President Bush's 2004 budget previews many worthy education policy reforms, though in most cases the fine print remains to be written. Last week, I applauded the Administration's excellent Head Start initiative (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#350). Let me now note one that's drawn less attention but could prove equally momentous. In the portion of the budget dealing with the Education Department's Office of Vocational and Adult Education, you will find a preview of "The Secondary and Technical Education Excellence Act of 2003," which is the administration's plan to overhaul the "Perkins Act," Washington's main vocational-education law, last revised in 1998. Uncle Sam's involvement with voc ed goes back to 1917, however, and the existing program is creaky as well as old. It still assumes that high schools should prepare some kids directly for the workforce, via a job-centered and not-very-academic curriculum, while the rest get an academic education and head toward college. Perhaps that kind of curricular tracking made sense two or three decades back, but not today. The fact is that nearly all of today's young people need a proper secondary education to equip them for a life that will include multiple jobs requiring ever more sophisticated skills, as well as one or more bouts with postsecondary education (maybe right after high school, perhaps later) and successful citizenship in a complex modern society. To the dismay of traditional vocational educators, the Bush administration's "Sec-Tech" proposal, quietly crafted by assistant secretary Carol D'Amico, picks up where NCLB leaves off. It says that U.S. high schools need to equip ALL their students with core academic competencies and that job-related training should take place AFTER high school, when it should be supplied mainly by community and technical colleges. That seems to me exactly right and fully consistent with education reformers' quickening interesting in America's barely-changed high schools. Expect fireworks on Capitol Hill from unreconstructed defenders of old-fashioned voc ed, but Dr. D'Amico and her colleagues have pointed to the future that we need to reach. You can see for yourself at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OVAE/CTE/actespeech.doc.
