Could vocational education be progressive?

Allen Graubard

In the past century, the rapid development of compulsory and universal schooling has been accompanied by an unprecedented differentiation of school formats and curricula in high schools and more recently in colleges. Stratification in secondary education has been universal. Though I will concentrate on the U.S., it is helpful to keep in mind that stratification and differentiation characterize all mass education systems, whatever the histories and political structures of particular countries.

The basic concept of an "academic" track is familiar. Almost everyone reading this essay has gone through an "academic" high school program. And almost everyone was aware at the time that there were other "tracks" within their high schools, less academic in their content and pedagogy, where students who were predominantly not from elite levels in the social hierarchy were placed. For some students, there was "vocational education," taking place in "shops" within the comprehensive high schools or--mainly in older industrial cities--in separate vocational high schools. In this two part essay, I will be looking closely at current "detracking" debates, at actual policies, and at the most vivid form that differentiation has historically taken, namely "vocational education," all within the framework of Radical Teacher's concern in this issue with progressive education.

To most people, the term "progressive education" conjures up images of school that are quite different from the ordinary school experiences. In a well-known New Yorker cartoon of a generic progressive classroom (almost certainly a private school), a student asks the teacher "do we have to do what we want to do again today?" I imagine that few readers of this essay experienced progressive education in this sense. Those who did probably had the luck of being able to afford an old Deweyan institution such as New Lincoln, Elizabeth Irwin, or Dalton, in New York City. Though some anti-progressives seem to claim that the cartoon idea seeped into almost all regular public school classrooms, pedagogical progressives actually had little effect in the real world of public schools. Remember your own high school: were there desks in rows, teacher-dominated classrooms, many "academic" requirements, almost no student initiatives or small group projects outside of the classroom or emphasis on individual creativity, motivation via the incentive or threat of grades? Such a school experience was certainly not progressive in the pedagogical sense.

Histories of schooling also use the term in a second sense, linked to the political reform movement called "Progressivism," and to its intention of applying newly-evolved ideas of efficient bureaucratic administration to institutions of all kinds. Historian David Tyack's excellent study, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Harvard University Press, 1974) introduced the term "administrative progressives" for those who promoted an efficiency-minded, top-down approach to organizing schools. The classical account of this movement is Raymond Callahan's Education and the Cult of Efficiency (University of Chicago Press, 1962). It shows how the standard model of school administration came to incorporate ideas of "scientific management" drawn from the factory.

Accounts that narrate and criticize this century-long process come from a wide range of political positions, from the Marxism of Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, to what is generally thought of as the conservativism of Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. These accounts provide a broader frame than does the cartoon: in it, one can understand the development of the kind of high schools almost all of us went through--with standardized classrooms, classification of students through testing, and tracking them through differentiated curricula--as the primary institutionalization of progressive politics. Pedagogical progressives of our day (most of us included) would certainly not find much common ground with the efficiency-seeking administrative progressives who did come to dominate public schooling.

Vocational education was the most egregious example of differentiating curriculum and methods in a way that assigned working class and minority youth to a narrowly "practical" school experience, limiting their educational access to mobility, and stigmatizing them as incapable of learning intrinsically worthwhile, "academic" subjects and skills. I feel confident that almost no one reading this went through a high school vocational program, and, of the "radical teachers" who read this journal, almost none teach in a vocational program or separate school.

An apparently ecumenical agreement on how vocational training corrupts the essential meaning of education is an old theme. But this agreement has never governed actual policy or institutional arrangements. Advocates of an ideal academic education rooted in high culture have always deplored the existence of vocational schools and perspectives, and this remains true today. Yet vocational schooling has been embedded in the mainstream format of the comprehensive high school for several decades. There is a complex institutional world of vocational teacher credentialing, a traditional core of shops and programs, journals and conferences, legislative supporters on all levels, from local school districts to Congress and the federal Department of Education. (Massachusetts, where I live, is unusual in having more than thirty regional vocational-technical schools, governed by elected school committees.)

