Way Beyond Shop Class

Matt Grohnke wasn't dumb; he just couldn't get interested in English literature or American history. During his first two years at Robinson High School in Fairfax, Va., Matt would count the minutes until he could get home and focus on his real passion — computers. So after some prodding from his guidance counselor, Matt applied to the career academy located within a high school in nearby Chantilly, Va. At the Chantilly Academy, students earn coveted technical certifications in courses designed by Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Nortel. Surrounded by like-minded classmates and encouraged to pursue something he loved, Matt quickly blossomed from a bit of an outcast who couldn't get his GPA above C level to a motivated and popular A student.

Stories like Matt's have caught the eye of school administrators, leading to a nationwide movement toward career academies. For many kids, especially those who feel disconnected from traditional coursework and don't excel at things like sports or drama club, these "schools within schools" provide an exciting connection between classwork and a fulfilling career. They also manage, through the breadth of their recruiting and their subject offerings, to avoid much of the stigma once associated with shop and vocational classes.

During a recent open house, guidance counselors from across Fairfax County toured the 18 career clusters at Chantilly Academy, popping into the Animal Sciences classroom to watch students groom dogs and visiting the Hotel Management and Dental Careers courses. The counselors then settled into an annex off the high school cafeteria, where students in Culinary Arts served a four-course meal.

Until 1993, Fairfax had a dual-track system, in which some students were prepped for college and others were dumped into vocational schools, which were viewed as dead-end depositories for underperforming teens. Now, though, Fairfax has five distinct career academies that bus juniors and seniors in from across this sprawling and diverse county for two-hour courses each school day and then bus them back to their home schools for regular coursework. John Whittman, Chantilly Academy's principal, estimates that 15% of the students are in advanced-placement or honors courses, 25% are special-needs or learning-disabled students, and the rest are "just regular kids who are bored in traditional classrooms."

In the Medical Health Technologies cluster, all first-year students learn basic physiology, including how to take a patient's blood pressure. Teachers counsel kids on goals and career paths, and career coordinators help place them in internships with hospitals, medical practices and physical-therapy centers. In their second year, students are given lessons more customized to their career track. Those thinking about college pre-med are urged to take advanced biology, while those aspiring toward other medical careers, such as physical therapy or nursing, are offered more practical training.

Most of the nation's 1,500 career academies are all-day schools that focus on one area of study. In a typical medical academy, students would fulfill all of their core academic work at the academy, but it would be tailored to their areas of specialization. In a comprehensive long-term study of these academies, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. recently found that the programs were especially beneficial to underperforming students. One key benefit was reducing the dropout rate.

Whittman describes half of the Chantilly Academy's students as "at risk." He doesn't mean that they have grown up amid poverty and violence but rather that they, like Matt Grohnke, were not previously interested in their high school work and weren't headed for college or a career. But at the academy, says Grohnke, "you're doing something you love. Then you get a good feeling by getting a good grade, and then you want that feeling everywhere, in all your other classes."