing a contextually valid education. The first section outlines the problems that the academy systems attempt to address, the four major principles essential for the success of career academies, and the nine…

As more career and technical educators are faced with integrating academics into their curricula, workshops for teachers may help them to get started. In this brief article, Crystal B. Taylor, Ph.D., director of career, technical and adult education for the Roanoke City Public Schools in Virginia, describes four workshops on integrating academics…

Most school-to-career initiatives are limited to career education and applied learning, combining academic basics and workplace readiness skills. A high-school credentialing system would offer a structured pathway to academic and technical credentials, requiring that students earn a college-placement readiness credential and industry-recognized…

Integration of academic and vocational curricula is missing from most American classrooms because integration that is rigorous, authentic, and sustained is much more difficult than most advocates imagine. The difficulty arises because teachers must do the following: keep integration sharply focused on clear, well-defined educational objectives;…

The relationship between high school restructuring and vocational reform was examined in case studies of two moderately large comprehensive California high schools that have undertaken schoolwide efforts to establish new forms of social organization for teachers' and students' work. Over the 2-year study period, several visits were made to each…

A fifth strand of the "new vocationalism" is trying to align academic and vocational education by restructuring high schools to provide more consistent integration opportunities. These efforts take the form of career academies, clusters or career paths, and occupational high schools or magnet schools. Active, student-centered pedagogies…