Archived Information

**Implementing the "Education Consensus":**

**The Federal Role in Supporting**

**Vocational -- Technical Education**

James Jacobs

Macomb Community College and

Community College Research Center, Teachers College

W. Norton Grubb

David Gardner Chair in Higher Education, U.C. Berkeley and

Community College Research Center, Teachers College

March 2002

This paper was prepared for the Office of Vocational and Adult
Education, U.S. Department of Education pursuant to contract no.
ED-99-CO-0160. The findings and opinions expressed in this paper do not
necessarily reflect the position or policies of the U.S. Department of
Education.

Implementing the "Education Consensus": The Federal Role in Supporting

Vocational -- Technical Education

James Jacobs and W. Norton Grubb

### Introduction

Until the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the first legislation specifically
funding vocational education, [^1] the federal government had not
supported kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) education at all.
Inevitably, its enactment raised controversial issues of what aspects of
education states should support---since education was and remains a
state responsibility---and when the federal government might intervene.
But there was a sufficiently strong consensus around the need for more
vocational preparation to overcome opposition to federal funding, at
least for limited purposes, and a broad coalition of business
representatives, educators, social reformers, and labor unions united in
support.

Since then, of course, times have changed, and so it has been necessary
to revisit the original rationale for federal funding, to update its
purposes, and to modify the kinds of programs on which federal funds may
be spent. This happened in 1931 with the establishment of the National
Advisory Committee on Education, leading to the passage of the
George-Ellzey Act in 1934 and the George-Deen Act in 1936, both of which
increased federal funding for vocational education. In 1936, President
Roosevelt convened the first Advisory Committee on Vocational Education,
which was charged with the first external evaluation of federal efforts.
Recommendations from this committee were finally implemented in the 1946
George-Barden Act. A significant piece of new legislation, the
Vocational Education Act of 1963, increased appropriations again and
allowed states flexibility in the development of programs. Amendments to
the legislation were made in 1968 and 1972; in 1984 it was renamed after
Carl Perkins, and reauthorized in 1990 and again in 1997.

The current practice of reauthorizing federal legislation every five
years, with an associated national study (the series of National
Assessments of Vocational Education), demonstrates that the questioning
of the federal role has become a virtually continuous activity. On the
one hand, this pattern of constant reexamination has made occupational
education somewhat unstable as it has been subjected to periodic federal
changes and as new purposes---the support of New Deal programs in the
1930s, the emergence of equity rationales in the 1960s, workforce
development efforts towards training or retraining incumbent
workers---have complicated and sometimes confused the original purposes
of the Smith-Hughes Act (Rosenfeld, 1993; Hoachlander, 1986). On the
other hand, the continued scrutiny of the federal role has made it
possible for adjustments to keep up with changing conditions and
priorities.

In this paper, we continue the process of examining the rationale for
federal involvement in occupational education. Past discussions of this
issue have come to a broad set of conclusions:[^2] that the federal
government should fund what states cannot fund on their own, including
efforts to improve the quality of occupational education, to enhance
equity, and to conduct the kind of research and demonstration projects
that are more efficiently carried out at the federal level. Our
conclusions will be roughly consistent with this persistent argument,
but we will focus in particular on two important changes that justify a
federal role and that ought to shape subsequent legislation:

The emergence of what we call, for lack of a better term, the Education
Consensus on the need for a better-prepared labor force for a
knowledge-based society. Education has become not only an initial
activity accomplished before entering the labor market, but a
continuous, lifelong process. The Education Consensus recognizes not
only the need for more education, but education of a different kind,
incorporating competencies that were not relevant in 1917. And
increasingly, economic rewards are shifted to those who earn degrees or
other forms of credentials that demonstrate educational achievement.

The continued escalation of average levels of schooling, with the
consequence that high school vocational education should play a
different role than it did in 1917, and that institutions that didn't
exist then---community colleges and other postsecondary
institutions---play the dominant role in occupational preparation. We
will label this, for ease of reference, the Institutional Transformation
of vocational education.

In Section I, we outline briefly the historical role of the federal
government in occupational preparation, extracting from this history
some continuing arguments and then presenting in greater detail these
two important changes, the Education Consensus and the Institutional
Transformation. In Section II we outline why certain changes implied by
the Education Consensus are unlikely to be undertaken by states, and why
there remains a justification for a federal role in implementing this
Consensus. In Section III we become increasingly explicit about what
federal policy might do in the realm of occupational education,
especially given limited funding and the desire not to intrude on the
prerogatives of the states.

## *Back to Our Roots: Continuity and Change in Federal Support*

At the turn of the last century, around 1900, there was widespread fear
that the previous methods of preparing a labor
force---apprenticeship-based methods, some controlled by unions and some
provided by employers in corporate schools and "vestibule training" on
the job---had become inadequate.[^3] Improvements in technology---the
development of electrically-driven equipment, the expanded use of
complex machinery, new production processes in many different
sectors---and shifts in business organization---especially the expansion
of corporations with their great needs for accountants, clerks, and
various management positions---were changing the nature of occupations
and skills required and, it was widely feared, leading to shortages in
certain critical occupations. Public officials and business leaders
concerned with economic growth and international competition pointed to
the success of Germany and its system of vocational education and argued
that continued success in international competition required emulating
the German system. The social dislocations of the period---huge
increases in immigration, the general movement into cities, increases in
women working, increases in poverty, increases in youth
unemployment---alarmed many social reformers and settlement house
workers, who in turn called on the schools to play a role in keeping
youth off the streets and teaching them to be more productive and
better-paid workers. Educators bemoaned the high dropout rate from high
schools, especially since it led to the "wasted years" syndrome between
the age of compulsory attendance at 14 and the age of high school
graduation at 16 or 17, when employers were more likely to hire youth.
Agreeing with the necessity of keeping youth in school longer, they
searched for forms of schools that would be more motivating and more
likely to lead to permanent employment. Somewhat reluctantly, unions
joined the movement, wanting to have some leverage over the kind of
vocational education provided in schools and hoping that higher levels
of schooling might elevate the status (and earnings) of middle-level
workers. So the coalition for vocational education contained many
different proponents, each with slightly different reasons for
supporting this innovation but joined in their view that high schools
should change.

