Education Board inches toward vocational school reforms

Yahoo

28-01-2025

BOSTON, Mass. (SHNS)–Any selective criteria used to admit students to vocational technical schools must be actually essential to the success of the school, per new regulations the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is drafting for their board's review next month.
The board has been reexamining the admissions process for career technical education high schools for months, just three years after they overhauled their regulations to promote more 'equitable access' to the career-oriented schools.
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Demand at the state's technical schools far outpaces the available space, and 25 of the 29 CTE schools in Massachusetts use 'selective criteria' like grades, attendance and discipline records from middle school to choose which applicants should come to their high school programs.
Some say these admissions practices disproportionately exclude students of color, those who are learning English, have disabilities or come from low-income families. They instead advocate for a lottery model of random chance for all interested middle school students.
After months of reexamining the admissions processes and talking to stakeholders in both camps, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education member Martin West, who led a task force to look at the regulations, said many of the state's CTE schools have a proportionate amount of students from protected classes.
'We learned that many of the schools, if you compare the composition of their student bodies to the composition of the sending districts, we see that they are quite representative in terms of their racial and ethnic composition and in terms of other protected classes, like students with disabilities, English learners and others,' West said. 'That being said — there are exceptions to that.'
West said in some cases, comparing applicants to admitted students, students from protected classes are less likely to be admitted.
Previewing what the regulations presented to the board next month will likely contain, Martin said Tuesday, that 'any selective criteria' used in admitting a student will 'need to be essential to the success of the school.'
'The principles that really come down as a legal framework are that any selective criteria need to be essential to the success of the school [and consider] if they are having any disparate impact in the admissions process,' he said.
This could mean that if schools want to use disciplinary or attendance records to reject a student's application, for example, the school would need to prove that those 'selective criteria' are directly tied to the school's success.
In the past, superintendents of vocational schools have said using these selective criteria is especially important in CTE environments.
'Our schools only consider the most serious disciplinary offenses. In the absence of such criteria, our vocational community would have concerns. Attendance: we cannot send tutors home with large equipment. Students cannot succeed in co-op programs if they are not present and can't earn credentials without the requisite number of hours,' Aaron Polansky, superintendent of Old Colony Regional Vocational Technical in Rochester, said during a BESE meeting last October.
West gave an example of a reform schools could make to the admissions process more accessible for some students, while maintaining a requirement that the student show expressed interest in actually attending the high school.
Currently, he said, some schools require students to sit for an evaluative interview for a seat at the high school.
An alternative, he proposed, is requiring students to write a letter or tour the school. This way the student can still prove they are interested and dedicated to the school, but it makes the admissions process more fair for limited spots at the public schools.
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