At a time when universal agreement on matters pertaining to education and ours schools is virtually non-existent, the emergence of any significant area free of controversy is worth noting. Such an area is that of job-related vocational education. The U.S. Commissioner of Education has stressed the importance of such schooling, and agreement with his view appears to be quite general.
In the Fall 1971 issue of the Public Interest, Professor Norton E. Long says that the inner city may be doomed, by reason of the fact that it is rapidly becoming similar to an Indian reservation - a non-productive, non-economic enclave increasingly dependent on financial aid from the outside. One of the major reason for this development, Long says, is the "failure of the educational system to relate seriously and effectively to the employability of youth in the city ... "
A lead article in the Wall Street Journal of September 22, under the headline, "Learning a trade, Vocational Education Boom as Jobless Seek to Acquire New Skills," reports that vocational school are being flooded with applications from laid-off white collar workers. While colleges and universities are showing the smallest increase in enrollment in many years (25%), the U.S. Office of Education predicts enrollment at public vocational schools will jump 9%. The Journal goes on to say: "It's clear that vocational training gives people an edge in the job market compared with those who lack formal training. National unemployment among teenagers stands at 16%, but the rate for teens with vocational training is only 5%, the U. S. Office of Education say ... The Office of Education estimates that 85% of those high school graduates who complete vocational programs finds jobs in the field for which they were trained."
In Professor Long's view, employment may be the key to solving the urban problem: "Of all the means of restoring the city , none seems more promising than achieving the satisfactory employment of its inhabitants, particularly its youth. In a city such as St. Louis, the condition of a few thousand black and white youths is a key factor in the troubles of the entire city. Their failure to find meaningful employment infects the schools with a sense of frustration and futility. The dirty, dead-end, intermittent jobs that are open to them offer a poor and unattractive alternative to crime, the hustle, drug addiction and unemployment. They may well be a major cause in the increase in illegitimacy rates: the ADC rolls, and the incidence of the female-headed family with all its attendant problems.
This marginal youth population, so well depicted in Elliot Liebow' s Tally's Corner, acts as an almost Keynesian multiplier of social ill. Low and unstable incomes insufficient to maintain the housing in which such youths reside contribute to the spread of blight. Crime and blight lead to housing abandonment and the decay of the city.
Career Training: A Casualty of Decentralization
It is ironic that precisely at this time, when there is such Politics widespread agreement on this issue, the vocational high school in New York City have suffered their greatest cutbacks. Through the years, vocational high school students have willingly endured a longer school day in order to obtain the fullest measure of practical and theoretical education. Now, over 40,000 students in vocational high schools have lost one period of specialized career training everyday. The consequences of this curtailment will be disastrous. Cosmetology students, for example, will be unable to meet the minimum state exam for licenses to practice their trade. Other trade fields will suffer similarly. One student complained, "I love the school, am willing to travel two hours every day and spend $4.50 each week on carfare. My friends and I are serious students, and we feel that we deserve better treatment at the hands of the city."
Why, it should be asked, have these cuts been made? The answer is to be found in the new politics of decentralization. Since elementary and Junior high school are run by locally elected community boards, and the high schools by the central Board of Education, the latter has come under fierce attack for spending much more money on vocational education than was being spent for other school divisions. The central Board, unable to withstand the attack, proceeded to cripple the vocational program.
When decentralization was first proposed one of the chief arguments for it was that it would break the bureaucratic "lockstep" of the centralized system and lead to educational innovation. If the vocational high school experience is any example, we may expect, not innovation and excellence, but an arbitrary, arithmetical leveling process that will lead inevitably to the destruction of many worthwhile programs and to educational mediocrity.