But high schools, as they emerged from the nineteenth century, were
still predominantly academic institutions, with a curriculum resembling
the current college prep curriculum. As colleges and universities
developed their own professional programs, the academic track became
even more attractive as a route to the baccalaureate degree and the
professions. The only concession to vocational goals in high schools was
the introduction of classes in business, partly in response to
competition from private business and secretarial schools. Federal
support was necessary if the multiple goals of the movement for
vocational education were to be met, in order to make the
transformations in high schools that states and localities were unable
to undertake on their own. And so industrial education for
production-related occupations, trade education for the emerging
wholesale and retail sectors, and home economics to support the
application of "science" in the home[^4]---but not business education,
already incorporated into high schools---were included in legislation
for federal funding. The original legislation also envisioned
substantial support for continuation schools, where individuals who had
entered their initial employment would continue to receive academic
instruction. Although these schools did not flourish, the principle of
continuing to learn while employed was embedded in the original
legislation.

The Smith-Hughes legislation therefore provided federal support to
introduce innovations into high schools that might otherwise persist in
being wholly academic institutions, all in the name of preparing the
labor force to generate individual benefits, high rates of economic
growth, a stronger role in international competition, and solutions to
various social problems. There were, to be sure, many things either
wrong or incomplete or exaggerated about this early version of an
Education Consensus: it often led to overly narrow vocational programs,
providing preparation for poorly paid entry-level jobs; it created
fragmentation in high schools that often operated to the detriment of
poor, working-class, and agrarian youth; the schools by themselves could
not do much to improve international competitiveness or economic growth,
even if expanded education was a good idea for many other reasons; and
the introduction of vocational education probably had less to do with
keeping students in high schools than did the high school diploma as a
prerequisite for entry into professional programs at the college level.
But the notion of educational innovations, in the interests of both
public and private goals, supported in part by the federal government,
was firmly established.

If we fast-forward from 1900 to 2000, we can see that many of the
conditions of a century ago are remarkably similar to those prevailing
now. Immigration has increased, presenting new challenges in integrating
recent immigrants into society and the economy; inequality has increased
from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s; the problems of youth
unemployment and "wasted years" have persisted. In particular, a new
version of an Education Consensus has developed, extending the earlier
consensus forged after 1900. The current version is different in its
details than the earlier one, because economic conditions have changed;
but it remains similar in its emphasis on changing education. It goes
something like this: the Knowledge Revolution (or the Information
Society) is changing the nature of work, increasing the skills required
for the 21st century in virtually all areas of employment. In response,
it is necessary for prospective employees to have both higher *levels*
of education---in most cases education beyond high school (the notion of
College for All, which has replaced the earlier ideal of High School for
All[^5])---as well as different *forms* of education, with a new focus
on such higher-order competencies as problem-solving abilities,
communication, and critical thinking skills. Individuals are more likely
to find their skills becoming obsolete and to lose their positions as
firms change their technologies and products; therefore, lifelong
learning is necessary to keep up with these changes. In addition, the
growth of contingent labor---of employers hiring temporary rather than
permanent workers---has exacerbated job instability and made lifelong
learning even more necessary. International competition has increased,
and, because no developed country wants to fall into the ranks of
undeveloped countries relying on raw materials and unskilled labor, the
need for greater levels of education and training over the lifespan is
even more compelling.

This view creates a new importance for continuing education, not just
initial education; it posits public as well as private benefits; and it
stresses broadly vocational purposes to the near-exclusion of other
goals. This view is now so widely supported by a variety of evidence and
anecdotes, and so widely accepted among policymakers and employers as
well as educators and researchers, that we can speak of it as a new
Education Consensus. Since it is by now so familiar, it also constitutes
a kind of simple story or narrative than can be used to justify
legislation.[^6]

If we take the Education Consensus as true,[^7] then a number of
implications follow for federal (as well as state and local) policy. In
terms of *levels* of education, policy should first promote high school
graduation, since the economic penalty for dropping out of high schools
has gotten larger and larger; and since access to college of some sort
is increasingly important, high school completion is a
near-requirement.[^8] In addition, policy should enable students to
access postsecondary education, though not necessarily at the
baccalaureate level. It is important to stress completion rather than
merely access, because attainment of a degree is usually necessary to
realize the economic benefits of spending additional time in
postsecondary education (Grubb, 1999).

In terms of the *kinds* of education that should be supported, it
follows from the Education Consensus that broader and higher-order
competencies are necessary for skilled work in flexible production, to
facilitate retraining as technologies change and required competencies
shift, and to enable individuals to move among jobs if necessary. The
kinds of narrow job-specific skills associated with traditional high
school vocational education are now inappropriate. In addition, if
higher-order competencies are necessary, then other problems in the
current educational system need to be directly addressed, including the
very low levels of standard academic competencies that many high school
graduates (and certainly high school dropouts) have, the subsequent need
for remedial education, and the tendency to teach in ways that encourage
only rote learning rather than a deeper understanding of both academic
disciplines and occupational methods and procedures. Finally, if
lifelong learning is as important as the Education Consensus suggests,
then policy should support access to educational institutions throughout
the lifespan, not simply at the conventional ages of 6 to 22 or so. This
means that assessment, counseling, remediation, and a number of support
functions become far more significant than they were when vocational
education served a relatively homogenous group of secondary students.

