An unacknowledged gem

From How the Other Half Learns by Oren Cass. A plea to make the lives of all Americans by improving technical schools as an alternative for the 72% who do not complete a college degree. I think technical schools have been the unacknowledged gems of our higher education system, replete with second chances for kids who make poor decisions. But because they don't get the attention (or funding), we also don't expect as much from them as we should.

Congressman Joe Kennedy wanted a dramatic backdrop. The Democratic Party had asked him to deliver its response to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address—an honor that for many past recipients proved an invitation to commit political seppuku. Speaking from an empty soundstage into America’s living rooms is never easy; doing so immediately following the pomp and circumstance of a presidential address to a joint session of Congress is a recipe for disaster. So Kennedy decided to speak from somewhere. His choice: the auto shop at Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School, in Fall River, Massachusetts. The students in attendance would be those pursuing a course of technical training instead of a standard academic curriculum. Kennedy began his speech lauding how the students carried on the “rich legacy” of Fall River, “a proud American city, built by immigrants . . . that knows how to make great things.”

And that was all that Kennedy had to say about that. Transgender bullying and gay marriage, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter—all got call-outs. The “Dreamers” got two. But vocational education—or, in its now-fashionable formulation, career and technical education (CTE)—got none. Nowhere among Kennedy’s talking points was any reference to the plight of students who won’t complete higher education, or to the need to expand and strengthen schools like the one in which he was standing. Kennedy mentioned only “good education you can afford,” presumably a reference to subsidized college tuition. The auto shop provided a backdrop only; it wasn’t on the policy agenda.

Kennedy’s congressional colleagues apparently feel the same way. CTE and “career pathways” and “apprenticeships” enjoy bipartisan support, at least verbally; yet over the past 25 years, the primary federal funding stream for such initiatives has declined in value by 30 percent, to just over $1 billion per year. Federal funding for college, meantime, has risen by 133 percent. Throw in state-level funding for higher ed, and the total passes $150 billion annually. Massachusetts, which Kennedy represents, takes the in-word-but-not-deed enthusiasm for CTE to an extreme: it has built a high-quality system of technical schools (which actually outperforms the state’s public schools on standardized tests), but the system promotes itself as essential to increasing the state’s college-enrollment rate.

The virtues of a reliable pathway from high school to a stable job and a middle-class life remain appealing in theory, but always, it seems, for someone else’s constituents and, ultimately, someone else’s kids. What we’re left with is a public education system that stands among the nation’s most regressive institutions.

Those other people’s kids, it turns out, are most people’s kids. For every 100 American students who begin the ninth grade, 18 will fail to graduate high school on time, 25 will earn a diploma but not enroll in college, and 29 will enroll in college but fail to complete a degree. Even among the 28 percent who graduate from college in a timely fashion, 12 will end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees anyway. Only 16 out of the 100—call them the Fortunate Fifth (and it’s more like a sixth)—will move smoothly through the high-school-to-college-to-career pipeline that we pretend should be everyone’s goal.

And the picture is not improving. Despite a more than doubling of per-pupil spending in real terms since the 1970s, standardized test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained flat. SAT scores have declined. In 2013, the national board responsible for the NAEP mapped test scores to a threshold for college preparedness. Fewer than two in five high school seniors cleared the bar in either reading or math. The reading scores allowed for historical comparison and showed a decline over two decades, both overall and within racial groups. At no point from 1992 to 2013 did even 20 percent of African-Americans or 25 percent of Hispanics achieve reading scores that would indicate college readiness.

Where progress appears to be happening, it is more often a consequence of lowered standards—and sometimes, outright fraud—than genuine improvement in outcomes. High school graduation rates have gotten better, at least marginally—from 79 percent in 1970 to 83 percent in 2014—but such results are hard to credit, absent improved test scores. Pursuing higher graduation rates, many states have eliminated requirements, created “alternative” diplomas, or manipulated their data. California has shown the most impressive gains on paper, for example, but in 2018, a U.S. Department of Education audit of the Los Angeles Unified School District found that more than 10 percent of graduates were incorrectly classified and that the state “did not provide reasonable assurance that reported graduate rates were accurate and complete.” The year before, one public school in the nation’s capital was caught red-handed awarding diplomas to an entire class of students (and celebrating their subsequent admissions to college), even though most of the kids had missed months of school and almost none had passed the citywide exams.

A parallel trend is emerging at the college level, where massive investment in remediation for underprepared students has failed to stanch the flood of dropouts. The federal government’s most thorough analysis followed a cohort of students enrolling at both two- and four-year colleges in 2003, and found that six years later, in 2009, only about half had earned any credential. Less than 60 percent of four-year enrollees had finished a bachelor’s degree; only 26 percent of two-year enrollees had completed an associate’s degree or higher. In the years since, results have barely budged—completion rates are up less than 3 percentage points at two-year schools and less than 2 percentage points at four-year schools.

Lot's of great opportunity to help those not in the Mandarin Class through better funding and better performance of technical schools.