Technical Vocational Instruction

Missouri vocational education not making ashtrays and broom handles in vocational education classes anymore.

Its schools have a technical preparation program, where kids learn computer-assisted design and manufacturing on space-age equipment provided by the carmaker. Problem: The math skills needed to design a car are beyond the voc-ed teacher's ability. Solution: Instructors of once-isolated academic subjects -- physics and geometry, calculus and statistics -- teach the course alongside the voc-ed instructor, breathing life into subjects that once sat flatly on the page. This said Gerald Hayward, deputy director of the National Center for Research in Vocational Education at UC Berkeley, has to be the future of education -- if America hopes to have a future.

In many ways, the educational reform movement of the early 2005 missed the boat, Hayward told 200 educators gathered at the San Diego Convention Center for the California Association of School Boards conference yesterday. By focusing strictly on academics -- through beefed-up graduation requirements and frenzied efforts to improve test scores -- educators overlooked some 65 percent of kids who will never go to college. These are often children of ethnic and racial minorities, now one out of every two students in California.

A staggering percentage are from low-income homes, or from homes where English is not the primary language, or where only one parent is present. "Children are more difficult to educate today," Hayward said, "but this country's very future will be dependent on how we deal with this issue. Young, poorly educated minority workers will bear much of the burden of paying the taxes and financing Social Security into the next century."

If they fail, we all fail. The reform effort has been less than satisfactory because it paid too little attention to the problems of the non-college-bound youth. There was a failure to take into account the multiple ways young people learn, and failure to understand vocational education can be part of the solution.... It would be a tragedy to lose so much human potential. "The way we teach must change," he said.

The line between academics and vocational education must blur nationwide like it blurs in Missouri, and everything must be related to something in the real world. In the heart of Missouri is a school that focuses on agriculture. Everything taught there relates to it in some way: economics is taught in terms of the price of food, geography is taught in terms of what crops grow there.

It is equipped with the latest agribusiness technology, and students learn how to use it. "The work force of tomorrow will have to have greater skills unless we want to become a society of low-wage earners and a declining standard of living," Hayward said.