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JUDY WOODRUFF: But, first, a new night for
education.
The NewsHour has long been committed to covering
that topic.
And starting tonight, we will be expanding
our coverage on Tuesdays with a new feature
series called Making the Grade.
We will provide in-depth reporting on education
issues at every level, from early childhood
and preschool, all the way through high school
and beyond with the world of higher education.
We will explore the most fundamental concerns
in schools, communities and workplaces, and
we will also cover plenty of approaches you
may not have heard about yet.
Tonight, we focus on vocational education.
There’s a growing recognition of its value
for some students.
But how do you determine when it’s working
for the long haul?
Special correspondent John Tulenko of Education
Week has our story.
JOHN TULENKO: This year, more than a million
students will graduate from high school, and
most will go on to college.
It ought to be something to celebrate, but,
in fact, nearly 40 percent of those who go
to four-year colleges and some 70 percent
of students at community college will never
earn their degree.
DAVID WHEELER, Principal, Southeastern Regional:
It’s the shame of our nation, when you look
at, a student comes out of high school, not
knowing what they want to do, goes to college,
drops out.
Now they’re in debt, without a job, and
not knowing what they want to do.
They’re worse off than they were, you know,
as little as a year before.
And that’s all preventable, all of it.
JOHN TULENKO: One solution, principal Dave
Wheeler says, lies in schools like his, Southeastern
Regional Vocational Technical High School,
south of Boston.
Here, in addition to the regular school subjects,
students learn skilled trades and professions,
and, if they choose, instead of college, they
can go directly into the work force.
DAVID WHEELER: You can become anything you
want here, if you take advantage of what we
have.
JOHN TULENKO: Choosing a career program starts
in ninth grade.
Students spend the first semester sampling
each of the roughly 20 professions taught
here.
Dajon Lopes (ph) chose culinary arts.
DAJON LOPES, Student: We learn to cook everything,
a whole bunch of foreign dishes, American
dishes, anything.
You name it, we got it.
This right here is Asian scallop saute.
JOHN TULENKO: Is this a new dish for you?
DAJON LOPES: Yes.
It’s my first time, matter of fact.
JOHN TULENKO: The first time, yes?
May I?
PAULA KFOURY, Southeastern Regional: It’s
not like you’re opening a book and reading
about it.
JOHN TULENKO: Culinary arts teacher Paula
Kfoury.
PAULA KFOURY: It’s hands-on, which is so
different.
JOHN TULENKO: That’s very nice.
PAULA KFOURY: They come in here every day
and open a restaurant.
And we do all of the functions for the school.
MAN: This car has — gave us a lot of problems.
JOHN TULENKO: In collision repair, the work
is also real.
MAN: A customer brings in a car, we, like,
do a estimate on it.
JOHN TULENKO: This is someone’s car?
MAN: Yes.
And then, after that we call the customer
up, we tell them how much it will cost, and
we start repairing it.
DAVID WHEELER: Almost all of our shops do
some form of, we call it live work.
Cosmetology takes clients.
Construction, we have done complete renovations
of buildings.
We have done Web sites for people.
We do printing.
There is no better way to engage a student
than they’re doing real, meaningful work.
JOHN TULENKO: Of course, they also do academics.
Every other week, students are in traditional
classes full-time.
DAVID WHEELER: Every single kid is going to
learn algebra.
Everyone’s going to get a high-level literature
class.
Everyone’s going to get physics.
JOHN TULENKO: On the state math test, 73 percent
of students scored above proficient, in English,
90 percent, numbers that nearly match state
averages.
And Southeastern’s 93 percent graduation
rate is better than average.
On the flip side, SAT scores and scores on
advanced placement tests lag significantly
behind the state as a whole.
But, for Dave Wheeler, those are not the numbers
that matter most.
DAVID WHEELER: When we do follow-up studies,
generally speaking, we hit the 90 — high
90 percent range of students that are either
in the work force, continue to be enrolled
in college, or have gone into the military.
The point is to get you to be a happy, productive
citizen.
JOHN TULENKO: This approach is getting lots
of attention from reformers these days, who
see it as a way to improve engagement and
achievement in high schools.
