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Showing posts from February, 2011

The Problem Of School Dropouts

I read an article in the Phi Delta Kappan entitled Keeping Youths in School: An International Perspective . This article examines the vocational training strategies other countries use to help reduce the number of school dropouts. American tends to use vocational training as a way to entice unmotivated students into education. Whereas,other countries have a higher regard for vocational training and nationally respected licenses can be obtained in these programs. Employers trust these programs to prepare workers and the programs themselves are constructed to allow people to train for white-color jobs in their field. With its “college for all” mantra, the United States uses VET (career and technical training in the U.S.) mainly to engage unmotivated students and introduce them to various career options. This strategy makes the United States an outlier. In the more successful countries, VET has little to do with engaging unmotivated students, though that is one robust outcome, nor with