Taking their tools away (Continued)   BY ALEX IRVINE

Vocational educators and state officials show little confidence that ED will follow through on its pledge to take their concerns to heart. Lynwood Turcotte says that NCLB and other testing regimes have already caused problems for vocational programs, and has little faith that any revision of the Perkins Act will do what the feds promise. "You commit yourself to this and that," he says, "and they renege on their responsibilities along the way."

"Assuming it was 100 percent competitive," says John Stivers, "I think that would have a big impact on Maine’s centers. They’d be competing against each other" for a pool of money that before had been shared. He’s been at some of Hans Meeder’s presentations on the future of Perkins/STEE, and has come away reasonably hopeful. "One thing we were assured by Hans Meeder was ‘block-granting Perkins is very low on our priority list right now.’ There will be federal money for CTE that will not be able to be appropriated, but it may not go in the traditional avenues it has in the past."

"We’re crossing our fingers," says Portland Arts and Technology High School Director Diane Bauby. She isn’t terribly worried about the grant process becoming competitive, since the school already has to make detailed proposals to get funding from the state — a point Meeder also makes — but she is concerned that a greater federal role in approving grant applications will leave her school vulnerable to the ED’s latest political mood swings.

Every dollar of Perkins money PATHS gets pays the salaries of ed techs for the 40 percent of PATHS students categorized as special ed; without those ed techs, Bauby worries, "We’re going to have a lot of kids in very difficult positions."

Bauby might be able to justify a request for ed techs on the grounds that they improve the academic performance of special-ed students — which they undoubtedly do — but nobody is quite certain what the new STEE Act will look like. Hans Meeder would say only that the department "spent the last year listening carefully and talking to people all over the country. Some of the concerns that people have expressed to us we are trying to address. I would not advise you to characterize the Administration’s position based only on last year’s budget." He suggested that the February release of the president’s new budget proposal would quiet many educators’ concerns.

Meanwhile, the Maine legislature is taking steps to prevent a certain unfunded federal mandate from diverting resources away from needed programs like vocational education. LD 1716, sponsored by state senator Michael Brennan, would resolve "that the Department of Education may not use any state funds to implement the policies of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001."

LD 1716, currently in the Education Committee awaiting public hearings, calls on the state to figure out exactly how badly NCLB is underfunded. A November press release from Maine Congressman Tom Allen pegged this year’s appropriations shortfall at $8 billion, $37.5 million of which falls on Maine’s shoulders, but Brennan suspects that the situation is in fact worse than that.

"There’s a lot of unknown costs," he says, "in terms of providing assistance to quote ‘failing schools,’ that haven’t been calculated yet regardless of what the federal government promised for funding. My fear is that even if the federal government were to fully fund what it said it would fund, the cost of implementing NCLB would exceed even that."

The intent of his bill, he says, "would be to say that no state money can be used to implement NCLB and find out how much it would cost to opt out of NCLB."

Brennan aims to have the information-gathering done soon so he can take action this legislative session. If LD 1716 passes, Maine might well find itself thumbing its nose at the Bush Administration over NCLB, as Utah has recently done and other states are in the process of doing. "Other states have attempted other avenues of redirecting federal money and allowing districts to opt out of NCLB," Brennan notes. "But we also met with the Attorney General early this year and if we were to file suit against the federal government claiming this was an unfunded mandate, we first have to document how much it would cost to implement it relative to what we get for federal money."

If the preliminary math indicates that leaving NCLB and thereby losing all federal school funding — which Brennan estimates as "anywhere from 90 to 110 million dollars" — would in the end be cheaper than struggling to make up the federal act’s shortfalls, Brennan says, "I certainly would start to try to make that case. At the very least, I want to make sure that we don’t spend any of our state money to implement what would then be an unfunded mandate."

Even without the impact of No Child Left Behind, state vocational programs are feeling a pinch for a number of reasons, declining enrollments being primary among them. PATHS Assistant Director Brian Britting puts the blame squarely on increased graduation requirements. "If a student is astute and has parents who are on top of things," he says, "you might free up some time your senior year." If not, many students who want to take vocational courses end up stuck repeating the English or math classes they didn’t pass early in their high-school careers. Many others simply drop out.

ACTE’s Hyslop agrees with Britting’s analysis, but she also notes that vocational offerings are increasing in places like Sarasota, Florida; Austin, Texas; and Fairfax County, Virginia — in other words, in places that have more money than the average region in Maine. "It could be," she allows, "that as CTE programs, equipment, and technology become more expensive, that has allowed districts with larger populations or larger incomes to expand their programs."

