Vocational admissions: out for public comment

The most discussed regulation change in years is out for public comment: a change to vocational school admission, in which the largest change would require that only attendance (27 days or more over 7th and 8th grade) and discipline (of the most serious kind) be part of the consideration.

As always, everything that follows here is just from me personally: 

I am pretty sure that I have told this story before, but I will share again: my own view of admission to vocational programs was heavily shaped by my first year teaching. At the high school at which I taught in New Hampshire, the vocational school was only for 11th and 12th grade; students attended the comprehensive high school for 9th and 10th grade, and were admitted to the vocational school for junior and senior years.
In one of my sophomore classes, I had a student who struggled a lot in English. He also was the son of a local auto shop owner, and he'd been in and out of the garage since he could walk. He drove a car he'd rebuilt himself--if you wanted to get him talking, ask about his car--and all he wanted in life was to go work with his dad and eventually take over the garage. 
He would never never never have gotten into a vocational school in Massachusetts.*

I ran into a lot of kids like that over the years in Worcester: kids whose families had businesses in programs we had systems for at Worcester Tech, who could never get in. And at the same time, I saw at very close hand how students who had top grades, who honestly had no interest in vocational programs at all, were directed there by many.**

We actually as a state have a stake in this one, as a vocational student (they're called that in the foundation budget) "counts" for more than 50% more funding per student than a comprehensive high school student in the state funding system. We have actual dollars on the table here.

At ground, this comes back to if we're really about educating all students. We say, a lot, that the thing about public schools is that they educate all kids. Your having had a rough time in middle school, or being someone who gets sick a lot isn't supposed to mean you don't get the same education.

Either that really is a shared responsibility we all stand behind, or, well, we have to stop saying it. 

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*he did in New Hampshire. 
**Worcester has worked at this, though we're not there yet. And no, adding chapter 74 programs everywhere is not actually the answer, because that isn't the same thing.