What America's Shop Class Lost, From Smith-Hughes to the Perkins Act

Somewhere in America there is a retired woodworking teacher who is wondering where the lathe went. The answer is not a mystery. It went where most things go in a school building when the budget gets tight and the test scores get measured: into a storage room, then a surplus auction, then a story that a grandfather tells about the junior year he built a gun cabinet and passed it down.

For most of the twentieth century, a high school student in this country could learn a trade at public expense, graduate with a skill and walk into a job. Then a generation of policymakers, educators and parents decided that the only respectable destination was a four-year diploma, and the shop floor started to look like a consolation prize. This post tells the story in order: how the federal government built vocational education, how it sidelined it, and what the history means for a family weighing college today. It is a story with heroes, with good intentions, and with a lesson about what happens when Washington decides it knows the one right road.

Before Washington: manual training and a farm country

Start in the nineteenth century. The Morrill Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, gave states federal land to fund colleges devoted to agriculture and the mechanic arts. That is the origin of the land-grant universities. It was an extraordinary idea: public higher education for farmers and mechanics, and not only for clergymen and lawyers. But it did nothing for the fourteen-year-old who needed to be earning.

Cities filled with factories in the decades after the Civil War, and school reformers argued about what to do with the children who would work with their hands. Many schools added "manual training," a kind of practical education in the use of tools. Employers wanted a more skilled workforce. Educators and labor leaders argued over whether schools should train workers or educate citizens, and whether a program built to train boys for factory jobs would trap them there.

In 1906 a group of businessmen, educators and reformers founded the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education to push for federal help. In 1914 Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, which funded agricultural extension work, and Congress created a Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education, which reported that year in favor of federal grants for vocational schooling. The ground was prepared.

1917: the Smith-Hughes Act

President Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Hughes Act, formally the National Vocational Education Act, on February 23, 1917. It is named for its sponsors, Senator Hoke Smith and Representative Dudley Hughes, both Democrats from Georgia. The law did several things that shaped the next half century.

• It gave states federal money for vocational education below college grade, specifically in agriculture, trades and industry, and home economics, and for training the teachers who taught those subjects.
• It required states to match the federal dollars, so that Washington's money encouraged local spending and did not replace it.
• It created a Federal Board for Vocational Education to oversee the program, and it required states to set up their own boards and plans.

Notice the design. Washington did not run the schools. It offered a grant with strings: spend your own money, build a plan we approve, teach these categories. That's the template for most federal education policy that followed, and it has all the advantages and risks of the method. The advantage was that it worked, in the narrow sense that vocational programs spread. The risk was that a federal list of approved fields made it harder for local schools to teach something that was not on the list.

The Constitution does not mention schools, which is why states and towns ran them. The subject is dealt with in The Constitution Never Mentions Schools and That Is the Whole Point. Smith-Hughes was one of the first big federal steps into that space, justified by the argument that a national economy needed skilled workers. You can accept the aim and still ask what it cost in local freedom.

The Depression and the apprenticeship law

The next wave came in the 1930s, with the help of Senator Walter George of Georgia and others. Congress passed a series of acts that expanded the Smith-Hughes money: the George-Reed Act in 1929, the George-Ellzey Act in 1934, and the George-Deen Act in 1936, which added distributive occupations, meaning retail and sales work, to the list. The George-Barden Act followed in 1946.

Meanwhile, a different system was being built outside the high school. The National Apprenticeship Act of 1937, often called the Fitzgerald Act after Representative William Fitzgerald of Connecticut, set up an apprenticeship program in the Department of Labor. It did not pay for schools. It set standards for apprenticeship, worked with employers and unions, and let programs register with the government as meeting those standards. Registered Apprenticeship is still the name today.

Look at the difference. Smith-Hughes funded training in schools. The apprenticeship law supported training at work, with an employer paying a wage while a worker learned. The two were meant to be partners. In practice they became separate worlds, one run by educators and one by the labor department, and they did not always talk to each other.

War, the GI Bill and the rise of the technician

The Second World War, a vast training exercise in welding, machining and shipbuilding, proved that ordinary workers could learn skilled trades fast and well. The GI Bill of 1944 then paid tuition and living expenses for veterans, and a good number of them used it for trade and technical schools, not for a university degree. The country was proud of its builders and mechanics.

Then in 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and American policy took an academic turn. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 poured federal money into science, mathematics and foreign language instruction and student loans for college. It also included support for what it called area vocational education, for training technicians in fields important to national defense. The message to schools was that the future belonged to the scientist and the engineer, and that the hand-skills tradition should be rebuilt to serve that future.

1963: the Vocational Education Act

President John F. Kennedy's administration had commissioned a panel of consultants on vocational education to look at the Smith-Hughes system. The panel found that the old categories no longer matched the economy. Farms were mechanizing and shrinking. The jobs of the future, they argued, were in new fields that the 1917 law had never imagined.

The Vocational Education Act of 1963, signed by President Lyndon Johnson on December 18, 1963, responded. It broke from the old fixed categories, opened funding to a broader range of occupations, provided money to construct vocational facilities, and supported work-study for students. It reflected a new idea: that vocational education was a tool of social policy, a way to help the disadvantaged and fight unemployment, in addition to a way of training skilled workers. The 1968 amendments extended that approach.