The history of vocational education is more complicated than the common negative image, and would be worth considering in some detail. But here, a brief glance will have to do. Vocational education in the U.S. was invented more than a century ago, when interest in training young people in school for the developing industrial trades and preparing them for specific jobs in the new economy made this an active issue. It is easy to understand why business, growing rapidly into the dominant force in American politics and society, would favor vocational training at public expense. Meanwhile, philanthropists, worried about the problems of poor youth, started small vocational programs to provide training outside the public schools. And between 1890 and 1910, vocational education in the narrow sense of job preparation attracted the support of a diverse range of social and economic interests. The National Association of Manufacturers was a strong advocate, pushing for schooling that would prepare workers for factories and workshops. Labor was at first wary, fearing that business interests would use the schools to produce docile workers and potential strikebreakers. But, as represented by American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, labor came around to supporting vocational education. And as administrators faced the challenge of rapidly growing numbers of working class and immigrant youth entering high school for at least one or two years, intensely antipathetic toward its traditional academic style, vocational training appealed more and more to educational professionals, as well. By 1910 the National Educational Association had joined the NAM and the AFL in active support of this cause. Congress soon appointed a commission on "National Aid to Vocational Education," which in its 1914 report found a "crying need" for this kind of schooling. And in 1917, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes act providing federal funds for it.

But however sensible such an innovation might seem from a utilitarian viewpoint, it raised serious issues for the democratic ideal of a "common" school, and for the closely allied conception of social mobility through education that is still, today, a core value in American ideology. And, very important in the rhetorical framing of debate, if less so in the real world aspirations of many working class students and parents, educational discussions going back to the early decades of the nineteenth century had imagined education as an ennobling activity that developed the "higher faculties." From this perspective, only an academic education could offer young minds a proper grasp of the glories of Western man's (not women's) intellectual achievement, and prepare the young to be cultured individuals.

So throughout the hundred years of vocational education's creation and development, the still unresolved argument about differentiated public schooling in the name of equal opportunity went forward. In a professional education journal, two supporters of introducing vocational education wrote, "Instead of affording equality of educational opportunity to all, the elementary school by offering but one course of instruction, and this of a literary character, serves the interests of but one type of children" (William H. Elson and Frank P. Bachman, "Different courses for Elementary Schools, Educational Review, 1910).

Still, the "social efficiency" perspective on how schools could serve the growing numbers and diversity of students and changing needs for their labor spread rapidly, becoming the dominant approach in educational policy. Democracy and equality were to be fostered not in "common" schooling for all, but by a system that provided young people with schooling regimens calibrated to their differing abilities and likely occupational futures. Schools should be modeled on the factory, taking in diverse raw materials and turning out an appropriate range of products to serve the expanding industrial system, in this way efficiently serving society as well as each individual student.

For efficiency reasons, most administrators favoring the cause of vocational education argued for separate vocational high schools where tools, equipment and instructors appropriate to specific trade training could be concentrated. In large industrial cities, this path was often followed. Also, in some cities, "exam" schools emerged (e.g., Bronx High School of Science, Central High School in Philadelphia, Boston Latin School) which were kept academically pure, with no vocational programs at all. But most systems moved instead to incorporate vocational education and college preparation as two tracks in what became the "comprehensive high school." Other tracks in it might include the "general" and the commercial. Sociological descriptions of the 20s and 30s like Middletown and Elmtown's Youth richly detail the emergence of this format.

Ironically, the current push to give all students a traditional academic high school education, backed by high stakes tests exclusively on academic content and skills, comes about as the "vocationalizing" of high school has become almost total. I want now to pull some other contradictions out of this recent history.

