Dear next President,

There needs to be more vocational training high schools. There are a lot of students who already know what they want to be for a career choice. If they already know what they want to be then they should learn and take classes that are relative to that job.

    I went on a vocational school website and found that there are many students who go there and already are getting accepted into colleges. “We’ve done a disservice in this country by suggesting that there’s only one path to success, which is to get a bachelor’s degree.” (quote by Mark Edwards,School principal). He also said “we need to expand how we think about success, it's just a smarter, more nuanced way of thinking about workforce development”. To summarize these two quotes, Mark Edwards is saying that our main goal in education in this country is to get a bachelor’s degree and that we need to broaden our ways of teaching to better fit this requirement and develop a smarter, more approachable way of learning.

    I feel that it is way too easy to graduate elementary and middle school.. Due to Clinton’s “no kid left behind” act, children aren't fully learning what they already need to know. If you put a domesticated animal into the wild for a first time, it will not survive. Same thing with students, if you keep passing failing students then put them in a high school with very little knowledge of things they were taught, they will not pass as easily as others. Learning Math, Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts is very overwhelming for most people. There are a lot of people who just don't understand the concept of Science and are better fitted for Literature. Why make an author learn Science when they will never use it for writing a book. People don't need to be educated in every course, just the ones that will benefit them later in life.

    When people go to interviews to get a job, their employer will look at their high school grades and see what they specialized in. Now, they will see that they have some experience in all categories Math, Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts but if this is an interview for a highly complex Science based job and they have little experience in science because they weren't able to study science a lot and then they probably won't get the job. This is very important to fix because there are already so many unemployed people out there, we don't want to make anymore.

Language arts teaches you to read and write, that is a very important skill to have for any job so it should be a required class. Math is very important in a lot of jobs, being able to calculate percentages and graph data, it should be a required class. This gives you an idea of how we can change high schools to become more vocational based. This doesn't mean that high schools are a problem now but we can make them better than they are. If every school is vocational then students and parents won't have to worry about location of schools since every school will be the same.

So, I hope you will take into consideration about what I said and make a change to our schools across the country. The more vocational training schools we have, the better our education will get.

Sincerely, Ben