At 12 and 13-years old in New Bedford, some kids have their whole lives before them while others have already begun their downward slide.

At 12 and 13, some kids know exactly what they want to do with their lives while others don’t have a clue. Others know what they want to do, but think there are few opportunities for them.

It’s a very different reality for the middle-class kids growing up in the garrisons of the West End and the immigrant kids growing up in the triple-deckers of the near North End.

For some kids there is homework and after-school sports or drama club, vacations or summer camp. For others there is a job washing dishes and a noisy tenement shared with two other families, worries that their father or mother might be deported to Guatemala or El Salvador.

Why then does Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational-Technical High School have so much power to decide which of these 12 and 13-year-old kids will get on a positive track and which will not, as far as their public school experience goes?

Wasn’t separate but equal outlawed more than a half-century ago?

A view of the field house near the entrance of Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School. [ Jack Spillane ]

Who came up with the idea that Massachusetts’ public vocational-technical high schools should get to pick and choose the kids with the best grades, the best attendance, the fewest number of disciplinary problems and then create their student body at the expense of the nearby comprehensive high school? 

Who came up with the idea that the kids not accepted into voc-techs must go to the local public high schools and take their chances with far less fulsome opportunities to learn a skill?

Want to get a kid excited about high school? Tell them they can spend half their school time learning a career like carpentry, culinary arts, auto repair, or dental assistant work. 

And it’s no longer just traditional vocational careers that Voc-Tech offers kids. More than a few high school freshmen would like to spend half their day learning Voc-Tech majors like media technology, information technology or engineering and robotics.

The simple truth is that the vocational-technical high schools have become career schools and they’ve corralled what amounts to a monopoly on most of the exciting contemporary careers. It’s an educational model that in 2021 works better than the traditional comprehensive high school for all but a small cohort of the most academically-minded kids in cities like New Bedford.

New Bedford High School has made great strides the last few years. The dropout rate has decreased by 4.4 percent and chronic absenteeism by an impressive 16.3 percent. The number of kids taking advanced placement classes at the high school has increased by a full 5 percent.

But it is still a school where 56.4 percent of the Class of 2019 did not plan on attending college. At Voc-Tech, that figure was 50.3 percent. You read that right. The Voc-Tech kids go to college at a higher rate than the comprehensive high school kids. In fact, the majority of the majors at Voc-Tech are what used to be called professional high school courses that generally led to college. (To be fair, about 30 percent of the GNB Voc-Tech kids are from Dartmouth and Fairhaven. The rate of high school graduates who plan to attend college in the suburban towns is 81.9 and 80.6 percent respectively, so it’s fair to assume they help pull the Voc-Tech college rate up as well as the successful New Bedford students who are attending.)

A view of the front entrance at New Bedford High School. [ Jack Spillane ]

It used to be the opposite. Public vocational high schools were conceived as a way to educate kids who were not academically-inclined, and/or who were not interested in going to college. But that time is long past. Massachusetts’ vocational schools may as well rename themselves as public career schools.

At the same time, fewer and fewer working and middle-class kids can afford to major in liberal arts like English, history or foreign languages. There are simply not enough jobs in those fields for many parents to spend the money for what is an increasingly unaffordable undergraduate degree. Middle-class parents and their kids are voting with their feet and choosing the vocational-technical schools, almost as a backup to their college experience.

We’re not talking about affluent kids from South Dartmouth or Marion or Mattapoisett here --  kids whose challenge is which public or private liberal arts college will accept them. We’re talking about the urban, lower middle-class kids who are taking up the majority of seats in public vocational high schools and leaving many of the underclass and immigrant kids to what used to be the high school of choice, the comprehensive high school.

Nowhere is the difference between the student bodies of New Bedford High School and GNB Voc-Tech more apparent than in the percentages of English language learners, kids with disabilities, and kids from economically depressed families who attend the schools.

Only 4.2 percent of Voc-Tech kids in the 2018-19 school year were English language learners while 28.9 percent were ELL at New Bedford High School. 

