Vocational Schools: Learning a Living

Vocational training: the very phrase calls up the smell of plastic ashtrays, the clink of copper trinkets, the ennui of workshops crowded with delinquents manning lathes and squirting grease into crankcases. Vocational training should be a major source of steady employment for U.S. youths. Instead, it has become an educational junkyard for rejects from a college-geared society.

This month Congress acted to inject much-needed relevancy into craft education. Going well beyond the Administration's request of $250 million, the House Education and Labor Committee unanimously approved a $1.2 billion Vocational Education bill...