Free Republic

... 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...

America has a deficit of workers. Willing workers. Capable workers. Skilled, or at least semi-skilled workers, who can do a job and do it well. There are at least one million jobs that go begging day after day if only employers could find workers to fill them. This probably seems hard-to-believe. After all, how can America have a worker shortage when we have about 18 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed? When the real unemployment rate is 12 percent? Well certainly the economy isn’t creating nearly as many jobs as it should – in large part because of regulatory...

Instead of going through Congress and making the initiative bipartisan, President Obama acted alone in mid-November, promising $100 million in grants to specialized high schools — such as New York City's Pathways in Technology Early College High School — that prepare students for technical careers. The president's on the right track, but why make it partisan? Schools like P-TECH are an idea whose time has come — one that can be adopted by both parties and by business as well as government. Vocational education fell from favor decades ago because it was seen as an inferior track for less able...

Pupils as young as 14 will be allowed to leave the classroom for two days a week to learn a trade under plans to tackle skill shortages and motivate disillusioned children. In an interview with the Telegraph today, Mike Tomlinson, a former chief inspector of schools, outlines proposals for a young apprenticeship scheme. Ministers are preparing to announce next month that thousands of 14- to 16-year-olds will be able to spend two days a week in the workplace, one day at college and the remaining two days at school. They will learn alongside skilled workers such as plumbers, joiners and...

With a few years of experience, an auto mechanic at a dealership can earn $80,000 a year. But high schools are eliminating auto shop classes, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. The equipment is costly, industrial tech (shop) teachers are hard to find and students' schedules are filled with college-prep classes. Students assume the only way to make a living is to go to college, but many don't have the motivation or the academic skills to earn a college degree. Only about half of students who enroll in college ever earn a degree; most of those who graduate won't be earning $80,000...

<p>A horror story has surfaced in the liberal bastion of Madison, Wis., that illustrates how destructive bilingual education can be at least for one immigrant student.</p> <p>Our story centers on 15-year-old Kiet Tran, who moved to the United States last year after his Vietnamese mother married John Gardner of Madison. The teenager didn't understand English, so Madison public school officials placed him in a bilingual education class &#8212; for Spanish speakers.</p>

NEW YORK - Does teaching high school students how to clean a carburetor or decorate a cake give them valuable job skills or does it simply distract them from the study of algebraic equations and French verbs? The debate over the value of vocational education in America's public schools has been raging at least since 1917, when the federal government first began funding such classes. But it's likely to intensify this year as Congress moves to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998 against the backdrop of the Bush administration's recommendation that such programs receive...

<p>WASHINGTON - * Group's study 30 years after Title IX finds few women choose to be plumbers or electricians and more enroll in child care and cosmetology courses. Educators say societal stereotypes are partly to blame for the disparities.</p> <p>Thirty years after Congress banned sex discrimination in schools, vocational training courses for high-wage skills like carpentry, welding and automotive repair remain virtually all-male preserves, a new study finds.</p>