Improving School-to-Work Transitions

AN ARRAY OF programs, policies, and institutions in the United States attempts to improve the transitions of youths from school to work. These components of the educational system have taken a back seat in the past decade to educational reform focused on measurable academic outcomes, as reflected in…

SCHOOLS ARE THE main institutions preparing young people to enter productive roles in society. To support the assumption that schools respond to labor-market needs, many scholars refer to human-capital and functionalist theories. Even critics who disparage such responsiveness believe that it occurs …

DURING THE LATE 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the U.S. economy was seen as not competitive with respect to other major industrial countries, concerns were voiced about the quality of the public education system. Critics of public education linked the quality of public schools to the perceive…

THE CAREER-ACADEMY model-a school-within-a-school, career focused high school program of study often with related work experience-has spread rapidly throughout the United States since the mid-eighties, in large part because educators and policymakers believe it to be a promising approach for encoura…

The three preceding tables present a large number of estimates, and it is difficult to get a sense of their overall message by perusing the tables. Therefore, in table 4.11 we offer a summary of the results from tables 4.8 to 4.10. In columns 1 and 3 we summarize the results for the forgotten half, …

FOR A NUMBER of years, we have been helping high schools and districts that are attempting to create or improve career academies- hence our title: "Learning by Doing Career Academies."4 Our assistance includes developing the schools' capacity to keep track of results for students by relying mainly o…