It is equally important to acknowledge the escalation of education
levels, especially since the Education Consensus is partly (though only
partly) correct about levels of schooling. As we have moved from the
ideal of universal high school, articulated around 1900, to an emerging
consensus about (some) College for All, the role of the high school has
changed and new institutions---particularly community colleges---have
become more important. Vocational course-taking in the high schools has
remained steady and has not grown; almost all high school students still
take at least one vocational course. Yet the percentage of
"concentrators"(students taking three or more courses in a single
occupational area) has declined dramatically (Levesque et al., 2000).
This is partly due to the pressure from increasing graduation
requirements stressing academic coursework; partly because high schools
have found it increasingly difficult to maintain coherent programs and
maintain up-to-date equipment; partly because parents (and students)
want access to college and see vocational education as a "dumping
ground" with potentially discriminatory effects for women, minorities,
and lower-income students; and partly because the evidence suggests that
the vocational track in most high schools does not generally lead to
higher earnings or improved employment. The Education Consensus implies
that high schools should be places where students master a set of basic
(or general, or foundation) competencies necessary for all of adult
life, rather than specializing in specific preparation for employment;
this idea has been embedded in state high school exit examinations that
focus on basic academic subjects, and now in the exams required in the
No Child Left Behind legislation.

Conversely, occupational education programs in community colleges and
related institutions[^9] are where preparation for the workplace is now
taking place. These programs have expanded since the 1960s and have
become increasingly differentiated as the variety of occupations in the
economy has expanded, and as, increasingly, occupational preparation
becomes formalized in colleges rather than being developed on the job.
In 1996, about one-half of sub-baccalaureate students majored in a
vocational program area (Levesque et al., 2000).

Furthermore, and consistent with the emphasis on the economic shifts
embedded in the Education Consensus, the nature of occupational
education in community colleges has changed. The dominant fields of
study have shifted away from the traditional occupations that have
dominated high school vocational education to newer occupations that are
part of the modern economy: 29 percent of enrollments are in business,
22 percent in health occupations, 12 percent in engineering and science
technologies, 5 percent in computers and data processing. The "old"
vocational areas ---agriculture, home economics, marketing, trade, and
industry---together comprise only 12 percent of all enrollments
(Levesque et al., 2000, Section VI). The dominant areas are occupations
that make greater use of academic competencies, rather than manual
abilities alone; they provide access to professional and
semi-professional occupations, rather than blue-collar jobs; they tend
to pay more than occupational preparation in older fields and enjoy more
employment stability; and they are fields also represented at the
baccalaureate and graduate school level, facilitating transfer from
community colleges to four-year college. As a result, the transfer rates
from community colleges to four-year colleges are higher from some
occupational areas than from academic areas (Palmer, 1986-7); these
"modern" postsecondary occupational programs can lead either to
well-paid employment, or further education, or both.

Because of the Institutional Transformation in occupational education,
any federal policy should emphasize different goals at the secondary and
at the postsecondary levels. At the secondary level, the emphasis should
be on completing high school, not simply with standard academic skills
(something that the No Child Left Behind legislation tries to accomplish
through periodic exams) but also with the higher-order competencies that
are prerequisites both for further education and for employment in the
jobs of the modern economy. The emphasis of occupational education in
high school should *not* be on obtaining the job-specific, entry-level
skills of traditional vocational education. We will have more specific
recommendations in Section III for supporting the innovative high school
programs variously described as the "new" vocational education, or
"education through occupations," or "college and careers."

At the postsecondary level, however, implementing the Education
Consensus implies quite different approaches, again detailed in Section
III, to ensure that postsecondary occupational education follows the
precepts of this consensus. Thus a different set of recommendations
follow, particularly those that enable comprehensive institutions to
improve the quality of their occupational offerings.

But first it is necessary to examine why there should be a federal role
in occupational education---why, if the Education Consensus in this
country is so powerful, there is not enough support from state
governments and local institutions to make these changes on their own.
The federal government proves to have some distinct advantages over
states and localities, particularly in the areas of program improvement
and equity, that not only justify federal intervention but also make a
federal role crucial to implementing the Education Consensus.

***What the Federal Government Can Do***

There are several ways to justify federal support, even for a public
good like education that has been the responsibility of states. One is
simply a pragmatic and political approach: if some outcome is important
to enough organized groups in our country, then they can persuade
Congress and the president to enact legislation supporting that outcome.
This is close to the political process that led to the Smith-Hughes Act,
when the support from different political constituencies finally became
strong enough to overcome opposition, without much hand wringing about
what precisely justified the federal role. However, quite apart from the
fact that such a pragmatic approach cannot convince skeptics, it cannot
detail which specific practices should be supported. Over the long run,
a purely pragmatic coalition of supporters often leads to different
groups stressing different practices and, therefore, to diffuse use of
federal funds with no particular effect. Moreover, legislation produces
a cluster of public and private individuals and groups who directly
benefit and who become a constituency, which promotes the continuation
of the legislation, often at the expense of any examination of public
needs. Many of the federal commissions who examined vocational education
have pointed out the significance of the state and local vocational
educators in producing local political support for their activities,
despite little enthusiasm from parents, the private sector, or other
educators.