The practical mainstream view of high school received its apotheosis in the 1960 best-selling Carnegie Foundation report The American High School Today by James B. Conant, the premier education leader of his era--former president of Harvard, leader of science and technology planning in Washington during World War Two, former High Commissioner of Germany, key figure in the creation of the SAT. His vision was of an ideal and very American institution that provided a high cultural, academic curriculum to the small proportion of youth intellectually capable of receiving such an education and going on to higher education; vocational programs for the small number at the academically-challenged tail of the normal distribution and a milder academic curriculum for the great majority in the middle. Carrying on this functional differentiation with all the students under one roof, sharing extracurricular activities and "civics" classes, would confirm American values of equal educational opportunity, and mix youth of all backgrounds together. The rise of civil rights movements in the years after Conant's report increased awareness of inequalities in high school opportunities for minority and poor youth and led to a further decline in support for separate vocational high schools, where they still existed. The usual path was to turn those schools into comprehensive high schools, with most students being in college prep or "general" academic programs, and a diminishing number in the shops.

(I note in passing that for Conant forty years ago, the American comprehensive high school looked bad when compared to European systems that selected early for a very limited, university admission, academic track. Yet as European systems came to take in more students for longer periods of time, they greatly expanded vocational programs. It would be worth while to relate these educational changes to strong labor movements, social democratic parties, the involvement of labor federations in vocational schooling, and so on. European systems, once far more selective and elitist than that of the U.S., have become steadily more inclusive. In several European countries and in Japan, seventeen-year-olds are more likely to be in school than their counterparts here, and high school completion rates are converging. Might my analysis of vocational education in the U.S. apply more universally?)

Awareness of the increasing dollar value of a college degree, not a soulful desire for knowledge, has been the main force driving the rise of college-going: not even believers in the pure worth of an academic general education have the chutzpah to claim otherwise. Today the great majority of high school students think of college as the only respectable next step. Completion of high school is at an historic high, if one leaves out the still quite staggering dropout rates for particular urban minority groups (an estimated 40 percent of Latinos, for one striking example). The completion rate for all groups taken together is approximately 75 percent. Furthermore, current statistics show over 60 percent of high school seniors going on to higher education, compared to about 30 percent in the 1950s. But not often noted is the great rise in community college attendance. Well over 80 percent of college-goers in the fifties went on to four-year colleges, while in recent years 45 percent of "freshmen" have been entering two-year colleges--not to mention the huge numbers of adults taking courses there and in for-profit universities. This unfolding of college as a mass phenomenon, with effectively universal access (through the community college route and through a couple of thousand unselective four-year colleges), is distinctively American--and distinctly vocational: is it also "democratic"?

As noted, concerns with equity increasingly affected educational talk and policy over the decades, and vocational curricula had to be revised to meet the political demand that all high school graduates were in principle qualified to go on to higher education. That has in fact occurred, legislatively and de facto. To be sure, many fewer students in the dwindling vocational high schools and programs go on to four-year colleges than do those from academic high schools. And there is still a sense that vocational education is for students who have done so poorly before high school that failure in regular high school was very likely for them. But most of them have a positive interest in preparing for work, and they experience the actual life of a vocational shop as less onerous than almost exclusively "academic" curriculum they had been disliking and often failing in middle school years. I would expect realistic matching studies, should anyone do them, to show that students with negative attitudes and poor previous academic achievement in the low track college prep programs went to and graduated from college at about the same rates as vocational students.

So even as enrollment in vocational programs steadily declined, the old concern remained, for students who seemed to gain little from the academic curriculum and either dropped out as failures or finished high school with little chance of going on to higher education and little high school experience that would help them in the "transition from school to work," as policy talk now puts it. Writers like Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner had proposed high school options for this "forgotten half," and the first Clinton administration presented as a major part of its educational plan its School to Work legislation. The spirit of the initiative was Dewey-progressive, providing contexts of learning in schools to clarify the process by which adolescents moved from schools into the world of jobs.

