Implementing High School JROTC Career Academies

摘要

In 1992, the U.S. Departments of Defense and Education joined together to create a new high school program aimed at encouraging at-risk youth to remain in school and graduate. The program is a marriage of the defense- sponsored Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program and a comprehensive high school reform initiative referred to as career academies. This report grew out of the sponsors' interest in tracking the implementation of the program as a way to improve it and with an eye toward expanding the program to additional sites. However, the intended audience for this report is not only the program's sponsors. It also speaks to those working in or interested in the field of educational reform, including researchers, school district administrators, teachers, parents, and business and community leaders. This research was sponsored by the Director, Special Projects and Research, in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. It was conducted within the Forces and Resources Policy Center of RAND's National Defense Research Institute (NDRI). NDRI is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the unified commands, and the defense agencies. In 1992, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the U.S. Department of Education (DoED) joined forces to implement an innovative vocational education program at nine high schools across the United States. Designed to keep dropout-prone students in school, this innovation, JROTC Career Academies, combines military training that the services have provided in high schools for many decades with special schools-within-schools that education policymakers more recently have used to target particular student populations that have not prospered under traditional coursework and school settings.