A more principled approach has a chance of being more targeted, more
effective, and more influential over the long run. The principled
approaches that have dominated in federal legislation for vocational
education have included program improvement and equity. But why don't
states and localities support these goals adequately? The answers
provide some guidance about which kinds of spending might be justified
and which might not. In particular, the following seem to be reasons for
state (and local) failure in these areas:

-   States---at least most states---suffer from diseconomies of small
    size. They are less able to engage in innovations requiring some
    initial experimentation in a variety of settings to see where they
    work and where they don't; they are less able to evaluate these
    innovations. Thus states have an incentive to wait until other
    states develop promising practices. And so there's been a
    justification for the federal government to engage in demonstration
    and pilot projects to develop effective practices because of the
    economies of scale that the federal government enjoys, and because
    of the economies of breadth---the federal government is in a better
    position to see the successes and failures in *all* states, not just
    in local programs. This justification implies that federal activity
    should be confined to supporting examples of innovative practice,
    evaluating their effects, and promulgating their effects (both
    positive and negative).

-   States (and localities) are, directly or indirectly, the creators of
    educational institutions---in this case, high schools and community
    colleges---and may not be politically able to see the need for
    reform. This is, of course, a problem that all funding institutions
    have: foundations are usually unwilling to hear bad news about their
    grants; presidents (and governors, and mayors) don't want to hear
    that their favorite projects have failed; legislators are usually
    more engrossed in getting new legislation passed (and taking credit
    for it) than in evaluating the results carefully and potentially
    taking the blame for mediocre results; and local educators may be
    reluctant to admit that the program they have just implemented is
    ineffective. In some instances, change means the loss of jobs,
    money, and prestige, or unfavorably affects constituents and
    supporters---leading to the status quo as the most acceptable
    option. Careful evaluation and complex judgments, such as
    understanding the conditions under which an improvement works or
    fails, are not especially valuable in the political process. Here is
    an area where the distance of the federal government from state and
    local conditions is a *benefit*, rather than a problem: the federal
    government can more readily distance itself, both politically and
    emotionally,[^10] from the state and local politics that prevent
    dispassionate analyses of innovations.

-   In education, states have inherited traditions of local control,
    both in K-12 education and in community colleges, with their
    commitments to serving local communities. Over time, states have
    increased their power relative to local K-12 districts, especially
    as state funding has increased relative to local funding (of course,
    some states are more centralized than others). Still, the creation
    of coherent state policies is often undermined by traditions of
    local control. This is particularly the case for community colleges,
    where most state agencies (with some notable exceptions such as
    those in Florida and North Carolina) have very little power to
    improve the quality of local programs. Here, then, is a
    justification for a stronger federal role in program improvement.

-   Support for the Education Consensus is often interpreted as support
    for only one means of success for high school students: gaining
    access to a four-year college. In this country, academic
    alternatives dominate any programs with the appearance of being
    vocational. Parents continue to press for their children to enter
    academic programs in high school since they presumably lead to
    college and the baccalaureate degree. Good education, particularly
    at the high school level, has often been reduced to one measure: how
    many students attend postsecondary institutions. Community college
    students tend to say they want to transfer to four-year colleges,
    since this is the high-status alternative. Yet many students do
    poorly in their academic tracks, fail to go on to college or to
    transfer to a four-year college, and fail to complete the
    postsecondary degrees they or their parents say they want.
    Therefore, while there is consensus that a variety of programs to
    prepare individuals for "modern" occupations is necessary, there is
    usually more parental and political support for the academic track.

In addition, even though the Education Consensus and its emphasis on
higher-order skills implies that occupations programs should be broad
rather than narrow, employers at the local level often pressure
institutions for students with the specific skills that enable them to
enter specific jobs immediately---"turn-key employees," as one community
college leader described them---and thereby undermine the commitment to
broader programs integrated with academic content. As a final example,
there's been a broad consensus within occupational education that a
mixture of school-based learning and work-based learning is superior to
an emphasis on formal schooling alone. Yet quality work-based learning
is difficult to implement and more expensive to maintain than
traditional classroom instruction, although there has been some success
in recruiting employer participants (Bailey, Hughes and Barr, 2000;
Wieler and Bailey, 1997). Again, various dimensions of the Education
Consensus are effectively undermined at the local level, providing a
role for the federal government.

In this country, there has been a marked preference for comprehensive
rather than specialized institutions---for comprehensive high schools
rather than distinct academic and vocational high schools, for
comprehensive community colleges rather than technical institutes, for
comprehensive public universities rather than specialized liberal arts
colleges and specialized institutes in business, agriculture,
psychology, or teacher training. The dominance of comprehensive
institutions is, in our view, a laudable and remarkable development: it
is more equitable, since it does not create the kind of tracking
mechanisms that separate institutions would; it allows students to
change their interests more easily, without having to move to another
institution; it means that different disciplines and fields of study are
all in one institution, allowing for the integration of academic and
occupational content, for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary
education and research.

But the reliance on comprehensive institutions comes at a cost: these
institutions tend to be dominated by academic values and norms, by
administrators and faculty from the academic side, and by institutional
procedures (like funding mechanisms) that have been developed for
academic rather than occupational programs. As a result, occupational
programs usually feel like second-class citizens. More concretely, they
have difficulty getting the funding they need for capital equipment and
materials (as do some sciences and computer-related courses, to be
sure); there are usually no built-in provisions for internships,
co-operative education, or other forms of work-based learning; the
connections to employers that are important to keeping up-to-date and
the placements efforts that are crucial to realizing the benefits of
occupational preparation are difficult to fund in enrollment-generated
institutions.[^11] Again, states have been the creators of these
comprehensive institutions, and it has been politically difficult for
them to overcome the biases in favor of comprehensive institutions with
an academic focus. This is yet another reason why some federal role may
be necessary to implement the occupational programs necessary under the
Education Consensus.

In fact, the dominant use of federal funds for vocational education has
implicitly followed this logic. Particularly at the postsecondary level,
a great deal of Perkins funding has supported equipment purchases and
the updating of programs and curricula---two activities that are
difficult to fund in academic institutions. As one occupational
instructor noted, "Shakespeare never changes," while occupational
programs need to keep up with changing technologies and procedures.

