Editors’ Note

Prior to assuming her current position, J.D. Hoye served as President of Keep the Change, Inc., a consulting business focused on helping communities reform education and develop a skilled workforce. Previously, Hoye developed and implemented policy at the highest level of federal government. In 1994, she was selected by U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Reilly and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to head the new Office of School-to-Work in Washington, DC. She has also been a leader for education reform at the state and local level, serving as Associate Superintendent of Oregon’s Department of Education and as the leader of a 27-county organization that managed federal job training funding for rural counties in Oregon. Hoye began her career as a youth employment counselor, working directly with at-risk youth in Corvallis, Oregon.

Foundation Brief

The National Academy Foundation (www.naf.org) was created as a partnership between business leaders and educators to address the need to prepare students for professional careers. NAF serves more than 50,000 students in 529 academies in 41 states and the District of Columbia. NAF operates four types of academies – the Academy of Finance, the Academy of Hospitality & Tourism, the Academy of Information Technology, and the Academy of Engineering – involving employees of more than 2,500 corporations, who secure internships, volunteer in classrooms, act as mentors, and serve on local advisory boards.

What is the mission of the National Academy Foundation?

The core mission of the organization is to work with corporate partners and school partners to provide high school students with a relevant experience that will lead to aspirations for college and careers.

How easy is it for you to build the types of partnerships you need for success?

We have a way to go in this regard. The notion of corporate partnership is pretty well established in the country, especially around high school students, and we’ve had many conversations about the power of experiencing work in helping young people think about their futures. The challenge is putting it in an organized context that really mobilizes corporate America, and doing it in a high-quality way. One of the valuable aspects of NAF is that it values internships as much as the career academy industry-vetted curriculum. It sees both as equally important. So I believe we have a model that could leverage corporate engagement and partnerships for young people in a much more robust way than has been demonstrated thus far.

NAF has a network of 529 academies. Are you happy with that number and their locations, or are you looking to increase the provision of academies around the country?

In my view, we don’t yet have the strength that we’d like to have. We’ve done a really good job of expanding quickly, and now we’re retooling, with the knowledge that expansion without quality doesn’t really get us where we want to be. We’re doing some serious targeting in key urban centers where there’s a high degree of need, a good corporate presence, and a new appetite on the part of high schools and school districts to recognize that partnerships with industry can benefit students. For instance, we’d like to have a greater presence in Dallas, Los Angeles, and targeted areas in Chicago. We have a model that works and, while we’re willing to encourage anyone, we are focusing our communication strategies on those urban centers.

What role does the curriculum play in NAF’s activities?

The core elements of the curriculum have been pretty consistent for the past 50 years. We’ve struggled with different ways of teaching them, but the core content areas have been pretty solid, in terms of what kids need to be able to do and what they need to know in order to compete. While we recognize which core content areas are fundamental in the academic realm, we also look at what should be brought to life on the industry side. So, for example, in financial services, a course on ethics might not have been in the top five courses five years ago, but it is now in the top two, because of real industry issues that have become fundamental to corporate America. Not only do we need to prioritize and refresh the curriculum on the industry side, but we need to align it with the academic side, so that it becomes part of how the academic core content areas come to life for kids.

Is it possible to describe a typical NAF student?

We’ve undertaken a couple of longitudinal studies that have shown us not only who our students are, but also the difference our academies make to them. The early findings indicate that as the academies started to grow, they tended to attract the middle cohort – people who weren’t the superstars and who weren’t dropping out either; they were kind of in the middle. In more recent times, we’re finding that the academy model is actually attracting the middle and lower cohort of students, which we like. In that context, we realize that we have to prepare both the teachers and the students well, to make sure that they are ready to benefit from the curriculum. It’s not going to do the students any good to throw them into a losing proposition. Ultimately, we want to be open to all kids, and we believe that our model is just that.

Is it important to have the metrics in place to evaluate success? How challenging is it to establish those metrics?

The metrics are difficult, particularly if you want to look at something other than the fact that the students were there, they stayed, and they moved on.

In partnership with the Carnegie Corporation, the MDRC, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we are beginning to put together a new platform for evaluation. We hope it will be flexible enough to deal with our decentralized education system, and provide enough impact information for us to drill down and figure out if there are any key indicators that, if identified early, will accelerate the opportunity for success.