Announcing the Ford PAS and Ford NGL Thought Leader Series
This month's topic:
Supporting Career Academies is smart business, not charity
By Richard K. Delano, Ford Motor Company Fund Advisory Council
Our series of Thought Leader essays that appear regularly on the Ford PAS NGL website (www.fordNGL.org) seek to provide you with compelling and concise topics important to scaling up and sustaining a network of successful career academies. We want to make it easy for you to understand key concepts and share them with others in your community, with the goal of helping you mobilize like-minded individuals in order to achieve your goals.
This installment summarizes our thinking on business engagement, a critical ingredient in supporting your career academy network. We acknowledge that businesses have many different options to support education, but we believe that business investment in a career academy network offers local and regional businesses the most significant Return on Investment (ROI), both personally and professionally, than other choices. This Thought Leader essay helps you analyze this ROI. We invite you to share this analysis widely.
This article builds on our December 2008 Thought Leader piece focused on how to calculate the new dollars that career academies bring to districts, and project larger new-dollar flows from increased career academy enrollment over the next five years. Many states (including California, Texas and Florida) fund schools based on student attendance. Interventions like career academies that link attendance and graduation rates generate new district revenue.
Recent meetings in Florida suggest a growing interest in funding the development of a "financial calculator" to simplify and validate the process of estimating future district financial value of implementing the career academy model. In 2009, as our economy sours, our schools will be hard-pressed to sustain their support for academies. No district is immune to budget cuts. The question is what to cut. So we make the case that career academies are, in fact, income-generators and as such, it does not make sense to reduce funding to them.
Most business leaders receive an array of proposals to support education. These requests include out-of-school youth, early childhood literacy, children's health, field trips, campus improvements, mentorships, principal for a day and many others. And that's just the K-12 arena. Business leaders find it very challenging for them to make informed decisions in the absence of strong comparative data.
We believe that supporting an expanding career academy network offers the best possible ROI for business to support education through their philanthropic giving, their volunteer time, and even through their human resources and marketing budgets. We believe career academies should be a top investment priority. Here's why.
Businesspeople and their business intermediaries—including Chambers of Commerce, workforce development organizations and economic development entities—are interested in two key outcomes:
• Ensuring a vibrant and responsive workforce pipeline
• Controlling the local costs of doing business (sometimes referred to as "cost-of-place").
Career academies make substantial and documented contributions to both of these outcomes.
Making the Business Case: Begin With Data
Career academies have amassed an arsenal of data over the 40-year history of this reform strategy. In fact, we know of no other reform strategy that has been so carefully studied. We have summarized this data at: http://www.fordNGL.org/nav_career.html. Through this link, you will find a rich mix of federally funded longitudinal data that has tracked career academy graduates for over a decade and contrasted their performance with a control group of non-academy peers. You will be able to study the impact of a broad adoption of the career academy in Sacramento City district and review the improvements in just six years. What you will discover is that this high school redesign strategy works anywhere in the country where it is implemented successfully and that it works with all types of young people. Additionally, that this reform strategy improves both academic and technical outcomes.
Understanding What Makes Career Academies Successful
Career and technical education (CTE) has long been known to increase interest in attending high school. Kids would come to school for their CTE and tolerate their academic courses which, in contrast with their CTE, seemed irrelevant to them. In well-designed career academies, the technical teachers become part of an academic team. Academic teachers bring the career theme into their courses through projects and lessons that make their courses far more relevant. Think of the career academy as Christmas tree, a central structure that can be further adorned with mentors, job shadowing, internships, externships for the academic teachers and so forth.
English teachers become conversant in contract writing and preparing for interviews, science teachers can explain how proteins in egg whites align to create a lemon meringue and math teachers can describe a sloping roof.
Calculating the Career Academy ROI
Our colleges and workplaces are now burdened with a remarkably large percentage of high school graduates who are not ready for the workplace or college. Because career academies encourage high school students to lift their academic skills, as well as their technical capabilities, these students are far more likely to be ready to go directly to work in high-wage, high-skill jobs in your community. They are more likely to pursue post-secondary courses to further their capabilities and they are more apt to be successful lifelong learners. They will need less technical remediation on the job and less academic remediation going on to post-secondary.
We are told by officials in Montgomery County Schools, Maryland, that their career academy graduates required 50 percent less academic remediation when moving on to Montgomery County Community College. We will have a mountain of data from Florida career academy students moving on to post-secondary and the workplace in contrast with their non-academy peers.
The Haas Center at the Business School at the University of West Florida developed a community financial calculator that illustrates the positive financial benefits of graduating additional students ready to work in high-wage, high-skill career fields. This analysis summarizes the direct impact in terms of wages and taxes paid, as well as the community "multiplier" that each job has on new demand for support services. One result of this ability to analyze economic development benefits is recently enacted Florida state legislation to increase the number of career academies in the state and to financially incent high schools to graduate more career- and college-ready students.
Individual businesses and the larger business community understand the profound importance of increasing the skilled worker base to business vitality and long-term community prosperity. The availability of a skilled workforce is clearly the number one reason businesses choose a particular new location for their company, or for business expansion.
Avoiding Long-term Community Costs of High School Dropouts
Another ingredient in analyzing a community's ROI from implementing the career academy model is found in costs that academies help a community avoid. Several authoritative studies help us estimate the lifetime cost of a high school dropout at around $260,000. This figure, multiplied by the legions of dropouts most communities experience, is a major contributor to what economic developers call "cost-of-place." When Sacramento City District succeeded in reducing their dropout rate from 24 percent to 14 percent over a six-year period through the widespread adoption of the career academy model, it took the first step in significantly reducing its long-term cost-of-place.
Communities can project similar reductions in the number of students who leave school prior to graduation as their share of career academy students grows. This projection and the school district new revenue projections mentioned above combine to dramatically illustrate the community ROI that can be achieved from this model.
Aligning Business Support to the Career Academy Model
As the number of students learning in career academies increases, so does the need for local businesses to align its support. As the percentage of students served reaches 30 percent or higher, the task of alignment becomes more complex, keeping in mind that we want all academy students to enjoy the full academy experience.
Ford Motor Company Fund developed a set of 12 Best Practices observed in communities that have scaled up and sustained their career academy networks. These are displayed at www.fordNGL.org and these strategies are guiding communities around the country in developing their career academy networks. Following is a quick summary of the most important Best Practices related to business engagement.
1. Master Plan – Lays out a logical career academy expansion plan based on local workforce needs and school capacity to change.
2. Industry Education Councils – Pipeline dialogue among pathway employers and educators, including K-12; aligns supply and demand.
3. Career Cluster Entrepreneurs – Specific individuals, conversant with businesses in their career pathway, bring needed support to career academies with which they align.
Case studies have also been added to the site to bring each of these Best Practices to life.
Closing Thoughts
Perhaps most remarkable to us is how quickly this model can be taken to scale and how rapid positive results can take root. Growing a successful career academy network is hard work. But the strategies are better understood today, as are the benefits to be derived by students, teacher, administrators and businesspeople. Every four years, high schools experience an entirely new population of young people ready to learn in the setting that communities provide. They only get one chance at this experience and we have the power to alter that experience in profoundly positive ways.
Previous Thought Leader Essays:
Outlining the financial benefits and positive outcomes of career academies and demonstrating how they more than justify the investments in building a career academy network.
By Richard K. Delano, Ford Motor Company Fund Advisory Council
Reinventing the Workforce and Bolstering the Economy through Career Academies and More Relevant High Schools
By Cheryl Carrier, Program Director, 21st Century Education Programs, Ford Motor Company Fund