Allowing states to establish policies inevitably results in inequities
among states, as some provide better funding for education than others,
or more inspired leadership, or more coherent programs. The federal
government can therefore serve a role in evening out variations among
states in the ability to implement the Education Consensus. This is, of
course, a form of equity that is collective (focusing on states) rather
than individual.

Finally, the Education Consensus implies a *national* interest in
certain forms of education that *states* cannot serve. Indeed, states
are often in competition with one another, pursuing
"beggar-thy-neighbor" policies to lure employment from other states, a
practice that is unproductive from a national perspective. Instead, to
the extent that education is a component of economic growth and
international competitiveness,[^12] the preparation of the labor force
as a whole, rather than in particular states, is crucial; the need for a
skilled workforce for the 21st century, as the common rhetoric goes, is
a national rather than merely a state interest. While this is especially
true among the new information and computer-based technologies, there is
also a national interest is areas such as allied health and now airport
security, where it is entirely appropriate for the federal government to
play a role in stimulating a national response to the needs in these
occupations (Karp, Jacobs, and Hughes, 2002). So, once again, it is
impossible to rely on the incentives of individual states to implement
the Education Consensus; a national effort is necessary.

Thus, on close examination, there are many reasons why states do not and
cannot support forms of education---including occupational
education---that are necessary for the Education Consensus to be fully
developed. These reasons imply that a federal role is important---but
not just any role, since these different rationales imply specific tasks
for the federal government to undertake. In the final section we outline
some concrete directions for federal policy in occupational education
that follow from both the Education Consensus and the Institutional
Transformation of occupational education.

***Options for Federal Policy***

At the outset, there is a major decision that, in theory if not in
practice, the Congress and the federal government might make. In some
areas of education and social policy---including the education of
low-income children (in the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA) and now
the No Child Left Behind Act) and Social Security and Medicare for the
elderly---the federal government provides enormous sums of money, in
effect supporting all or most of a certain activity. This is an approach
that conceivably the federal government could take in occupational
education. While the government now spends about \$1 billion for
vocational education, federal support for postsecondary vocational
programs contributes only two percent of total spending (Grubb and
Stern, 1989). One could imagine spending three or four times that amount
in order to provide all programs an array of support services, more
money to provide adequate support for equipment and materials, yet
another large sum to equalize the differences in the extent and quality
of occupational programs among states, and still more money to eliminate
high school dropouts and to ensure "College for All"---particularly
among low-income and minority youth. In order for the federal government
to contribute 10 percent of the budget of community colleges---a
substantial but still modest proportion---it would have to increase its
spending by about \$4 billion per year. But we don't think that such
substantial funding is remotely possible, particularly not if the
current recession deepens. Instead, as in so many areas of social
policy, the federal government will probably be confined to playing a
role with considerably more modest sums.

This implies that the dominant federal role should be to stimulate
innovation and improvement, instead of funding large amounts for
relatively routine activities. This is an obvious way to leverage
relatively small sums and to compensate for the inabilities of states
and localities to support certain crucial activities (as we argued in
Section II). It is also consistent with the recent history of federal
legislation in promoting program improvement. Furthermore, if our
argument about the Education Consensus is correct, then program
improvement should be defined as those activities that further the
innovations necessary to realize the Education Consensus *and* which
states and localities are unlikely to implement on their own. In turn,
we examine the specific implications for secondary schools, for
postsecondary institutions including community colleges in particular,
for the potential recipients of federal funds, for equity, and for the
structure of grants and the activities of the Department of Education.

**Secondary Occupational Education:** As we argued in Section I, the
Institutional Transformation of education over the twentieth century has
resulted in a general consensus that specific vocational preparation
should not be part of high school. The No Child Left Behind Act supports
this idea in stressing the acquisition of basic academic competencies at
all levels of the K-12 system, as do the many states that have developed
their own assessments of academic abilities. In this sense, the goals of
K-12 education have, for the moment at least,[^13] been defined in terms
of basic academic competencies, a rough consensus that seems to leave
little room for occupational education.

But the way these competencies are achieved has never been as clearly
defined. One strand of historical development stresses the conventional
academic track of the nineteenth century high school---now four years of
English, three years of math, three years of science, and so on, a
curriculum developed by convention without any internal coherence. The
alternative stresses that high schools might develop a variety of
approaches to suit the different interests and motivation of different
students; this is the approach, for example, of magnet and charter
schools and other choice mechanisms, which intentionally allow the
development of alternatives to the monolithic high school.

In this second path, there's a powerful role for new forms of vocational
education, the approaches that have been variously labeled "education
through occupations," "college and careers," or simply the "new"
vocational education.[^14] These approaches tend to integrate academic
and *broadly* occupational content; they often facilitate this
integration with novel structures including the creation of schools
within schools (as in career academies), the creation of majors or
clusters defined by broad occupations, or the creation of entire schools
(including magnet schools) with a broadly occupational theme. They also
incorporate paths to postsecondary education like Tech Prep activities
and usually try to incorporate forms of work-based learning as well,
creating other forms of learning and bridges to employers. They are
therefore a novel form of occupational education, closely connected to
academic competencies and the higher-order abilities stressed in the
Education Consensus, and they are closely related to other strands of
the current school reform movement (see Hughes, Bailey and Mechur,
2001). Continuing to support such efforts through federal funding---as
has been the case since 1990, when the Perkins Amendments stressed the
integration of academic and vocational education---is a way of
simultaneously reforming vocational education, creating high schools
consistent with the Education Consensus, and serving the acquisition of
basic academic and higher-order competencies.