I won't name names, but prominent among the policy people writing School to Work and related guidelines were bona fide leftie education activists. However, legislative power doesn't rest in such hands. It might seem reasonable that the business community, following a long tradition going back to the original establishment of a public vocational track, would support School to Work: since business has steadily complained about the poorly educated youth the schools are sending out to the work force, presumably it would support approaches that might do better at teaching basic skills to "non-academic" students. But it is also consistent with these complaints for business to support the standardized "academic" curriculum and organization of high school, only backed by practices like accountability, incentives, and threats to teachers and administrators, to raise productivity.

And that's how the Clinton idea played out. There was a good deal of boilerplate publicity, along with conferences and a small new bureaucracy at state and federal levels, but not much really happened to make high school a better preparation for jobs. Enrollment in vocational education of the traditional sort, federally funded since 1918, continued to decline in number--though a few more modern "shops" were developed, like graphic arts or biotechnology or health careers, to go along with the traditional auto body repair, plumbing, masonry, and, for girls, business and office skills, and even "industrial sewing" (in a region whose extensive mills had moved south and abroad decades ago). Also, pressures for equity from social movements of the Sixties had led to requirements that vocational students receive enough academic credits to quality for regular high school graduation and college entry--however small the number of vocational students who actually chose to go on to college. And given the widespread belief that college was the best path to a diminishing pool of well-paid, high-skill job opportunities, it was difficult to get much going along school-to-work lines, in the typical tracked comprehensive high school. Since there was a little federal funding for the states, in support of school to work, educators responded accordingly. But by his second State of the Union message, Clinton was talking about two years of college for everyone, and stopped pushing for a renewal of the School to Work Act, which quietly died in 2002.

Crucial opposition came from right wing forces in Congress, and the zany tone of debate on this issue deserves attention. An op-ed piece in The New York Times presented Lynne Cheney's testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Feb. 3, 1998 and accused the Clintons (and their policy guru Ira Magaziner) of attempting to impose a system of central planning that would turn schools into job preparation programs while destroying liberal arts, the only true education. An even more detailed and more paranoid outcry came from a sister in spirit and politics, far-right publicist Phyllis Schlafly (The Phyllis Schlafly Report, April 1997). The wonderful story she exposed was that, having failed in taking over the health system, the Clintons now adopted the secret plan of Marc Tucker, a school-to-work policy designer, whose goal was to "change the mission of the public schools from teaching children knowledge and skills to training them to serve the global economy in jobs selected by workforce boards.... Designed on the German system, it is a plan to train children in specific jobs to serve the workforce and the global economy instead of to educate them so they can make their own life choices."

Without much fiddling, at this level of rhetoric, something like Cheney's and Schlafly's arguments could be a part of a progressive overview, with "serving the workforce" replaced by "serving the profitability of American capital." An odd situation, in which political liberals and educational progressives are taken to task by conservatives for treating young people as potential tools for corporate employers rather than as future citizens and intellectual critical thinkers.

Oddities and contradictions such as these should make us skeptical about conventional analysis of vocational education, and raise questions about the widely accepted condemnation of it. Progressives today might well support a vocationalism that would integrate academic and vocational learning--what could be more truly Deweyan? To flesh out this claim, I'll conclude by describing a couple of models I admire. But let the foregoing discussion block any facile optimism that such radical changes could spread widely, short of deep changes in our economic and political system. In effect, the happy tomorrow of Dewey's 1915 book, Schools of To-morrow, is still tomorrow for us.

Oakland, California, with about 350,000 residents, is a very low scoring district on standardized tests. It has a 95 percent minority school population, very diverse and rapidly changing. African-American students are a substantial majority in the public schools, though Oakland's black community is a minority of the city's population. The main immigrant groups are Latino and Asian.

Over the past seventeen years, a high school reform idea that has state support, the California Partnership Academy, has been spreading in Oakland. There are now more than 30 academies in the six comprehensive high schools. The core features of the model include a career theme, a "technical" class connected to the career theme, a team of teachers who will provide most of the major academic subject classes, voluntary student selection, internships at worksites in the community, and partnerships with appropriate organizations, agencies and enterprises. Concerned with the "at-risk" category of students, the state made it a requirement, for state funding to reduce class size that at least two-thirds of the academy enrollments come from that group. Students in each academy meet the graduation requirements and take part in the elective courses, extracurricular activities, and student government of their comprehensive school.

