The president's apprentices - vocational education for high school students

Reason, March, 1995 by Jonathan Marshall

Vocational education's failing grades

America's "forgotten youth," the three quarters of high school students who never complete college, are forgotten no longer. They are now the focus of vigorous White House attention and one of the trendiest movements in education circles: "school-to-work transition" programs.

This upsurge of interest in school-to-work programs began with widespread recognition that non-college-educated workers have fallen into a deep economic pit over the past two decades. From 1973 to 1993, the real hourly wage of male high school graduates plummeted 20 percent. Younger workers did even worse; male high school graduates with one to 15 years of work experience saw their wages dive 30 percent in the same period.

In the conventional wisdom of Education Secretary Richard Riley, American students suffer thus because "we are the only major industrialized nation with no formal system for helping our young people - particularly the 75 percent of high school youth who don't go on to finish a four-year college - make the transition from the classroom to the workplace. That translates to lost productivity and wasted human potential."

School-to-work programs come in many varieties, including youth apprenticeships, co-op programs, and career academies. Before they became so fashionable in the 1990s, they had a more generic name: vocational education. But bland old voc-ed is now hailed as the potential savior of American workers from foreign competition and declining living standards. It is supported with impassioned rhetoric from politicians of both parties and an infusion of $300 million in new federal funds last year.

Yet the clamor at the federal and state levels for revamping vocational education is based on one part research, five parts wishful thinking, and 10 parts political opportunism. The problems they are addressing are real enough, but with their exaggerated claims, government officials are setting up students and educators for a big disappointment.

Bill Clinton didn't invent federal government support for vocational education; federal cash has flowed to such programs since 1917. Since the early 1980s, Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars for youth training under the Job Training and Partnership Act. And in 1990, Congress reauthorized the Perkins Act, a $1 billion-a-year program to fund state and local vocational education initiatives.

Despite those programs, Clinton promised that "in our administration, we'll establish a national apprenticeship program, like those in Europe." In his first budget Clinton asked Congress to support a national school-to-work transition program, including youth apprenticeships. The absence of a master blueprint, Labor Secretary Robert Reich declared when legislation was introduced in August 1993, "creates tremendous expense for business and long-term negative consequences for our economy."

The School to Work Opportunities Act, which enjoyed bipartisan support, was signed into law last May. It provides $300 million to help states plan "comprehensive, statewide school-to-work systems," implement programs at the local level, and develop a skills certification system for high school graduates.

Since the act passed, the Departments of Education and Labor have issued a steady stream of grants - and feel-good press releases - to communities all over the country. The money goes to assist partnerships of employers, educators, students, and labor organizations. Yet even officials involved in the new wave of voc-ed concede that it's no revolutionary advance.

"The School to Work Opportunities Act is in the same mold as the Perkins Act," says David Boesel, head of the National Assessment of Vocational Education in the Department of Education's research office. "A lot of discussion and work is going on right now to decide what the relation between the two acts is and how they can be brought closer together. There is no answer yet to the question of how they differ."

Both acts aim to integrate academic and vocational education to help students who have trouble grasping abstract concepts. The theory is that schools should offer non-academic track students enough academic instruction to broaden their minds and keep open their college options, while gearing teaching to practical tasks. Shaping curricula around a particular occupational interest and providing related job experience should in theory provide students with marketable skills and an incentive to stay in school.

Modern Voc-Ed programs take several forms. Cooperative education usually combines morning classes with afternoon jobs that earn students credits toward graduation as well as pay and work experience. The marketing education co-op program at Pennington, New Jersey's Hopewell Valley Central High School, for example, gives seniors work experience in various retail and service industries. As of 1993, about 450,000 high school juniors and seniors nationwide, about 8 percent of the total, were enrolled in such programs.