During a visit to the Hancock County Technical Center in Ellsworth, Gov. LePage repeated his previously stated belief that Maine has placed too much emphasis on preparing students for 4-year colleges and not enough emphasis on career and technical education.
“What we are trying to do is make career and technical education mainstream instead of second-class education,” LePage said during yesterday’s visit. Beefing up the academic offerings at the state’s 27 vocational and technical centers so that students do not have to travel back to their regular high schools for the academic portion of their program is one way LePage hopes to accomplish this. He also cited the need for the state to show more flexibility in terms of vocational students and the state’s general graduation requirements.
LePage’s proposal makes sense on several levels -- including the common sense one. Maine has and will probably continue to have more jobs for those trained in trades and technical skills over jobs for those with a liberal arts education.
However, this proposal seems to fly in the face of other concerns previously voiced by LePage. His proposal also seems dramtically inconsistent with other current state and national education initiatives.
(1) LePage kicked off his recent focus on education with a complaint that the test scores of Maine students have been stagnating. However, any initiative which places an emphasis on technical education is almost certain to result in backsliding in terms of the core academic subjects of English, math, science, and social studies.
(2) The technical schools themselves have stated a preference for receiving students who have a solid base in the core academic subjects over students who are weak in reading, writing, and / or math but know, for example, how to write a computer program or how to frame a roof.
(3) National movements including No Child Left Behind and the increasing emphasis on standards-based education make it difficult for schools to clear time in a students schedule for extended blocks of vocational and technical education.