Crucially, the plan brings together a small team of teachers and a group of students (recommended size 150) who have made an active choice in joining the academy. The teachers will work with those students for the entire three years of academy life (ninth graders do not participate). So teachers and students typically come to know each other more intimately than in the standard format. The team of teachers can pool knowledge of students and their situations. Also crucial: teachers work to coordinate instruction across courses, around the career theme, showing how academic subjects connect to vocations. Senior projects and supervised summer internships (sometimes with pay) have become parts of the program that students find appealing.

The idea of "career" is taken much more broadly than in traditional "shops." Some examples from Oakland academy: Arts and Education, Architecture and Graphic Arts Technology, Architectural Design and Construction, Business, Computer Science and Technology, Culinary Arts and Food Science, Education, Electronics, Environmental Sciences, Fashion, Health and Bioscience (a program I co directed for a year), International Trade and Transportation, Law and Government, Media and Communications, Performing Arts, Visual Arts, Public Safety and Human Services. More traditional shops in Massachusetts "vo-tech" schools include Carpentry; Cosmetology, Marketing Education, Metal Fabrication, Plumbing and Pipefitting/HVAC (heating, ventilating, air conditioning).

The Engineering Academy at Oakland Tech is not typical, but it is exemplary. In existence for fifteen years, it maintains a population of approximately 120. The original creation of a physics teacher and a drafting teacher, the program is highly structured, starting with Engineering Principles and going on through projective geometry, engineering physics, architectural design, and 3D modeling, where students master AutoCAD, the architectural design software used worldwide. (One commented to me that although he planned to go right on to college, if he wanted to postpone that, "I can always get a job"--gesturing toward the impressive AutoCAD project on his computer screen.) They have a home base in an old shop area, made available because of the decline in traditional "shop" programs, where there are design tables and high-end computers funded by a grant by Bechtel. They are in their home before and after school, as well as for academy classes and during free periods. Usually 50 or 60 academy members are in the shop for lunch, eating on the tables and hanging out.

Academically the program requires decent math skills, and predictably does not mirror the ethnic-racial profile of the school, which is 65 percent African-American, 20 percent Asian, 10 percent Hispanic, 4 percent white. The academy is roughly 25 percent African-American, 56 percent Asian, 9 percent Hispanic and 10 percent white. Most amazing, it is more than half female. Though skewed, the group's diversity is still impressive. Students' having chosen to join is an important source of their commitment--a traditional principle, this, of progressive education. As one student told me, explaining his sense of how students work together and help each other do things before asking the teacher, "everyone who is here wants to be here."

It should be noted that the great majority of Engineering Academy students are in "honors" and AP humanities courses. There is some historical irony in a vocational program's being the "elite" track in a high school, but that is the situation. The director's comment that almost all the graduates go on to four-year colleges, including all the UC campuses and a number of Ivy League schools, is telling. He also says that a small minority actually become engineers. But going on to a good college seems to be, in Oakland as elsewhere, the true measure of high school success.

I heard an illuminating perspective on the program from a young African-American senior, about to graduate and go on to a California state college campus to study computer science. He had been suggested for an interview because he had done his senior project on Paolo Freire's work. His explanation sounded as much like Bowles and Gintis as like Freire: he noted that the economy needed many low-skill workers for the kinds of jobs available, and he saw that inner city schools teach kids to "be on time, not to question." He gave a very positive evaluation of how academies worked, his own and the others he knew about at Oakland Tech. He explained:

