Can Career Academies Work as a School Turnaround Strategy?

• In Event: Career and Technical Education SIG Paper Session: Administration, Organization, and Programming

Abstract

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, college and career readiness has become the central focus of education policy in the United States. Career academies (CAs) are an increasingly popular way to support students in their postsecondary transitions, but little causal evidence exists about whether this model of schooling is effective in promoting learning and transition to adulthood outcomes. We capitalize on the adoption of the CA model in a large school district and employ a generalized difference-in-differences approach to test whether adopting the CA model caused improved graduation rates and test score outcomes. We find that the adoption of the CA model improved graduation rates and that schools that had the lowest graduate rates at baseline saw larger impacts.

Authors

• Joshua Childs, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shaun Michael Dougherty, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannah Kistler, Annenberg Institute, Brown University
  Presenting Author