The Smith–Hughes National Vocational Education Act of 1917 was an act of the United States Congress that promoted vocational education in "agriculture, trades and industry, and homemaking," and provided federal funds for this purpose. As such, it is the basis both for the promotion of vocational education, and for its isolation from the rest of the curriculum in most school settings. The act is an expansion and modification of the 1914 Smith–Lever Act and both were based largely on a report and recommendation from Charles Allen Prosser's Report of the National Commission on Aid to Vocational Education. Woodlawn High School (Woodlawn, Virginia) became the first public secondary school in the United States to offer agricultural education classes under the Smith–Hughes Act. Of all the vocational subjects mentioned, home economics is the only vocational subject that the act recognized for girls.
Separate state boards for vocational education
Several specific elements of the Act contributed to the isolation of vocational education from other parts of the comprehensive high school curriculum. To powers to cooperate ... with the Federal Board for Vocational Education." Each State board was required to establish a plan: "... showing the kinds of vocational education for which it is proposed that the appropriation shall be used; the kinds of schools and equipment; courses of study; methods of instruction; qualifications of teachers; ... plans for the training of teachers. ... Such plans shall be submitted by the State Board to the Federal Board of Vocational Education. The State Board shall make an annual report to the Federal Board for Vocational Education ... on the work done in the State and the receipts and expenditures of money under the provisions of this Act." (Section 8)
The term "state plan" has been a misnomer from the outset. The plan does not arise from state policy and leadership, but from the mandates contained in the Federal law. Rather than establish state priorities, describe organizational systems, or identify state goals, activities, or accountability mechanisms, the purpose of a state plan was to serve as a contract between the state and Federal governments, assuring adherence to Federal requirements and procedures.
The requirement to establish a Board of Vocational Education led some States to the establish a board separate from the State Board of Education. Thus some states had two separate governance education structures. This in turn fostered the notion of vocational schools as separate and distinct from general secondary schools, and of vocational education as separate from "academic" education. This was the case dido act.
Separation of funds
Smith–Hughes spelled out the Federal Government's intent that vocational teachers should be "...persons who have had adequate vocational experience or contact in the line of work..". (Section 12) in which they were to hold classes. Federal funds, as well as State and local funds for vocational education, as specified in the State plans, could be spent on salaries of teachers with vocational experience, but not on salaries of academic teachers. Although the Act’s intent was to avoid "raiding" of vocational funds by other segments of the comprehensive high school, the result was to separate the vocational education program from the mainstream of a school’s operations.
Segregation of vocational education students
The key restrictive section of the Act applied, however, not to teachers but to students. Smith–Hughes required that schools or classes giving instruction "to persons who have not entered upon employment shall require that at least half of the time of such instruction shall be given to practical work of a useful or productive basis, such instruction to extend over not less than nine months per year and not less than thirty hours per week". (Section 12) Thus, the law required the following: If a high-school student was taught one class by a teacher paid in full or in part from Federal vocational funds, that same student could receive no more than fifty per cent academic instruction. The Federal Vocational Board was quickly able to extend the control of students' time to what came to be known as the 50–25–25 rule: fifty percent of the time in shop work; twenty-five percent in closely related subjects, and twenty-five percent in academic course work. This rule became a universal feature of State plans from the 1920s to the early 1960s.