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Pathways to College & Career
Schools are increasingly being called upon to prepare all students for success in both college and career. Of the fastest growing jobs in the United States, 80 percent require at least some postsecondary education. Yet, only half of the nation’s high school graduates are academically prepared for college. EGC projects described below examine what it will take to organize and resource schools to ensure all students graduate ready for college and career.
College Know How is a three-year initiative to develop and pilot curricula supporting high school students’ transition from high school into college. The project also is piloting a professional development framework to assist teachers in integrating College Know How curricula into core academic courses. Funded by the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the initiative identified college expectations for thinking and planning skills across a variety of subjects, and provides high school students with learning experiences designed to develop those skills.
The target student audience is first generation college-goers, although it is anticipated that many others will benefit when the initiative is taken to scale. Two curriculum products will be developed: a full credit stand-alone course for 12th graders and a 9th through 11th grade strand of materials that can be incorporated into academic courses, homerooms or advisories, with a focus on helping students develop skills in demonstrating learning and understanding through writing and other forms of academic and technical communication, for instance, graphing.
The initiative is fueled by intellectually diverse sources, ranging across David Conley’s College Knowledge, Adelman’s 1999 Toolbox and successor publications, the many findings from Indiana University’s surveys of college, community college and high school students’ attitudes and experiences, and our own and our colleagues’ experiences with and learning from students and teachers in challenged urban and rural high schools across the country.
Robert Balfanz is principal investigator and Joanna Hornig Fox is co-principal investigator. For more information, contact jfox@csos.jhu.edu.
The Effects of Career and Technical High Schools
What is the impact of attending a Career and Technical (CTE) high school on academic outcomes such as on-time high school graduation, academic growth, and completion of college preparatory course sequences?
What is the impact of CTE high schools on postsecondary enrollment and graduation?
Does attending a CTE school have an impact on labor market outcomes, such as total wages and probability of full-time employment?
These are the key questions of a study being conducted by the Center, using administrative data on students from a large urban school district with five CTE schools. Given the growing interest in preparing all students for college and career, an examination of the benefits of Career and Technical high schools is particularly timely.
This study takes advantage of a natural experiment in which applicants to CTE high schools were randomly selected by a lottery. Academic, labor market, and postsecondary outcomes for students who “won” a spot in a CTE school through the lottery are compared to those who “lost” the lottery.
A final report will be given to the U.S. Department of Education in 2010.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Education