Resource Category Descriptions
Guides and articles
Rationale and Research
The “Proven Strategy” guide reviews the rationale for and history of career academies, and the extensive research and resulting findings concerning their effectiveness. Several other reports add to the extensive body of knowledge about academies and their effects on student achievement.
Academy Design
Career academies are a well defined model, embedded in state law in California and in national standards developed by a group of organizations that support them. This section provides these national standards and guides to planning a new academy and handling related master scheduling.
College and Career Resources
This section contains a guide to web-based curriculum useful in academies, including for integrated projects and for many career fields, a guide to developing a career-technical course sequence in any career/industry field, and a guide to establishing dual enrollment programs with nearby colleges. A companion website shows how high schools can strengthen their college going support: collegetools.berkeley.edu.
Partnerships with Employers and Post-secondary Education
Here you’ll find a guide to developing employer and higher education partners for an academy, a mentor program handbook, an internship program handbook, and other materials for involving partners from outside the high school.
Evaluation and Accountability
This section contains a guide that academy teachers and administrators can use to self-assess how well they’ve implemented the program, plus a broad set of standards and a related rubric to gauge the quality of similar “Linked Learning” programs.
Related Resources
There are many resources hard to classify: lessons learned from evaluating Small Learning Communities in 25 high schools, a guide to non-curricular web-based materials (Getting Connected), serving as a “mentor” academy for other newer academies, and implementing academies school-wide. Look here for an assortment of such guides.
Toolbox
A menu of toolbox items—templates and forms—appears in the right sidebar of every Resource page. The category titles are self-descriptive.