A related issue, both in current state efforts and in the assessment
required by the No Child Left Behind Act, is how broadly or narrowly
competencies are defined. In many states, the assessments emphasize
decontextualized facts and procedures, in contrast to the Education
Consensus that stresses various higher-order competencies. These
assessments can only have the effect of narrowing the education of
students, particularly low-income students. Therefore, an important
activity for federal support is the development of assessments that are
more consistent with the Education Consensus and with "education through
occupations," with broader conceptions of competencies, and with a
greater array of higher-order abilities. The development of such
alternate assessments is also consistent with the economies of scale in
research and development that only the federal government can achieve.

**Postsecondary Occupational Education:** The Institutional
Transformation of the twentieth century has led to the bulk of
pre-professional occupational preparation taking place in community
colleges and a few technical institutes. The purposes of these
institutions are now quite different from those of secondary schools,
and the markets they serve are far more diverse and specialized. It has
become increasingly awkward to lump federal funding for secondary and
postsecondary education into one piece of legislation and even more
difficult to apply similar models of accountability to what are becoming
two distinctly different institutions. The idea of separate pieces of
legislation for secondary and postsecondary vocational education (or
separate titles within one act) has been promoted consistently over the
past 20 years or so [^15] and has never been able to win politically,
yet with the Institutional Transformation now makes more sense than ever
before. Given the developments of the 1990s, and the increasing
insistence that high schools focus on basic competencies rather than
specific occupational preparation, the reasons for distinct legislation
have strengthened. Therefore the Department of Education and Congress
should develop two distinct pieces of legislation to accommodate the
different reform issues at the secondary and postsecondary levels.
Within both pieces of legislation there can still be a commitment to
systemic goals and a clear federal vision of one system.

This would also allow a federal division of funds between the secondary
and postsecondary functions. Currently, allowing each state to determine
the division of the funding creates glaring discrepancies; in some
states as much as 85 percent of the funds are allocated to secondary
institutions, while others divide them equally. There is strong
suspicion that the differences in the funding breakdowns have more to do
with the relative political power of secondary and postsecondary
vocational leadership than any reflection of needs or markets within the
state. If there is a serious interest in federal impact, then these
divisions should be mandated through federal legislation.

If reforms at the postsecondary level are driven by the need to
implement the Education Consensus described in Section I and to overcome
the deficiencies of state and local policies reviewed in Section II,
then a number of more specific postsecondary innovations should be
supported by federal funding:

Continued efforts to integrate academic education and higher-order
competencies into occupational programs. While there are many ways to
achieve such integration,[^16] and a great deal of progress has been
made in some colleges (particularly in incorporating so-called
Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) skills), in
general these changes require considerably greater and sustained support
(both financial and moral).

Efforts to develop more effective forms of remedial or developmental
education. Community colleges and other postsecondary institutions have
been forced to respond to the academic limitations of many students by
expanding remedial/developmental education. Unfortunately, there has
been relatively less attention to the quality and effectiveness of these
programs, especially for occupational students, though again there are
some promising innovations (such as learning communities combining
developmental courses with occupational courses). Federal support for
innovation in developmental education---*not* simply for conventional
learning labs, for which many colleges use their Perkins funds---would
benefit all postsecondary institutions.

Efforts to support work-based learning. The arguments for some form of
work-based learning as a complement to conventional college-based
instruction have been made many times, but such efforts are spotty in
community colleges.[^17] The development of experiments and
demonstration projects to support such efforts, and to examine the
conditions under which they prosper, could be a federal role.

Encouragement in providing more imaginative and productive links to
employers, going beyond the ceremonial annual convening of "advisory"
committees. These may include participation in the development of skill
standards or certification instruments, teacher preparation, curriculum
development, work-based learning, and so on. Given the growing
volatility of labor markets and occupational career pathways, direct
involvement of the private sector is an important component of any
postsecondary vocational education activities (Jacobs, 2000).

-   Efforts to correct the limitations of comprehensive and academic
    institutions. Federal support might continue to fund equipment and
    materials, as it now does; career-oriented counseling, which is
    underfunded and unimaginative in most colleges; and placement
    activities, which are quite weak in most colleges. In this area, the
    activities of the most sophisticated private trade schools, which
    have the luxury of narrowly defined missions (rather than
    comprehensive and diffuse missions) and considerably greater
    resources, can provide guidelines for public community colleges and
    federal funding.

-   Efforts to connect the community colleges and other postsecondary
    institutions with programs at the four-year and postgraduate level.
    While it is entirely correct to concentrate the federal role at the
    sub-baccalaureate level of educational preparation, it would be
    shortsighted not to appreciate that almost all of the "new
    vocations"---information technology, accounting, design,
    engineering, nursing, and business---are evolving into career
    pathways where a four-year degree is becoming the gateway for
    mobility beyond the entry level. Many community colleges already
    have articulation agreements with four-year colleges, so federal
    funding should concentrate instead on more specific curricular
    links.

The problem with this list of potential activities---all consistent with
improving the quality of broadly conceived occupational education and
with implementing the Education Consensus---is that there are too many
possible activities. It would be, we think, a mistake for the federal
government to spread its resources too thinly. One solution would be for
the Department of Education and Office of Vocational and Adult Education
(OVAE) to concentrate a number of demonstration or pilot projects in
each area---e.g., five projects to improve placement services, eight
models of expanding work-based learning, and so on---rather than
allowing individual colleges to pick and choose among this long list,
which is the current practice that dilutes the innovative potential of
federal funds.

**The Potential Recipients of Federal Funds:** Most federal support for
education, and for vocational education in particular, supports
activities at the level of schools or colleges. But, as we clarified in
Section II, the need for federal funding often arises because states are
unable to develop the policies and innovations necessary to realize the
Education Consensus. Therefore *states* rather than local educational
institutions could be the targets of some federal funding, to improve
their policies in line with the recommendations in this essay.

