In and Out of Class II
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010NOTE: For reasons not worth explaining, for the rest of this week and next (and maybe the week after that) the News Guy has had to abandon his usual headquarters and is working out of what the previous national administration called an undisclosed location.
He is operating without a printer, adding to the danger of typographical errors creeping into the posts (those of a certain age really have to see words in print on paper to edit them). Also a cell-phone-only communications system might, as they say in the corporate world, negatively impact productivity.
Still, the goal is to keep on keeping on.
Vermont is chock full of public vocational schools.
According to a chart compiled by Public School Review, there are 15 career centers or technical centers (at least two are “career and technology” centers), distributed around the state so that no student lives more than 25 or 30 miles from the nearest facility.
Some have been around for decades. Others, such as the North Country Career Center in Newport, are relatively new, and some of the others have larger student bodies than they had years ago. All in all, vocational education is a growing sector of the Vermont school scene.
No mystery here. Young people need jobs and employers need trained workers. It would seem to make sense, then, that the state is spending more money on vocational schools.
At any rate, Vermonters seem to think it makes sense because, unlike so many activities and innovations of public schools, the growth of career and technical centers has aroused almost no opposition. Rarely if ever does anyone argue that classes in cosmetology or heavy equipment operation are “frills,” – the word some apply to music or art courses.
For which there appear to be at least two reasons. One is that vocational education is a good idea. The other is that a lot of the folks who often complain about school spending are the business men and women who are being subsidized by vocational schools.
There’s nothing new about this, nor, when one thinks about it, are the subsidies limited to vocational schools. Public education has always been, among other things, a subsidy for business. It’s a whole lot easier to train a new hire who can read, write, multiply and divide.
But vocational education is a more direct subsidy. Consider that North Country Career Center, where one area of concentration is “natural resources.” Students in this program learn “first Aide (sic), interpretation of maps and aerial photography, surveying, soils analysis and erosion control, tree physiology, chainsaw and tractor operation…entry-level work place skill…in harvesting techniques, timber measurement, and processing.
“Natural resources,” in this case sounds a lot like “logging,” a skill in some demand in the Northeast Kingdom. In fairness to the school, it is teaching environmentally responsible logging, with classes about how “our ecosystem has a direct effect on wildlife and recreational uses in our every-changing landscape.”
But clearly, here and elsewhere, the curriculum is designed specifically to prepare the students for jobs likely to be available, and to provide local employers with the skilled workers they need. On a per-pupil basis, vocational education is expensive. Classes in heavy-equipment operation, auto mechanics, or home construction require more equipment and material even than science labs, much less English class. But employers who sometimes complain about the high cost of education rarely object when the taxpayers agree to pick up the cost of training future workers.
The point here is not to object to vocational education, which also benefits its students and the general public. It’s to demonstrate that one reason public schools cost a lot of money is that they are more than just schools.
Or, more accurately, that schools do more than just educate children. One of their other functions is to subsidize business by training their work force. Another is to serve as social welfare agencies.
This isn’t new, either. In America, at, least, schools have always played a role in protecting children – especially poor children – from dangerous neighborhoods and abusive or negligent parents. But, as with vocational schools, this function of the public schools seems to be growing, and it may be growing faster in Vermont than in many other states.
For instance, as mentioned in last Friday’s post, In and Out of Class, http://www.vermontnewsguy.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=2392&message=1
Vermont schools commonly employ behavior specialists, sometimes called behavior interventionists or behaviorists, to work with students who act disruptively in school.
“Some are full-time professionals and some part-time para-professionals,” said Richard Boltax of the Education Department. Many, he said, are actually employees of community mental health centers. In some of those cases the schools compensate the mental health centers. But much of the cost is covered by federal and grants, and does not come out of the general school budget.
“Funds flow in from a lot of different places,” Boltax said. “In some cases, Medicaid may pay as much as 40 percent.”
Like school psychologists and other service providers, behavior specialists have been around for a few decades, Boltax said. But he did not dispute that there are probably more of them than in the past, and that educators think they are more important.
“Most educators will say, yes, the kids coming through doors today are different,” he said. “Multiple factors that have entered the picture, from financial straits and poverty to technology and how it’s used appropriately and inappropriately.”
In some circles, these social services are also considered “frills,” or at least as benefits that might not be needed if old-fashioned discipline were imposed. But aside from the fact that it might be more expensive to expel students than to help them (an expelled student being far more likely to end up in prison), the culture would probably not permit that approach.
Nor, according to Boltax, would the law.
“What has changed in the last 50 years is that because of federal and state laws, schools have had greater responsibility of regulatory oversight to keep these kids connected,” he said. “There are more requirements not to usher these kids out the door.”
Like most educators, Boltax did not like describing schools as, among other things, social service agencies. But, he acknowledged, “We are in effect the mental health center, the local workout club, and we feed the kids. Education includes serving the whole child. You can’t start teaching a kid if he’s hungry.”
Whether Vermont schools provide more social services than schools in other states will be examined in a future post, as will a few other possible reasons why schools here cost so much.
Including this fundamental question: Are Vermont schools so expensive because they’re so good?







