In 2014-15, the high school graduation rate reached a record high of 83 percent (U.S. Department of Education 2016). Despite the gains, over half a million students still drop out of high school each year (U.S. Department of Education 2015). High schools have adopted various strategies designed to keep students who are at risk of not graduating in…

In order to assess how completely a Small Learning Community (SLC) and/or Career Academy is implemented in any given site, and to connect the degree of implementation with the amount of improvement in student performance, two kinds of information are needed. The first is information on the quality of implementation, which can be collected by…

This book examines the capacity of the career academy--one of the initiatives spawned by the school-to-work movement--to address academic reform in terms of increased education and workplace skills. Qualitative data collected as part of a 7-year local evaluation of career academies and a data set that contains transcript data on a population of…

This volume features the reform journeys of six American high schools. The six high schools portrayed here include four large comprehensive high schools (Oakland Technical High in Oakland, California, and Brighton High in Boston, Massachusetts, are urban; Sir Francis Drake in Marin County, California, and Rex Putnam in North Clackamas, Oregon, are…

The outcomes and implementation of career academy programs in California were examined in a study of one school district's efforts to implement a uniform career academy model in 1990-1996. A cohort of approximately 10,000 students who were sophomores in the district's comprehensive high schools between 1990 and 1993 were followed through high…

This publication describes the following six programs designed to improve education and employment preparation for adolescents and funded by the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds: (1) High Schools that Work, a national initiative that assists more than 1,000 high schools in 22 states as they upgrade their rigor and improve their quality of…