About 25 percent of the student body at Voc-Tech is Latino vs. 44 percent at New Bedford High. Twenty-one percent of the kids at New Bedford High School had disabilities while 10 percent at Voc-Tech did. Some 72.6 percent of New Bedford High students were economically disadvantaged while 42.2 present were at Voc-Tech.

All of this leaves New Bedford kids who are either uninterested in academics or unable to afford college shut out of training for the professional or technical jobs that could quickly employ them after high school graduation. Some of the craft unions, the carpenters in particular, say they face challenges finding qualified workers, with the average age of carpenters increasing until kids finish college or learn a skill on the job.

Some of the classroom buildings at Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School [ Jack Spillane ]

“The system is not fair to kids who through no fault of their own have a difficult time competing for those coveted Voc-Tech spots,” said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell who has been one of the leaders of a coalition of gateway cities, civil rights groups, educators and community groups trying to change the current voc-tech admission system in favor of a lottery system. In the background looms a civil rights lawsuit raised in a January letter to Education Secretary James Peyser by the Educational Vocational Justice Coalition.

Mitchell and the Educational Vocational Justice Coalition are waiting with bated breath for state Education commissioner Jeffrey Riley to decide later this month whether the state will replace the achievement-based admissions system with one that allows everyone an equal chance at a vocational tech high school education.

There is merit in their argument but there is also merit in the argument that vocational-technical high schools are the one type of public high schools that are working well in the state’s gateway cities.

The  problem is that there are simply not enough voc-tech high school seats in these gateway cities (a euphemism for what used to be called the state’s mid-sized, former industrial cities) to meet the demand of the kids who want to attend.

Administrators at the voc-tech schools have not raised many solutions publicly to Riley but their supporters have touted the voc-tech’s success and asked why it should be changed. 

Michael Watson, the incoming superintendent at GNB Voc-Tech, declined to be interviewed for this story, saying it would not be appropriate to weigh in before Riley makes his decision. GNB Voc-Tech, he said, will weigh in during the 90-day public comment after Riley unveils his recommendations, which are based on admissions data provided to the state by the vocational schools during the last year.

That’s the time you can expect the local state legislators to find their voices on this issue too, one way or the other.

“I respect the space Commissioner Riley deserves to analyze information and make his recommendations,” Watson wrote me in a prepared statement. “And I respect the opportunity of elected and appointed officials to express their opinions regarding the same.”

Riley has two decisions to make. How to change the admissions policies to allow more opportunity for under-represented kids and how to expand the number of slots available for vocational-technical high school education.

In the past, officials at both Voc-Tech and Bristol Aggie -- the other regional public school that offers vocational education for New Bedford kids -- have complained that the New Bedford school system does not allow them to pitch their schools to city middle schoolers about to enter high school. The theory goes that the vocational schools could reach more underserved New Bedford kids, particularly immigrant kids less aware of the voc-techs. 

Superintendent Thomas Anderson has opposed allowing the career high schools to make their pitches, as did his predecessor, Pia Durkin.

Asked his reasoning for not letting the vocational schools make presentations, Anderson sent a prepared statement saying the New Bedford district on its own makes sure students are well aware of all programming and high school options but that the priority for the school time is learning.

“Instructional time during the school day is precious and as superintendent I work with our NBPS team on all levels to maximize time on learning,” he wrote. 

The School Committee, chaired by Mitchell, hasn’t opposed either Anderson or Durkin’s decision and Mitchell declined to state his own thinking on the issue. The most reasonable conclusion one can reach is that New Bedford High is afraid of how attractive these vocational-high schools will be to the vast majority of New Bedford middle schoolers. Some 75 percent of them applied to Voc-Tech in 2016.

Some of the classroom buildings at New Bedford High School. [ Jack Spillane ]

It looks like Voc-Tech is offering something New Bedford High should be offering. 

In the long run, the state may have to face the fact it needs to revamp comprehensive public high schools to equip them to offer their own vocational and technical programs. It will be a big financial lift but one that has to be done as the problem isn’t going away. In the short run, the voc-techs need to start admitting more English learners, kids with disabilities and kids who are economically disadvantaged. 

The state is going to have to step up, both on the question of who gets admitted to voc-techs, and what kind of vocational courses the comprehensive high schools are allowed to teach.