Tennesee's Vocational Offerings

Tennessee vocational education has recently initiated several strategies to dissuade counselors from steering college-bound students away from Graff--inviting them to luncheons at the center, dispatching Graft counselors to meet with their peers at sending schools and sharing surveys showing that many students benefit from and enjoy vocational education. The jury's still out on the results.

Cullen says her group is "addressing [counselors' misconceptions] as an association by working with our [comprehensive high school] counselors' association in Tennessee." She adds, "We've also worked with our school boards association, and they're going to be sponsoring some activities this year to promote vocational-technical education and clear up some of the myths.... We have a strong relationship with the Tennessee Builders Association--they're engaged in a number of activities related to working with counselors, developing career fairs and developing public relations materials for vocational-technical education."

"As an association what we've really tried to do in the past five years," Cullen sums up, "is build coalitions with different groups--both business and industry based and education based."

In Alaska, Anchorage School District Vocational Director Jerry Balistreri says he's been blessed by strong business support and a $400,000 annual allotment from the local school board the past five years for equipment upgrades. Along with the makeover has come a new name for vocational education--career technology. Even so, Balistreri faces counselors who think college-track youths have no business in vocational education and experiences loss of staff to academic subjects-"Like when Principal X wants to start a Japanese-language program and says, 'Hmm,I've got a [vocational] retirement over here.'"

With ever-mounting evidence that workforce education is badly needed in the nation's schools to foster a pool of skilled and job-ready workers, Balistreri hopes for a "pendulum swing" toward vocational education in the coming years. In the meantime, he buttresses himself with the observation, "I wouldn't be in education--and in particular in vocational education administration--if I didn't like a challenge."

Equipped to impress Few things improve vocational education's image more effectively than state-of-the-art equipment that meets workplace standards and students' definition of cool. But finding the money to secure the latest technology is another major challenge for vocational administrators. "There's no way I can have a 30-station AutoCAD with Pentium 233s and AutoCAD 13," says Mike Murphy, director of secondary education for the Monroe School District in Washington state. "Never be able to afford it. So I need to keep current, but the reality is I'll never be able to keep current. It's not going to happen."

Paist notes that "if anyone wants to really poke criticism at any of the technical high schools I think that's where they start--with the observation that we're way behind local business and industry in terms of the equipment we have." Pathfinder recently secured more than$200,000 for technological equipment from surrounding town councils and is ranked No. 1 in technology among schools in western Massachusetts, Paist says. Even so, he anticipates needing to seek a bond issue before long to finance technology upgrades.