Herbert M. Kliebard, a former vocational education teacher and now a professor emeritus of curriculum and instruction and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that separate training for narrowly defined jobs was never a good idea at the high school level. In the 1940s, secondary and postsecondary vocational education schools trained 7.5 million people for jobs in defense and war production for World War II, according to the Association for Career and Technical Education. The quality of vocational education programs began to decline in the 1960s and 1970s, says Gene Bottoms, who, as the senior vice president of the Southern Regional Education Board, directs the High Schools That Work program. That program extends to vocational students the same challenging academic courses provided to college-bound students. Bottoms argues that federal legislation passed during those decades, such as the Vocational Education Act of 1963, placed too much emphasis on at-risk students.
Most reforms call for blending vocational education with challenging academics.
Anthony P. Carnevale, a labor economist and the vice president for public leadership for the Educational Testing Service, adds that the value of a narrowly defined vocational education decreased with the reduction of manufacturing jobs in the early 1970s. Most educators today agree that the course vocational education has taken for most of the century must be redirected. Most reforms call for blending vocational education with challenging academics. The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990, for example, encourages the integration of academic and vocational education. That's the real Deweyan application of vocational education.