Good intentions, again. But here the story turns. Critics in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them from the civil rights movement and the education profession, worried that vocational tracks were being used to steer working-class and minority students away from college prep. In some districts, they said, a student who was placed in the shop track at fourteen was never really offered the choice to leave it. That's a serious charge, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The worry was legitimate: no child's future should be decided by a counselor's guess at fifteen. Where the argument went wrong is in the remedy. Instead of fixing the tracking, a good part of the education world decided to bury the tracks.

1984 and after: the Perkins Acts

In 1984, Congress passed the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act, named for the Kentucky Democrat who chaired the House Education and Labor Committee and who died that year. Perkins has been reauthorized again and again, and it is the main federal law for what is now called career and technical education.

• Perkins II, 1990. It leaned on the idea of integrating academic and vocational learning and added a stronger focus on the students who needed it most.
• School-to-Work Opportunities Act, 1994. Signed by President Clinton, it encouraged states to create systems linking classrooms and workplaces.
• Perkins III, 1998. It added accountability measures tied to performance.
• Perkins IV, 2006. It adopted the name "career and technical education" in the title and pushed for programs of study linking high school to community college.
• Perkins V, 2018. Signed in July of that year as the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, it gave states more say in how to use the funds and in how to measure results.

The name changed from vocational to career and technical. The aim changed from training someone for a job to preparing someone for further study. That drift tells the story. The language of the law was moving toward the language of college.

The quiet shift to college for all

In the same decades, a different current was running in schools. In 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk, which warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" and recommended a stronger core of academic courses for every high school student. States responded by raising graduation requirements in math, science and English. Each new required course took a slot from somewhere else on a student's schedule, and the elective most often squeezed out was the one that needed a shop, a lab or a garage and an instructor with experience on a job site.

Later, test-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, with its focus on reading and math, tightened the squeeze. Principals measured by test scores had no reason to protect programs that did not show up in the numbers. Meanwhile the culture said that a bachelor's degree was the badge of success, and the guidance office measured itself by how many seniors went on to a four-year school.

I have to be careful here. I am describing a trend, and I do not have a clean number for how many shop classes closed or when, so I will not give you one. What I can say with confidence is that the law's language moved from trade to career readiness, that graduation requirements rose, and that the cultural prestige of the trades fell. If you want data, the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and the Perkins reports are the places to check.

Another cost is easy to overlook. A shop class is expensive to run. It needs equipment, safety rules, smaller classes and teachers who could earn more in industry than in a classroom. When budgets tighten, a lecture class is cheaper. The cheaper thing wins, quietly, unless somebody fights for the other.

What the history means for your family

Three lessons stand out.

1. Washington can fund a goal and still miss it. Federal money did build programs, but the categories, the rules and the shifting names meant that local schools were serving federal definitions as much as local needs. The most successful training in the country, apprenticeship, grew up with employers and not in a school at all.
2. The country over-corrected. The warning about tracking was right. The answer should have been to give every student a real choice, not to take the choice away. A student who wants a trade ought to be able to learn one without being treated as a failure.
3. The prestige problem is a policy problem. When every counselor, scholarship and ranking rewards the bachelor's degree, families conclude that the alternatives are second best. The numbers do not say that. The wages of a licensed electrician or a plumber, which you can look up in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, speak for themselves.

If you are comparing roads for a young person, the table in College, Apprenticeship or Trade School, How to Compare Your Options sets out the trade-offs, and the arithmetic in A Worksheet for the True Cost of a College Degree Before You Sign Anything helps you decide whether a degree is worth its price. The wider story of Washington in the classroom is in From Title I to ESSA, Fifty Years of Washington Meddling in Your Schools, and the office that now administers the Perkins money is described in What the Education Department Actually Does, and What It Cannot. The way job numbers are counted, and why they matter for these choices, is in how the jobs numbers work, answered in eleven questions. And one of the biggest barriers to entering a trade, the license, gets its due in the license you need to braid hair and the jobs it quietly kills.

The verdict

The shop class did not die of natural causes. It was starved by decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time: a new graduation requirement here, a test there, a federal law that renamed the thing until it stopped sounding like work. Nobody voted to end it. Nobody had to.

The conservative lesson is not nostalgia. It is the old one about humility. A government that tells every family there is one road to success will build a country with too many people on a road that does not suit them, and too few who can fix the furnace. Give families options, make the options honorable, and let the local school board, the local employer and the student decide.

The bottom line

• Congress created federal vocational education with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, and added apprenticeship standards in the National Apprenticeship Act of 1937.
• The Vocational Education Act of 1963 and the Perkins Acts widened the program, but the language drifted from trades toward college preparation.
• Rising academic requirements, test-based accountability and the prestige of the bachelor's degree squeezed shop classes out of many schools. The worry about steering students into dead-end tracks was fair; the fix overshot.
• Look at career and technical education and registered apprenticeship as real options, not fallback plans. Check pay and demand in the Occupational Outlook Handbook.
• Ask your school board what its career and technical offerings are, and whether students can reach them without giving up a college option.