The opening this year of a new alternative high school in Newport marks the biggest step forward yet in an uphill campaign to reinvent vocational education in Rhode Island.

The new school, an outpost of the Metropolitan Career and Technical Center (MET) school in Providence, opened in the city’s public housing complex with a $1-million grant from the General Assembly and the support of legislators who say the state’s approach to career and technical education is woefully out-of-date.

State Rep. Paul Crowley says attracting the state-financed MET school to his home city is part of the work he has been doing “below the radar screen” to drum up support for a six-year old study that recommends an overhaul of career and technical education in Rhode Island.

Vocational education, if it combines high-quality academics with rigorous applied learning, can be a powerful vehicle for keeping high school students from dropping out, says Crowley, a key figure on educational issues in the Assembly.

“Kids do better when they are more focused. Attendance is higher, and the graduation rate is higher. We have to address the reality that one size of academia doesn’t fit every kid,” he says.

Rep. Steven Costantino, the chairman of the House Finance Committee, agrees. Nationally, he says, “we send 70 percent of high school graduates to college and 50 percent drop out.”

Crowley estimates that at least 40 percent of the state’s high school students could benefit from high-quality courses that teach marketable skills.

The state Board of Regents concurs, according to spokesman Elliot Krieger who says Crowley’s 40-percent estimate may be low, depending on how one defines career and technical education.

Training students for the work world has all sorts of labels: vocational education, technical education, career education, hands-on education. Rhode Island’s approach took shape in the late l960s and early l970s and relies mostly on regional career and technical centers located in so-called host school districts throughout the state.

Centers operate near high schools in Richmond, Coventry, Cranston, East Providence, Newport, Warwick and Woonsocket. They accept students from surrounding districts and rely on some state aid, local tax dollars and tuition payments from the “sending” districts.

(An eighth center operates solely as an arm of Central High School in Providence.)

Choices vary among regions, but, in general, students attending the centers take courses in automotive repair, graphics and printing, construction, cosmetology, health careers, information technology, culinary arts, business and finance, biotechnology, or electronics. Many of the programs, such as those in hairdressing, offer certification or licensure, smoothing the way for graduates to secure entry-level jobs.

Students go to the centers for part of the school day and return to their home high schools for unrelated classes in English, math, history and the like. A state commission appointed in 1999 to study vocational education indicted the current fragmented approach, saying it is failing to equip young people for meaningful jobs or careers requiring lifelong learning.

“The system is often viewed as a place for poor students, for those who can’t or won’t go on to college, and for those who will have low-paying jobs,” the report said.

Because the “sending” school districts must pay tuition to the host school district, they have little incentive to encourage all the youngsters who might benefit to actually attend. Or, they use the centers as a “safety valve,” sending only those students who least fit in their own traditional college preparatory programs and relieving pressure to create innovative programs of their own.

The result: underutilized facilities that have a negative public image, according to the commission report. About 1 in 5, or 20 percent, of the 5,000 spaces in the regional centers are going unused.

Commission members say Rhode Island need look no farther than Providence and the Blackstone Valley to find more successful ways to provide vocational education for Rhode Island’s young people. One model is the MET school; the other is the William M. Davies Jr. Career and Technical High School in Lincoln.

Davies and the MET are independent regional public schools fully financed by the state. Their directors report to boards of trustees that answer directly to the state Board of Regents.

Crowley has led tours for legislators of both Davies and the MET to gather momentum in the legislature for reconfiguring career and technical education.

“We saw in these two programs kids who in other places had been very high risk who were basically engaged,” he said.

At Davies, which opened in 1970, officials say they aim to prepare students for both work and college, but also to help them become lifelong learners, a necessity in a workplace where jobs are constantly changing.

In the last 10 years, Davies has broadened and deepened its connections with business and industry through a network of contacts for internships as well as trade-association endorsements for courses of study and providing graduates with the tools to market themselves.

