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

Reason, March, 1995 by Jonathan Marshall

>Many legislators are understandably loathe to await the results before launching expensive new programs that promise to make the world a better place. But as a 1992 report by the National Research Council noted, "Without high-quality and credible evaluations, school districts will never be able to choose wisely among available innovations." And squandering billions of dollars hardly supports the message that schools hope to instill in youth: that knowledge is a precondition to individual and social advancement.