But career and technical education, or CTE,
as it’s sometimes called, has its critics.
CAROL BURRIS, Network for Public Education:
Even though that is what people are touting
as a possibility, rigorous CTE programs, in
the reality, I don’t think it’s going
to happen.
JOHN TULENKO: During her 15 years as an award-winning
high school principal in New York state, Carol
Burris had an insider’s view on these programs.
CAROL BURRIS: I think a lot of schools will
take kids that are behavior issues and will
say, you know what, I think technical education
is where you need to be.
I think they will take kids who have learning
disabilities, and rather than work with them
in academics, push them on that track.
We just know that historically.
JOHN TULENKO: Almost from the start, high
schools were organized into tracks, with separate
programs for students bound for college and
those bound for work.
MICHAEL PETRILLI, Thomas B. Fordham Institute:
And, oftentimes, the way the system made that
decision was based on the color of their skin
or by their zip code.
You can imagine that it was mostly kids of
color and low-income kids who were shuffled
into vocational programs, many of which were
terrible.
JOHN TULENKO: But Mike Petrilli who heads
the Thomas Fordham Institute, an education
think tank, says a major shift was coming.
MICHAEL PETRILLI: There was a big effort to
de-track the high schools and the middle schools
starting the late 1980s, early ’90s, which
was very successful in most big cities.
ANTHONY CARNEVALE, Georgetown University:
We decided that we were going to give academic
education, which essentially teaches abstraction,
we decided to give that to everybody through
high school.
JOHN TULENKO: The mission of public schools
changed, says economist Tony Carnevale, and
college became the goal.
ANTHONY CARNEVALE: The basic American model
is high school to Harvard.
The difficulty with that is, it doesn’t
work for most students.
You ask the teacher, why am I taking this
course?
And they will say, well, you need it for college,
and that’s enough.
For a lot of kids, that’s not enough.
JOHN TULENKO: Many arrive at college unprepared,
fall behind and drop out.
MICHAEL PETRILLI: It would be a lot better
for those people to go out into the work force,
get some real skills, and maybe down the road
they would be ready then to go and get a postsecondary
credential.
JUSTIN MEEKS, Class of 2015, Southeastern
Regional: Schoolwork wasn’t — I wasn’t
the greatest at it.
I feel like I’m more of a hands-on person.
JOHN TULENKO: For Justin Meeks, fabricating
metal was a better fit.
He learned the trade at Southeastern and,
through an apprenticeship arranged by the
school, landed a full-time job just days after
graduation.
JUSTIN MEEKS: School prepared me well for
this.
I weld here a lot.
I have to cut well on here and very accurate.
JOHN TULENKO: You can’t make a mistake on
a beam like this.
JUSTIN MEEKS: Yes, you can’t fix it.
JOHN TULENKO: If you don’t mind my asking,
how much do you make?
JUSTIN MEEKS: Fourteen sixty-six.
And if I can keep getting more money and more
money, and a raise, and working harder, I
think I could be fine without college.
JOHN TULENKO: Is this a success?
MICHAEL PETRILLI: First of all, let’s look
at the alternative.
If this was a young person who wasn’t doing
well in school, if he hadn’t been engaged
in something that really motivated him, he
probably would have dropped out or maybe he
would have made it to graduation, and then
that was it.
And then he’d be going into the work force
and lucky to get a minimum wage job.
This is a much better outcome.
JOHN TULENKO: And Petrilli says vocational
schools like Justin’s are different these
days, because, at places like Southeastern,
tracking is a thing of the past.
MICHAEL PETRILLI: It’s very important that
the pathways are chosen by the kids themselves.
We want to provide options, and let the young
people make decisions.
CAROL BURRIS: I think it’s very dangerous.
I have seen so many kids who have been academic
late bloomers, who all of sudden they mature
and they buckle down and they do their studies
and they go on to college.
When you start to push kids when they are
too young to make that decision, they’re
just not ready to make it.
JOHN TULENKO: But that’s not stopping families
from enrolling their teenagers at Southeastern.
This year, some 800 students applied for 400
spots.
In South Easton, Massachusetts, I’m John
Tulenko of Education Week, reporting for the
PBS NewsHour.
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