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Dropout
Overview
Career Academies are school-within-school programs operating in high schools. They offer career-related curricula based on a career theme, academic coursework, and work experience through partnerships with local employers.1
Research
One study of Career Academies met What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. This randomized controlled trial included 474 youth who were predicted to be most at-risk of dropping out of high school prior to the intervention.2 The Academies were located in eight urban areas in six states.
Effectiveness
Career Academies were found to have potentially positive effects on staying in school, potentially positive effects on progressing in school, and no discernible effects on completing school for those youth most at-risk of dropping out prior to the intervention. 3 The Career Academies served a more heterogeneous population, and the results for the high-risk youth may not be independent of their participation in the intervention with youth less at risk of dropping out.
| Staying in school | Progressing in school | Completing school | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rating of effectiveness | Potentially positive effects | Potentially positive effects | No discernible effects |
| Improvement index4 | Average: +13 percentile points | Average: +13 percentile points Range: +11 to +15 percentile points |
Average: -0.1 percentile points |
2 This report focuses on the 474 youth in the study sample who were most at risk of dropping out of high school because the Career Academies model initially focused on high-risk youth; these youth represent 27% of the total study sample of 1,764. Researchers used student background characteristics (including sibling dropped out, overage for grade, transferred schools two or more times, and attendance, GPA, and credits earned in the year of random assignment) to develop a model to predict whether students in the comparison group dropped out of school, and then applied the estimated model to predict which intervention-group students were most likely to drop out. The findings for those youth considered less at-risk of dropping out of school are presented in Appendices A4.1–A4.3.
3 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
4 These values show the average and range of improvement indices for all findings in the three review domains across the one study included in this report. The range is provided only if more than one outcome was measured within a domain.