chool reform efforts that have been employed nationwide, the career academy model has emerged as a strategy that works to improve student outcomes.” These career courses have been around for 40 years and continue to thrive as they have two objectives: career and college preparation. The courses are not just for education and learning about careers or preparing for college but also, in some schools, give a full in depth look into the work that will be done with hands on experience and the development of skills beyond that of just education. The results show as well. A study by an independent research organization, the MDRC, showed that students who take part in one of these career academies have a greater chance to complete the required credits for high school.
“College knowledge: A critical component of college and career readiness”
According to the reading, approximately 7200 students drop out of US schools each day, making up a total of 1.3 million students annually who fail to graduate high school in four years. It has been reported that the main reasons these students are dropping out is because they are disinterested in the courses given to them or they felt that these courses were not relevant to the world beyond high school. As well the students going into college tend to be uninformed on the process as a whole. Many students don’t receive counseling on courses that interest them which typically leads to another confusing few years. Now there are programs created to help with this issue that are supporting the students path to college and future. Programs are provided to give early college exposure for the students before they get to college so they know what they will be facing in the coming years. There are other programs where students get the complete feel for the college experience called “Early college high schools” where students attend school on a college campus and use the facilities and take higher level courses all while still being in high school.
“Blending high school and college can sharpen the focus of each”
Early college is a way to get a first glimpse into the higher education world as a student who is still enrolled in K-12. Early college students gain multiple advantages over their normal high school going counterparts such as academic acceleration, building a college-going identity, easing the second-postsecondary transition, etc. Many schools across the country are transitioning to this format of early college as it holds many forms of ways for students to get ahead of the game earlier than others. Some schools have college professors teach these dual enrollment courses as if the students are actually in a college environment, and some put their own high school teachers to the task with a different format of the courses to represent a higher education style course. These courses are to portray higher education so for them to do that they need to uphold quality with three things, faculty, curriculum, and support. These high school teachers who are teaching dual-enrollment must have the same qualifications as other college faculty. The curriculum must follow the college campus, use the same assessments, and follow the same grading policy. The support must have resources available to the students for tutoring and college counseling so the students do not get left behind.
Current State of Research Paper
Everything relating to my hypothesis and research has been going relatively fine for now. Possibly in the future I may want to change my hypothesis to incorporate career exposure in high school as a whole, but for now everything is working fine for me and I am interested to read more about the topic.