Some companies, like DuPont, a leader in automotive paints, sponsor seminars for adults in the school’s auto body shop, where the company has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

At the same time, Davies has ratcheted up academic courses to keep in step with state standards and the demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The MET, despite a formal name that identifies it as a career and technical center, operates outside the mold of a traditional vocational school, working mainly with teenagers who have largely turned their backs on formal education and would probably drop out.

The key to the MET’s approach is a teacher-adviser system that provides intensive support for each youngster. The teacher-advisers guide students in designing individual study plans built around students’ interests, incorporating relevant internships and relying heavily on projects that require youngsters to support and defend their conclusions under critical questioning.

There are no required classes, although most students supplement independent studies with courses at the Community College of Rhode Island. There are also no conventional tests and or grades. Instead the teacher-advisers write detailed narratives about each student’s progress.

By some measures, students who attend Davies and the MET fare better in the long run than they otherwise might have. For example, two-thirds of Davies’ students come from the Central Falls school district, where only 17 percent of the students are proficient in math, and Pawtucket, where only 31 percent of the students at Shea High School met state standards in math. At Davies, about 46 percent of the students met state standards in language arts and mathematics last year.

As a rule, MET students do not fare as well as their counterparts in the Providence system on state-mandated exams, with 30 percent of juniors achieving proficiency in language arts and about 17 percent reaching the standard in math last year. But 98 percent of MET students graduate. Three out of four enter college immediately and another 5 percent matriculate after a year out of school, according to a spokeswoman.

Of those who go on to college, 75 percent complete their studies, according to MET founder Dennis Littky. He says that rate is about 25 percent above the national average for all students and far above the 12-percent college graduation rate for African-Americans and Latinos. The school employs several transition counselors who provide support to MET alumni who need it, helping arrange for college tutoring or advising them on loans, scholarships, and other matters.

At Davies, about 92 percent of students graduate, coming away with both a standard diploma and certification or licensure for entry-level positions in one of 11 industrial or commercial fields, such as hairdressing, automotive and auto-body repair, carpentry, electronics, and metalworking. Some 30 percent to 40 percent of Davies’ graduates go immediately to post-secondary education, according to school officials, who say that others go later.

Now that the legislature has facilitated the opening of a new MET school in Newport, it is hoping to see two or three other schools modeled after Davies opened somewhere in Rhode Island. Toward that goal, the legislature earmarked $200,000 for the Department of Education to develop a plan for new state-financed schools that would help meet the overall goal of enrolling at least 40 percent of the state’s high school students in career and technical programs that are intertwined with high quality academic courses.

A separate Education Department study also under way aims to develop rules for ensuring that all hands-on programs, whether they are offered in a specialized school or an existing comprehensive high school, meet industry standards in the same way as career and technical courses at Davies.

Education Department officials had hoped to be well under way with both endeavors by now, but they were stalled for much of the last 12 months by budgetary considerations.

The Assembly has pushed for a few other incremental changes in vocational education, including an expansion to the Davies budget in 2004 so it could accept 30 freshmen every year from Providence. City students had previously been shut out of the school.

Voters in 2004 also approved a $15-million bond issue to repair the state-owned career and technical centers, although that sum is not now considered adequate to do the job. Those buildings, once brought up to date, would be turned over to the host districts if they are not selected as sites for new career and technical high schools.

Last spring, tension over educational priorities between legislators and Governor Carcieri made the August opening of the MET in Newport a big question mark until the waning days of the Assembly session. In the end, the two sides compromised, with Carcieri winning a $200,000grant to develop a statewide science curriculum and a separate pilot project to introduce physics in the ninth grade, among other science and math initiatives.

At the time, Costantino said that Carcieri’s emphasis on science and math is “a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the complete puzzle.”

“To treat every child as if they are going to take the academic path, without any regard to the trades, vocational, or career and technical education, is inadequate,” he said.