Practical skills vs. three R's: A debate revives

Does teaching high school students how to clean a carburetor or decorate a cake give them valuable job skills or does it simply distract them from the study of algebraic equations and French verbs?

The debate over the value of vocational education in America's public schools has been raging at least since 1917, when the federal government first began funding such classes.

But it's likely to intensify this year as Congress moves to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998 against the backdrop of the Bush administration's recommendation that such programs receive less funding.

"This administration is suggesting steering away from vocational education," says Nancy O'Brien, senior director of public policy for the Association for Career and Technical Education in Alexandria, Va.

Not so, insists Carol D'Amico, assistant secretary for vocational and adult education at the US Department of Education in Washington, D.C., who says the administration is targeting an outmoded concept of vocational education.

"Some schools still treat vocational education as a job-training program with no academic component," Ms. D'Amico says. "We discourage investment in those programs."

Discussions about vocational education - or "career technical education," as its advocates prefer to call it today - often bump up against uncomfortable questions of class and race.

They also feed on a basic policy debate in educational philosophy: Should some students be encouraged to learn through their hands and experience, or should all focus mostly on learning from books?

Before 1910, such questions were seldom asked in US public schools, says James Fraser, dean of the school of education at Northeastern University in Boston. At that time only an elite minority of students went to high school, and there they pursued traditional academics and trained for college.

But from about 1910 through the 1930s, there was a drive to broaden the appeal of high school. Adding vocational education classes, says Professor Fraser, "was part of a very egalitarian effort." But at the same time, he adds, "there was also the idea, if we do this right, we might make learning more interesting for some kids."

By the 1940s and 1950s, however, he adds, some communities began to view vocational education as a kind of second-rate high school experience. "It was popular in working-class white communities, but among immigrants and in communities of color it was mistrusted," Fraser says. "They feared that [vocational education] was being used to steer their kids into second-class citizenship."

Today, concerns that technical education could be a means of sidelining some kids are very much alive. At the heart of the 2001 No Child Left Behind federal education law is the belief that all high school graduates should be ready for college, whether they choose to attend or not. But that focus on core academics means other kinds of learning will necessarily be harder to fund and tougher to squeeze into a busy school day.

President Bush's budget proposal for fiscal 2004, which begins Oct. 1, recommends cutting federal funding for vocational education from $1.3 billion to $1 billion. It also proposes that states be allowed to transfer vocational-education money to Title I, the federal program designed to improve education in low-income schools.

Technical-education advocates worry that school administrators, many of whom are desperate to raise student scores on standardized tests, will be quick to shut down vocational programs if they can direct more dollars toward raising math and English scores.

Federal funding for vocational education in the US has been declining for years. While it accounted for 5.5 percent of the total federal education budget in 1980, it shrank to 2.5 percent in 2002. The number of students in a vocational "track" in high school has also dropped from more than 20 percent in 1969 to fewer than 10 percent in 1998.

Page: 1 | 2