For example, very few states have developed coherent policies for
developmental education, and yet that activity has been growing and is
critical to providing the basic competencies necessary for well-paid
occupations. Many states have supported customized training for specific
employers, but they have not thought to use customized training as a
vehicle for work-based learning complementary to college-based programs.
Most states have extremely awkward provisions for funding occupational
facilities and materials; some analysis of existing patterns of funding,
and some experimentation with alternative methods of allocating funds,
might overcome one of the persistent problems of occupational education.
The transition from high school to community college is still uneven and
plagued with inconsistencies in preparation (including deficiencies in
academic competencies); a few pilot projects to provide models (in
addition to Tech Prep) of closer integration between secondary and
postsecondary education might help states overcome this pervasive
problem. There are many other examples, and our point is simply that the
federal role could be reconceptualized to include the improvement of
*state policies* in addition to improvements in *local practices*.

On the improvement agenda should be the federal development of new
models for vocational education administration. One of the unanticipated
consequences that emerged from the original formulation of the
Smith-Hughes Act was the establishment of state agencies and a dual
system for the distribution of federal funds. While this system has
provided an insulated means of upward mobility for vocational educators
out of the classroom and into administration, it has not only separated
them from the mainstream of education, but also provided few standards
and benchmarks for adequate professional behavior. One reason why
traditional vocational education has been unable to develop a valued
place within the new Educational Consensus has been the inability of its
leaders to understand the occupational changes around them and provide
programmatic leadership. If there is any future for vocational education
on the state and local level, these leaders need significant retraining.

**Equity:** Readers will notice that we have made few recommendations
directly related to equity, including the conventional practice in
federal legislation of targeting certain funds for specific special
populations. We see little evidence that such efforts by the federal
government have had many positive effects, or have had any lasting power
beyond the period of funding, or have been incorporated into routine
practices. In community colleges, these programs often result in
balkanized and uncoordinated services, where some students receive
counseling or tutorial support from special sources disconnected from
the other support services of the college, creating inefficiencies and
inconsistencies and weakening the integration of such students into the
mainstream of the college. While equity is clearly an important goal, we
suspect this kind of targeting does little good and has the potential
for some harm. Far too little money is distributed to make a major
difference, though there is enough to create yet another set of programs
and further disperse the mission and focus of vocational education.

Instead, our approach is to emphasize the improvements in the
institutions and programs that students in need of special services are
most likely to attend. Low-income, minority, and disabled students are
much more likely to attend public community colleges than four-year
colleges, and community colleges (the "people's colleges") are committed
to serving a broad diversity of students. Similarly, alternatives to the
conventional college-prep curriculum in the high school often serve (or
are targeted towards) students at greater risk of dropping out. Improved
remedial/developmental courses will disproportionately benefit at-risk
students; improved methods of career counseling will help the large
number of undecided students ("experimenters," we often call them) who
flounder without direction; work-based placements integrated with
college (or high school) coursework enable low-income students to stay
in school. Concentrating upon skill standards and certification
examinations will benefit individuals who are in need of immediate
entry-level work.

Thus the improvement of community colleges and of alternative programs
in high schools automatically serves the interests of inclusion and
equity and the needs of special populations. The vision behind this
conception of equity is that institutional improvements available to all
students, rather than targeted to a few, end up benefiting high-risk
students disproportionately, and therefore are ways of achieving greater
effectiveness and greater equity simultaneously. To be sure, it is
important to make sure that innovations supported by federal funds are
broadly inclusive---rather than, for example, creating the equivalent of
gifted programs focusing only on middle-class students, or honors
colleges with the same effects. But with this important caveat, we
suspect that the critical goals of equity are better served through
institutional improvements rather than individual targeting.

**The Structure of Federal Grants and the Activities of the Federal
Government:** If federal policy is to provide broad support for a large
number of educational institutions, as it does in the No Child Left
Behind Act, then formula funding providing some resources to every
institution is appropriate. If, however, the purpose of federal funding
is to promote program improvement, then a stronger alternative is to
provide project grants to specific institutions for support of specific
purposes. This allows the federal government to specify more clearly
which improvements they want to support, to be sure that institutional
recipients use funds for that purpose rather than for some unintended
purpose (as often happens now), and to evaluate the successes and
failures of innovation. Of course, this role comes at considerable cost,
since the specification of project grants, the procedures for allocating
such grants, and the monitoring and evaluation of the results are all
more costly. Often, Congress has insisted on distributing as much
funding as possible to the local level, and with this goal the more
expensive and elaborate procedures necessary at the federal level are
impossible.

Another challenge is that a federal role in fostering innovation
requires greater expertise and imagination on the part of federal
officials, as executing innovations requires a deeper understanding of
schools and colleges than does the simple distribution of money to
states and localities. In particular, because of their increasing
importance to American postsecondary education in general and
postsecondary occupational education in particular, knowledge of
community colleges needs to be strengthened within the federal
government.

In the end, the challenges of improving the quality of occupational
education are not especially different from those in any other area of
social policy. While it's naïve to think that any aspect of policy can
be above simple, self-interested politics, a clear sense of purpose and
a disinterested recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of different
institutions, governments, and practices will go a long way to creating
coherent policy and improved programs. The Education Consensus, despite
some limitations, provides the purpose and direction that can motivate
federal policy in several areas, including vocational-technical
education. The recognition of institutional changes, summarized in the
Institutional Transformations described briefly in Section I, and the
realization of what different levels of governments do well and poorly,
summarized in Section II, provide yet other guidelines for federal
policy. And so the possibility exists for individuals, institutions,
governments, and grant-makers to work together, serving both their own
and the national interest, to improve the quality of education for the
next generation.

