Vocational Education: How Will They Make a Living?

The saddest fact about U.S. education is that it repels those most in need of it. Last month President Kennedy launched a drive to urge the million youngsters who dropped out of school over the past twelve months to go back in September. School officials, teachers and guidance counselors are cooperating in the campaign. But it will be doing well if it persuades even 1% of that million to return to classrooms. And by September 1964, another million will have dropped out.

The dropouts have a bleak employment future ahead of them. Over the past ten years, with overall employment steadily expanding, jobs for those without high school education have declined by 25%. Of the nation’s 4,322,000 unemployed, about two-thirds are people who failed to complete high school. Many of them lack even the meager education required to pass qualifying tests for Government retraining programs. Among teen-agers out of school, the unemployment rate is 16.2%.

An Unknown Segment. Yet many jobs requiring skills go unfilled. In New York City, municipal hospitals need 60% more registered nurses. In Philadelphia, 15,000 skilled jobs have no takers. The U.S. needs, among other occupations, more auto mechanics, carpenters, computer tenders, and machinists. Experts foresee by 1970 a need for 200,000 additional technicians a year.

The combination of people without jobs and jobs without people to fill them has stirred new interest in the segment of U.S. public education that educated Americans know least about—vocational education. Vo-ed, as teachers call it, is dismally inadequate to meet the demands upon it. Most U.S. vocational high schools offer the youngsters so very little that on the average two-thirds of their students drop out before graduation, as against one-third in academic high schools.

City school officials tend to use vo-ed schools as dumping grounds for the dull and the delinquent. The teachers, equipment and training methods are often so far behind the times that, in effect, the schools teach students to be unemployable. Last year a report by the Taconic Foundation concluded that the usefulness of New York City’s vocational schools is “extremely questionable.” Frank Cassell, personnel director of Inland Steel Co., says that “vocational education in Illinois bears about the same relationship to the real needs of industry as the shovel and the pickax do to the equipment demands of road building.”

A Lunatic Pattern. The shortcomings are partly rooted in vo-ed’s history. Under laws going back to 1917, almost half of the total federal outlays for vocational education are channeled into agriculture and home economics. Since state and local officials conform to the rules so as to get as much federal money as possible, the result is a lunatic pattern. Last year 26% of all vo-ed funds went into agricultural training, although fulltime farm workers comprise only 6% of the nation’s labor force.

Lacking prestige in the pedagogic pecking order, vo-ed teachers stick together in the self-protective American Vocational Association, a strong anchor for the status quo in vo-ed teaching. According to Executive Secretary M. D. Mobley, who heads up the A.V.A.’s persistent Washington lobby, what the U.S. needs is plenty of home economics courses. “The most enduring nations of the world” he says, “are those that have maintained good homes.”

The Most Important Bill. Last year a panel appointed by President Kennedy urged new directions for vo-ed. Reform has become all the more vital because vocational schools are the main instrument for carrying out 1962’s Manpower Development Training Act, which established federal-state programs to re-educate 400,000 unemployed people over the next two years. A few weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill to overhaul vocational education, provide additional federal grants ($237 million a year by 1970), plus state and local matching funds.

Introduced by Kentucky Democrat Carl D. Perkins, the bill retains farm training and home economics (Mobley’s lobby saw to that), but it introduces a new flexibility. Under the terms of the bill, states and municipalities could count as “vocational agriculture” such related industries as food processing, and include in “home economics” such jobworthy skills as commercial garment making. At least 25% of the money provided for in the bill would go to “area vocational education schools”-well-equipped centers offering modern skills to anyone, teen-ager or adult, who is not attending a regular high school. The U.S. already has 300 such area schools, teaching 500,000 people in 33 states, and another 106 are planned or under construction. The fact that Connecticut has 14 of them is one reason why that state has the nation’s lowest youth unemployment rate.

In the House a few weeks ago, Alabama’s Representative Carl Elliott said that the Perkins bill (which the Senate has yet to act on) “may well be the most important piece of legislation this session of Congress will consider.” Congress also has tax revision, civil rights and the test ban treaty confronting it, but in view of the immense human costs of unemployment, Congressman Elliott may be close to right.