Career tech center’s high grad rate
CART in Clovis serves 1,300 students
The Center for Advanced Research and Technology in Clovis is an impressive place, a model facility for career and technical education that other school districts will recreate one day when they once again have money.
Serving 1,300 students in Clovis and Fresno, CART blends college prep academics with technical skills for juniors and seniors who work half-days in 13 labs. They include biomedical engineering, forensic science, engineering, advanced communications, and global dynamics.
CART teachers and administrators have had testimonials and anecdotal evidence from employers and students who said they found the real-world exposure to college and careers challenging and inspiring. Now, there is additional data to support these assumptions.
A seven-year study showed that a larger proportion of CART graduates go on to community college than high school graduates statewide, and also significantly larger numbers than similarly matched peers in Clovis and Fresno. To a lesser extent, the comparison also holds for graduates who go on to a four-year university.
Overall, 72 percent of CART graduates since 2002-03 went on to community college, compared with 29 percent of high school graduates statewide. That comparison held up for all demographic groups, including African American graduates (68 to 32 percent) and Hispanics (73 to 32 percent).
More pertinent was the peer comparison, matching students in CART with juniors and seniors in the district with similar demographics, parent education levels, and scores on standardized tests; 71 percent of CART grads enrolled in community college, compared with 60 percent of their peers. The difference held a year later, with 62 percent of CART graduates still enrolled in community college, compared with 51 percent of non-CART graduates.
Students solder at a robotics lat at CART (courtesy of CART).
CART courses are A-G aligned, fulfilling an admission requirement to a CSU or UC campus. The percentage of CART graduates going on to a four-year university was 23 percent, compared with 21 percent of non-CART graduates. The study didn’t tabulate the percentage of students who chose community college to save money and then transferred to UC or CSU after two years.
The study was done by California Partnership for Achieving Student Success, with funding by the James Irvine Foundation, a key promoter of the concept of linked learning. This strategy prepares students for work careers or college through project-based, technical applications within career pathways. Irvine has funded district-wide linked learning planning in a dozen districts.
CART, serving as a regional facility for students from 13 high schools, differs from career academies – small schools within a school that provide three-year programs in a career pathway, along with internships and academic support. Career academies also have increased college-going rates, especially for students at risk, by creating a small-school community.
Devin Blizzard, CEO of CART, said that CART, too, has been able to provide students with a small learning community. The 100 students in each of the 13 career pathways study and work together daily in a three-hour interdisciplinary block, team-taught by three teachers. They break into small groups for hands-on projects; about 40 percent have internships.
CART has equipment that few individual high schools can afford, like polymerase chain-reaction machines and a spectrometer in the $1.5 million lab for the biomedical program that opened last fall. The psychology lab is team-taught by a chemistry, English, and neuroscience teacher (the only California program with a teacher who majored in neuroscience, according to Blizzard).
“The CART effect is not just technical knowledge but a set of values, like tenacity,” Blizzard said. “Students get to experience a profession in a high school environment.”
FYI: CART was formed in 1999. Their recently published study goes back to 2003. ConnectEd, which is the means by which the Irvine Foundation supports Linked Learning Programs (once called “Multiple Pathways”), wasn’t created until 2006. So it is a little odd that Irvine is taking credit for CART’s successes. Talk to CART people about them being a model LLP and they’ll simply laugh it off, knowing Irvine/ConnectEd had nothing to do with the advent of their unique program.
Keep in mind this exciting, regional program is accessible to only a small percentage of students from the feeder high schools (and requires those students to leave their home campuses each day). So while everyone should be proud about CART’s successes, it isn’t something that can be modeled statewide to serve all secondary students. More traditional and proven approaches to delivering CTE must also be preserved and enhanced to ensure that all high school students have access to these life-directing and career preparing programs.
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Dear John and Top-Ed Team,
Firstly, thank you for celebrating the college and career readiness of CART graduates and the recently released longitudinal matched pairs research study. As a point of important clarification, it has not been the impression of the CART education team that the James Irvine Foundation has claimed to have developed the CART model. Many of our founding faculty and business partners remain actively engaged with the school. Indeed, it is their vision which has enabled a unique learning environment to be created and sustained.
The CART team is appreciative of the Irvine partnership in conducting empirical research about the topics of career technical education, professional pathways, and recently, Linked-Learning approaches. In agreement with Mr. Jones, we must invest in multiple areas in order to optimize opportunities for students. I am hopeful that a large collegial network of CTE / Linked-Learning institutions may be developed in order to systematically recognize and enable both traditional and innovative approaches (including pedagogy yet to be conceived) in support of California’s students and future.
Devin Blizzard
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Thank you John for sharing information on the value of Career and Technical Education! I visited CART the first year they opened and indeed I was very impressed! I have been working in the CTE world for 18 years. It is very important that we get the message out to parents and school administrators about the value of career education. If students begin to hear about careers in elementary grades, explore a few career classes in middle school, and then try on career prep classes while in high school, many students will attend college becuase they found the career classes interesting. The more career classes, the more interesting school becomes to students. The purpose of college is to prepare students to go to the work world for the next 40 years. If a parent is going to pay for any college, it would be best if the student chose the college based on interest in a future career, rather than going to college, and then exploring careers. We could save parents a lot of money. Continue to keep up the great work on promoting career programs. As a former marketing techer, many of my students went on to college due to connecting a career to what you learn in college.
Alyssa Lynch
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Fred Jones, there’s a whole dance in the nonprofit funding world involving the strategically placed promotion of success in conjunction with the strategically placed quest for more funding.
That’s not a bad thing when it brings in more support for clearly worthy programs such as CART, and as a booster of vocational-career-technical education, I’d love to see many more programs like CART.
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Alyssa: Clovis Unified Superintendent mentioned in a press conference that the district is exploring the possibility of creating a CART-like program for students in middle school.
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Thanks John for the update! That is outstanding news! Althought we are in an extreme budget crisis, it has been anounced there will be some CTE middle school funding. It is one way to reduce the dropout rate since we lose a lot of students between middle school and high school! Keep up the good information John!
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