   Academies give people a focus
   and training; they can apply that
   to other things. Just because I
   know these disciplines in engineering
   doesn't mean I have to be
   an engineer, but it['s] an advantage
   just having that form of
   training, having that idea that
   things have to be really neat, they
   have to be perfect.... People
   think, you're going to the
   Engineering Academy,
   you've got to, be an Roughly
   engineer; you re going
   to the Health Academy, you've got
   to be a nurse. [They]
   can't really see that it's
   just something you
   can apply to your life.
   It helps people get on
   track: people can
   flounder around in a
   regular school system.
   ... but an academy
   gives you a smaller
   group with a director and teachers
   who know you personally ...
   In a regular school they care that
   people are in class on time and
   aren't throwing books at teachers,
   but they don't really ensure
   that the kids are in there enjoying
   themselves and learning and
   growing as students. They just
   kind of care about, "o.k., you're
   supposed to be in the classroom
   8:30 to 3:30, do your work,
   don't be late," and it's systematic
   that way. Also, [in the academy]
   it really helps because all the kids
   get along, and when you're in
   that environment learning,
   where there's no hostility or conflict,
   well that just promotes
   learning even more, and when
   there is a dispute about things,
   kids can talk it out and really
   learn from that situation. I can't
   emphasize enough how great
   academies are.

The other vocational program I'll describe is "Environmental Science," a recent option provided at Essex Agricultural-Technical High School in Danvers, Massachusetts. The setting here is very different from the comprehensive high schools of Oakland. Not only is Essex "aggie" among the exclusively vocational schools that Massachusetts has retained; it is one of a very few remaining agricultural vocational schools. (Once numerous, aggie high schools had an obvious advantage in connecting learning to work, because many of their students would in theory, at least return to and run the family farms they came from.) There are programs at Essex for training veterinary assistants and for forestry and such, but Environmental Science is a new program, designed by a horticulturalist who had high school credentialing and a marine biologist who was also an Outward Bound instructor. Its roughly 30 students, a large majority of them female, differ markedly from those at the Engineering Academy in Oakland. These are recognizably "voc" students. Most had poor academic records, and would have agreed with one of their number: she "hated" junior high, where one sat in class after class "not doing anything," and she refused to go to her local comprehensive high school. She went on to say that she "loved" her program that "I know it sounds corny, but we're like a family."

The program description is worth excerpting in some detail, given the popular image of vocational schools. Note that its authors--not consciously progressive educators--eloquently voice some of Dewey's ideals.

   The Environmental Science
   Program is a three-year major,
   which runs from the Sophomore
   year through the Senior year. It
   is designed for those who plan to
   pursue their studies beyond high
   school. The main topics of the
   Environmental Studies Program
   are water resources and global
   watershed education.

   The Sophomore Woodland and
   Wetland Ecology curriculum
   will help students to acquire
   real world skills used by field
   biologist and ecologists for conducting
   experiments and tests;
   this will aid them in developing
   models for better
   understanding of
   local forest communities,
   wetlands, and
   wildlife habitats.
   Students will conduct
   water quality tests on
   the ponds here on
   campus and along the
   Ipswich River, providing
   students the
   opportunity to do
   comparative studies
   of these two inland
   ecosystems....

   "Expeditionary
   Learning" is an integral part of
   the program. The expeditions
   are used to amplify classroom
   instruction. In the spring, students
   will organize a trip to the
   headwaters of the Pemigewasset
   and Merrimack Rivers in New
   Hampshire, in order to study
   the rivers' hydrology and chemistry.
   Throughout the year students
   will examine the many
   career opportunities in the
   Environmental Sciences through
   interacting with guest speakers
   and by working directly with
   professionals in the field.
   Students will have the opportunity
   to raise Atlantic Salmon,
   Salmo salar, from eggs, in the
   school's own fish barn facility.
   These salmon will be released
   into the Souhegan River in New
   Hampshire, a tributary for the
   Merrimack River, just prior to
   the spring expedition....

   The Junior year picks up where
   the Sophomore year ends, in
   the Estuaries of the Ipswich and
   Merrimac Rivers. This is the
   launching site for our studies of
   Marine Biology and Oceanography.
   The Marine Biology
   curriculum is based on understanding
   the Marine Biodiversity
   of the Gulf of Maine.
   Students focus on such local
   ecosystems as salt marshes, the
   rocky inter-tidal zone, benthic
   habitats and others....

