Inside the carpentry classroom at Harvard H. Ellis Technical High School in eastern Connecticut, three dozen sophomores and juniors are building cabinets and framing walls. Saws buzz, hammers clank and sandpaper scratches. It’s hard to converse without yelling. But Julian Lawrence, 16, doesn’t mind the noise. A mediocre student in middle school, he’s now earning straight A’s and says he’s excited to come to class each day, showing the benefits for many boys of opening more technical high schools.

“In middle school, I hated sitting at a desk every day,” Lawrence said, regarding the benefits of opening more technical high schools. “This gets my mind moving more.”

Only two of the 36 students in the classroom are girls, a ratio that mirrors the carpentry workforce. While a couple of the other trades taught at Ellis Tech skew female — hairdressing and health care technology, in particular — its overall enrollment is 70 percent male. Statewide, more than 60 percent of the roughly 11,000 students attending technical high schools are boys.

Boys seem to be getting a bigger boost from the schools, too. In one frequently cited study, boys accepted into Connecticut’s technical schools were found to have better attendance and test scores, and higher graduation rates and earnings than peers who just missed the cutoff for admission. Girls who got into the schools did just fine — but were no better off than their rejected peers.

Yet many boys who might thrive in a technical high school are missing out, due to a system-wide shortage of seats. This year, only 44 percent of the 7,850 applicants to the state’s 17 technical schools got in. Those schools enrolled 11,700 students this year.

The popularity of the programs has led to fights in both Connecticut and neighboring Massachusetts over who gets into the schools. Both states recently switched from competitive admissions to a lottery, amid allegations that their systems were shutting out at-risk students.

Others say the solution lies not in reassigning the limited seats, but in adding more of them. Nationally, boys lag behind girls on multiple measures of educational achievement, from kindergarten readiness to college completion. If technical high schools can help narrow that gap, advocates reason, why not build more of them?

Read the full article about opening more technical high schools by Kelly Field at The Hechinger Report.