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[^1]: There are problems of terminology, which we avoid. The original
    term for work-related education was vocational education, but,
    because this term has often been associated with low-quality
    programs, various synonyms have developed including
    vocational-technical education, career-technical education,
    occupational education (widely used in community colleges), and
    other hybrids. We use all these terms interchangeably, and we also
    note that professional education is the precise equivalent of
    vocational education, with all the same issues and controversies, at
    the baccalaureate level and above.

[^2]: Indeed, one of us has written such a paper for the National
    Assessment of Vocational Education of the late 1980s; see Grubb and
    Stern (1989).

[^3]: For this history we draw on our own work (Lazerson and Grubb,
    1974) and Grubb and Lazerson (in progress) as well as on Kleibard's
    (1999) book-length examination of the history of vocational
    education.

[^4]: We'll note in passing that home economics to support women in the
    home was expanded just as women were moving in larger numbers into
    the labor force, an anachronism that has continued to bedevil home
    economics.

[^5]: On "College for All," or the view that all students now need at
    least some college, see Rosenbaum (2002) and Boesel and Fredland
    (1999).

[^6]: Policy in many countries is driven by narratives or widely
    accepted "stories" about why certain programs are worthwhile. The
    creation of such narratives typically takes a considerable period of
    time and many different participants; once widely accepted, policy
    narratives are resistant to change, and empirical evidence---the
    kinds of results that research can generate---is not usually enough
    to modify or complicate a policy narrative. See, for example, Roe
    (1994).

[^7]: While there is a great deal of truth to the Education Consensus,
    there are also serious flaws in this view of the world---as there
    were in the earlier consensus generated around 1900. One is that the
    extent and speed of transformations at work are often exaggerated:
    many jobs remain unskilled, many jobs are untouched by new
    technologies or new forms of work organizations, and the pace of
    change has been slow enough that the normal workings of education
    and training markets are probably adequate to keep pace with
    changes. A second problem is that, in some places, the issue is less
    one of insufficient numbers of skilled workers than one of
    inadequate numbers of challenging jobs, resulting in the
    underemployment of relatively skilled workers and overeducation
    rather than undereducation. A third issue is that the Education
    Consensus is often too simple: many renditions of this narrative
    stress the computer "revolution" and changes in technology, but they
    fail to confront changes in work organization including contingent
    work. Fourth, the education gospel often assumes that employers know
    what kinds of skills they need and speak with one voice. Instead
    employers are often quite unsure of their needs, are unable to
    project their demands very far into the future, and vary
    substantially in what they need; for example, small and medium-sized
    employers often demand workers with job-ready, specific skills while
    large employers want employees more broadly prepared for the long
    run. These problems mean that the empirical underpinnings for the
    Education Consensus are sometimes incorrect and that the resulting
    policy may be wrong. Finally, and perhaps most seriously, the
    Education Consensus assumes that increases in education and changes
    in education policy can cure all ills, social and individual. This
    is clearly not so, and in many cases the realization of educational
    reforms requires changes in non-educational policies. However, the
    deficiencies of the Education Consensus are a subject beyond the
    scope of this paper, though they will be examined more carefully in
    Grubb and Lazerson (in progress).

[^8]: While the availability of second-chance programs in community
    colleges is certainly important, and allows high school dropouts and
    others who have learned very little in high school to continue their
    education, this is not a route to be encouraged because the
    probability of completing extensive remedial coursework and then
    progress to postsecondary credentials is not high.

[^9]: These other postsecondary institutions include technical colleges
    or institutes, which are much like community colleges but tend to
    offer only occupational degrees; area vocational schools, which have
    moved into postsecondary education; and private trade schools.
    However, we pay less attention to these kinds of institutions
    because technical colleges are being transformed into comprehensive
    community colleges in most states; area vocational schools and
    centers usually offer short, job-specific vocational education of
    the sort that is obsolete and ineffective; and private trade schools
    are not eligible for Perkins funding (though they receive large
    amounts of federal grants and loans).

[^10]: Assuming that it's appropriate to ascribe emotions to government,
    of course. But debates over innovations often become hot and heavy,
    and here the distance of Washington from state capitols and local
    boards may be useful.

[^11]: There are now several independent analyses that have come to
    virtually the same conclusions about the difficulty of maintaining
    the support services that are important for occupational programs
    within comprehensive academic programs. See Grubb (1996), based on
    examining a variety of education providers in four communities;
    Bailey, Badway, and Gumport (2001), which includes the very best of
    the private trade schools; work in progress at the Community College
    Research Center, in which case studies of 16 varied community
    colleges are collecting a variety of information on recent
    developments; and work in progress by James Rosenbaum. See also
    Jacobs (2002).

[^12]: The role of education is often badly exaggerated in both growth
    and economic competitiveness, but it surely plays some role. Grubb
    and Lazerson (in progress) examine this problem with the Education
    Consensus.

[^13]: See Cuban (1989) for the historical argument that this stage of
    reform is likely to be overthrown in the future.

[^14]: The literature on these approaches is enormous, much of it
    supported by the former National Center for Research in Vocational
    Education at the University of California (U.C.) at Berkeley, of
    which one author of this paper (Grubb) was a part. For a two-volume
    compendium of papers on various aspects of these reforms, see Grubb
    (1995). This approach has been taken up in many other reforms
    including expanding numbers of career academies, the Talent
    Development High School model developed at Johns Hopkins University,
    and a number of occupationally focused magnet schools.

[^15]: Again, see Grubb and Stern (1989) for one such argument.

[^16]: Again, a great deal of writing about these innovations has come
    from the former National Center for Research in Vocational Education
    at U.C. Berkeley; for one example see Grubb (1996), Chapter 5.

[^17]: Colleges did not benefit much from the School to Work
    Opportunities Act of 1994, which in any event has ended. See Hughes,
    Bailey, and Mechur (2001).