• Increased investments in career-related experiences during high school can improve students' postsecondary labor market prospects.
• It is feasible to accomplish the goals of school-to-career and career-technical education without compromising academic goals.
• The findings suggest that career academies make special efforts to serve students who are at risk of dropping out of high school without compromising their capacity to provide college access opportunities.
• Career academies served as pathways to a range of postsecondary education opportunities, but they do not appear to have been more effective than options available to non-academy groups.
• Because career academies are difficult to implement on a large scale with high levels of fidelity, the evidence from this report may not apply to programs not fully implemented or that use only selected features of career academies.

The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) presented a forum on this report in June.

Teaching by Choice: Community Colleges Expand K-12 STEM Pathways and Practices by AACC with support from the National Science Foundation includes recommendations for community colleges to expand post-baccalaureate teacher education programs and enhanced professional development in STEM for K-12 teachers.

Institutions need to:

• Model hands-on, inquiry-based teaching methodology in professional development and post-baccalaureate programs.
• Offer professional development workshops that meet school accreditation requirements for teachers such as CEUs, credits; or stipends based on attendance or completion of specific activities.
• Offer content-specific professional development that meshes classroom management, pedagogy, and student motivational strategy.
• Incorporate face-to-face instruction and teamwork in online professional development programs.
• Prepare teachers to fully utilize the technologies of their local school district.

• What institutions provide CTE?
• What is offered?
• Who participates and what courses and majors do they select?
• Who teaches CTE?
• What are the outcomes associated with CTE participation, including academic attainment, postsecondary education, and employment and earnings?

Findings include:

• Just over 90% of public high school grads from the class of 2005 took at least one CTE course during high school.
• Business, health care and computer science were ranked highest in occupational programs offered.
• At the postsecondary level, more credential-seeking undergrads majored in business and marketing and in health care than in any other career field in 2005.
• Undergrads considered themselves to be an employee who studies rather than a student who works (28% vs. 18%).
• Between 1990 and 2005, a larger percentage of the 2005 public high school graduates who took high-level 9th-grade mathematics courses completed an occupational concen-tration compared with their 1990 peers (an
  increase of 8 %), while a smaller percentage of 2005 graduates who took low-level
  9th-grade mathematics courses completed an occupational concentration compared with their 1990 peers (a decrease of 9 %).
• Between 1990 and 2005, core academic coursetaking (including English, mathematics,
  science, and social studies) of public high school graduates increased (by 1.8 credits on average), including among those who participated in the occupational curriculum (increases of 1.4-2.6 credits).

This report analyzed data from 11 different
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) surveys.