   The Junior year expedition
   takes the students to Nova
   Scotia, Canada, in order to
   study the northern portion of
   the Gulf of Maine ...

   During the Senior year students
   will prepare to take the
   Advanced Placement Environmental
   Science Exam....
   [They] will also take a
   Hazardous Materials Training
   Course (HAZMAT), provided
   by the University of Massachusetts,
   Lowell [and] work on a
   project with a local environmental
   conservation commission.
   These will be real world
   projects based on the environmental
   needs and concerns of
   local communities.

Students in vocational schools in Massachusetts spend half of their time taking regular, low track academic classes in math, English, history and science, with different assigned teachers for each class, as is the high school norm. Environmental Sciences at Essex takes up half the school day, with the students outside or using their own funky field house. Those I talked to all said they liked the vocational half, and at best tolerated the academic half. Literacy skills? Students were clearly doing lots of thinking, reading and writing in their "shop" program, though not of the standard sort. They did get Shakespeare in English classes, to what effect is a good question.

An obvious point to make about such programs is that they are unique. They depend on the deep skills and knowledge of particular teachers. So they are not replicable as a standard curriculum that could be mandated by an administration, and they can not serve as models in the obvious sense. But in their underlying principles, they represent the old vision of progressive education: there should be contexts of creative program development that depend on teachers; students should be able to choose, looking to their own current interests and vague sense of vocational possibilities; they should be active in connecting their school learning with real world concerns; they should have an opportunity to work together on projects and to work with adults other than teachers, who do things in the world. My examples suggest that the Deweyan principles, not particular contents, are key, and that the way vocational themes work to focus and provide connections to real world situations is an educational value, not simply a matter of job-training. Many students, like the one I interviewed in Oakland, recognize this. They see going to college to study marine biology, for example, as their new goal--whereas if they had gone to their local, comprehensive high school, they would have most likely continued to dislike school, done poorly, possibly dropped out, and almost certainly not qualified for conventional higher education.

Such programs and principles seem to me very useful for discussing high school realistically: e.g., for getting away from the high-culture rhetoric of the (abstractly) "educated person" that the hard right has so oddly appropriated. Norton Grubb, an economist at the School of Education at Berkeley who has studied vocational education for a long time, is one of several left academics who urge reconsideration of vocational education as a neglected path for serious school reform. For instance:

   The high school is now an
   inescapably vocational institution.
   [M]ost students ... are
   there to get a job. Some see
   high school as a route to college,
   of course, but this too is
   largely a vocational decision,
   since college is a prerequisite for
   the best-paid, highest status
   occupations....

   Yet the high school doesn't
   appear to be vocational in the
   least. The.... courses dominating
   the curriculum--the courses
   of the college prep track
   appear "academic," [i.e.]
   removed from the real world of
   jobs and other adult responsibilities.
   The standard ways of
   teaching present a sequence of
   topics experienced as "school
   subjects," as things to learn in
   school, with their importance
   for later performance as workers
   and as citizens and community
   members left unclear....
   Although the high school is
   crucial to the vocational futures
   of its students, it appears to be
   an entirely academic enterprise....

   (Norton Grubb, "Resolving the
   Paradox of the High School," in
   Education Through Occupations
   in American High Schools [New
   York: Teachers College Press,
   1995])

Such a perspective has implications for educational activists. It deserves discussion, even or especially in this weird moment of ruthless testing based on the academic curriculum, which may well squeeze out programs like Environmental Science.

In Part Two of this essay--forthcoming in issue #70--I will look skeptically at current debates on "tracking," question what are often taken to be progressive positions, look at concrete examples with a quizzical eye, and discuss the political context for progressive educational reformers today. That context will seem strange yet familiar, given the long, confused conceptual life of "progressive education."

COPYRIGHT 2004 Center for Critical Education, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group