The programs seek to crush walls between academia and work as students pick overarching career-related subjects as centerpieces to their entire educational experience.

“This is for kids who are low performers, middle of the road students and high performers,” Davidson said. “It is for every student.”

Putting learning in context

Long Island Association President Matthew Crosson said such programs excite students by showing lessons have applications in the workplace. “They motivate kids by providing relevance to what they’re learning academically,” Crosson said. “They put academics in a real-world context that is interesting to the kids.”

Wantagh School District Superintendent Carl Bonuso, whose district is launching a global business academy, sees this as bringing the real world into the classroom.

“We’re going to see if we can have more exchange, our students out of the class, visiting sites, learning from mentors elsewhere and bringing people into our classroom,” Bonuso said.

But career academies, by focusing on fields such as health care with a great demand on Long Island, also could battle brain drain, encouraging students to join professions where they can find work.

“It helps create a relationship between the future workforce and the companies that will be interested in them,” Crosson said. “And it will help keep young people on Long Island. They will more clearly see that they have a future here.”

Crosson said career academies, through internships and other connections, build links between students and employers that could pay off later.

“We have found in focus groups with young people that they don’t know what’s available to them on Long Island, because nobody ever tells them,” he said. “They don’t know what industries and jobs are here.”

Long Island schools that lack career academies are also connecting with workplaces.

Long Island Works helped create school/business advisory boards for 70 of Long Island’s 126 districts. Business people give presentations, offer internships, take part in career fairs and advise on developments sometimes reflected in curriculum.

“We’ve already been doing so many of these initiatives individually,” Bonuso said. “We’d like to connect them and see if we can come up with something that’s going to provide relevance and rigor and the opportunity to form important relationships with people in the field.”

Traditional subjects, with a twist

Those involved are careful to distinguish career academies from the vocational training offered by BOCES.

“What we’re looking to do is pretty much the opposite,” Davidson said. “To give career education to all students and show them the scope of opportunities.”

“It’s not vocational training,” said Rick Delano, a consultant paid by the Ford Motor Co. Fund to help create academies nationwide, including on Long Island. “It’s a way of learning in a more contextual environment.”

Career academies apply academics to specific fields.

Topics are tailored at least slightly to core subject areas such as health care or business. Global business academy students might learn about the history of business as part of their American history lessons. Health academy students might learn about socialized medicine in social studies. Math courses might include information about measuring injections.

Advocates of academies say students learn more, because they’re more motivated. A 2000 Ford Motor Co. Fund study of career academies in the San Francisco Bay area found grade point averages were 0.5 points higher, test scores 20 to 40 percent higher and dropout rates 50 percent lower, on average, than schools without them. In Sacramento, dropout rates fell 10 percent and graduation rates rose 5 percent after academies went into effect.

The reason? Delano said academies create cohesion and community, making it less likely students will get lost in the shuffle. “Students are in a smaller learning community, which is positive in terms of relationship building,” he said.

Davidson said people need to be exposed to professions before they can pursue them. “People don’t pick a career that they don’t know about,” she said. “The more they know about careers in health care or the green economy or in any field, the more likely they are to go into that field.”

Pros and cons

One upside is that career academies use existing resources. “You’re not adding teachers. It’s the way you teach,” Davidson said. “You use different examples and bring in people from the industry.”

The downside could be that students choose concentrations when they’re too young and could lose out on some of the benefits of learning subjects without a particular slant.

And each Long Island school will offer only one academy, leaving many students out.

But Davidson said this is the beginning of the academy approach. “This is just our toe in the water,” Davidson said. “What we’d like to see happen is eventually, schools would offer several academies.”

Districts such as Smithtown and Uniondale, she said, hope to launch academies in 2009. And districts like Wantagh could launch more academies. “Every magnificent skyscraper starts off with one keystone,” Bonuso said. “We think it’s a wonderful possibility.”