Responding to this process, vocational schools in Maine and across the country have done two things: regionalized to share costs, and gotten more aggressive about offering academic credit for their programs. The problem is that not every school that sends kids to voc programs accepts the worth of those credits. Diane Bauby continually goes through this tug of war with the 23 towns that send students to PATHS. She’s a strong believer in the academic quality of the school’s offerings, but, she says, "It’s up to the principals to accept the credits we offer."

"Most people working in CTE get the idea that [stronger academic emphasis] is the next logical step," says Hans Meeder. Actually, every single educator interviewed for this article was already doing it, raising serious questions about the need to monkey with the Perkins Act in the first place.

The reauthorization struggle is part of a larger turf war between local districts and the federal government, which in recent years has displayed a growing tendency to impose academic standards from the top down. Voc programs respond to pressure to increase their academic standards by focusing on integrating academics into their courses of study; the federal ED sees that some schools are doing this and that it’s working, and tries to shoehorn all schools into the same mold. The ironic thing is that the people doing the shoehorning are all Republicans who in every other walk of life spend their time screaming about federal interference in local affairs.

The Secondary and Technical Education Excellence Act, if passed to replace the Perkins Act, will take its place alongside No Child Left Behind and other recent legislation that consolidates federal control over what happens in America’s classrooms. Among those other bills, the 1998 Reading Excellence Act (REA), which links federal funding to a school’s willingness to abjure the heresy of whole-language teaching in favor of phonics, stands out — not just because it mandates an approach to reading, but because one of the people behind it was none other than Hans Meeder, the point man on the ED’s effort to junk the Perkins Act in favor of STEE.

Meeder has risen to his position despite never teaching in a school or taking an education course. His biography on the OVAE Web site cites executive experience at the National Alliance of Business, "a national organization supporting business leadership in education excellence," and the 21st Century Workforce Commission, in addition to a number of jobs in Congressional offices. While working for Reading Excellence Act sponsor Congressman William Goodling, Meeder wrote an article for Education Week advocating phonics; this article’s proposals show up in the original form of the Reading Excellence Act. In addition, the article was, according to the January 1999 Z Magazine, "co-written with Douglas Carnine, one of the authors of DISTAR, a well-known commercial phonics product that stands to profit immensely from the way reading is defined in HR 2614" — the bill that became the Reading Excellence Act. And when Meeder left his job in Congress, his successor was Robert Sweet of the National Right to Read Foundation, an organization of phonics evangelists.

The REA was a plain crony-enriching power grab, watered down by the efforts of the National Council of Teachers of English and other professional education groups, but ultimately signed by Bill Clinton, and the original version of the Secondary and Technical Education Excellence Act was no different. Both were attempts to consolidate federal control and, under the guise of (pseudo)science, impose Republican ideology in the public schools.

So what are the prospects for the newly revised and possibly more congenial STEE? According to Hans Meeder, "The House is more likely to work on legislation this year. The ideas we’re talking about are getting some pretty good groundswell. I’m not sure what the Senate’s plans are, whether they’re going to be able to move on it this year or whether it’s going to carry on into the next Congress."

Alisha Hyslop of the ACTE is cautiously optimistic that the ED’s new proposal will be more sensitive to the realities in the field, eliminating those "components that would strengthen academics at the expense of technical training, especially in high schools."

She’s also heartened by what she’s seen from the legislative branch. "Congress’s reaction over this past year, they actually increased funding for CTE after the president proposed a 25-percent cut. Support in Congress is very strong, and we anticipate it will remain so."

Would John Stivers agree with this assessment? "Yes," he says. "I think there’s broad-based bipartisan support" for technical education in Congress, but he doesn’t see a completely rosy outlook for Perkins or for vocational education. Stivers characterizes the original blueprint for the STEE as "rhetorical support for tech ed as a valid educational vehicle, but something that would happen primarily at the postsecondary level along with [industry and college] partnerships," and has no great faith that revisions will change the fundamental direction of the policy.

"I have a feeling the administration will be successful in changing Perkins to some extent," he says. "I think the movement toward this rhetorical banner of academics is going to gain steam. They talk about academics but they don’t have a clear vision."

Hyslop is a little more optimistic. She thinks ED will come out with revisions that are more supportive of secondary vocational education. "CTE teachers and administrators responded very adamantly to the last presentation about all of the positive things that were happening. I think the new perspective is ‘Okay, we’ve heard you, so what can we do now to make sure those good things are happening everywhere?’ "

This may be, but as we have noted, Hans Meeder has never let the opinions of education professionals worry him much.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com