Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.

NEWBURGH, N.Y. Suriana Rodriguez is only 19, but shes already lined up a full-time job at IBM. After her junior year in high school, she interned at the tech giants Poughkeepsie, N.Y., campus, 20 miles north of her hometown, for $17 an hour. For a year, Rodriguez has worked 40-hour weeks as an apprentice test technician, examining IBM mainframes to confirm they work before shipping them to customers. In January, shell move to a permanent position with a future salary that she says is definitely much more than I ever thought Id be making at 19.

Rodriguezs opportunities with IBM came to her thanks to her high school, Newburgh Free Academy P-TECH. Its part of an innovative public-school model that combines grade 9-12 education with internships and tuition-free community college. P-TECH, which stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School, has spread to 10 states and 17 countries since its founding in Brooklyn in 2011. The P-TECH network is growing fast. By the end of 2019, there will be 220 P-TECH schools in operation. With 93,000 students nationwide, it is one of the most extensive career and technical education programs in the United States.

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For public school districts, starting P-TECH schools is a way to try to address the skills gapAmerican educations often-elusive goal of tying vocational training to what actual employers such as IBM and Cisco and Microsoft want. It focuses on the much-valued STEM subjectsscience, technology, engineering and math. It aims to prepare students for so-called new collar jobs: work in tech that requires more than a high school diploma, but not always a four-year college degree. And at a time when free college education is surging toward the top of the progressive agenda, its an affordable free-college program thats taken root in poorer cities, boosting high school graduation rates and two-year-college completion rates among students of color and immigrants.

P-TECH interns showed off their projects at an exposition hosted by IBM in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

In 2014, Newburgh, an industrial city of 28,000 in New Yorks Hudson Valley, was struggling with widespread abandoned properties and the states highest murder rate. A majority-Hispanic city where 31 percent of people are impoverished, Newburgh embraced a statewide expansion of the P-TECH program as a strategy for building opportunity. It launched its P-TECH school with a class of 50 ninth-graders.

Rodriguez signed up. Since none of my family had ever really graduated from high school or college, she says, I was very interested in the aspect of getting a free college degree. Rodriguez and 16 classmates who jumped onto P-TECHs fast track finished the six-year program in four years.

In spring 2018, Rodriguez graduated with both a high school diploma and an associates degree in cybersecurity from Orange County Community College. An undocumented immigrant, Rodriguez couldnt get federal financial aid to attend a four-year college. But shes authorized to work through the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, so she took advantage of another part of P-TECHs model: a job interview with IBM after graduation. This August, she became the first Newburgh P-TECH grad to get a full-time job with IBM. Earlier this year, she spoke, along with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Rodriguez is now a night-school student at Dutchess Community College, with a goal of getting a bachelors degree in electrical engineering in two years, and a masters in five years.

Newburgh, N.Y. has struggled with unemployment and crime. Mayor Torrance Harvey, bottom right, believes the P-TECH program can help the city improve its economic profile by training students to fill well-paying jobs in the area. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Rodriguez is the first Newburgh graduate to go from IBM intern to apprentice to full employee, but others are likely to follow soon. IBM, which helped launch the first P-TECH school in 2011, is now affiliated with at least 30 P-TECHs worldwide. It has hired 30 of the 240 students whove graduated from IBM-affiliated P-TECHs so far, paying each a starting salary of at least $50,000.

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The P-TECH experience really helped me feel more confident overall, and it helped me learn a lot of skills that I am still today using, says Rodriguez, like collaborating and communicating, professional e-mail writing, and knowing when to ask questions and when to just listen.

Newburghs mayor, Torrance Harvey, is also a full-time P-TECH history teacher. He says the school helps Newburghs efforts to recover from its early-2010s crime epidemic. Public safety is always our No. 1 priority, but the next thing is how to create meaningful employment for our residents, Harvey says. Newburgh P-TECH students complete associates degrees in either computer networking or cybersecurityfast-growing fields, Harvey notes, whose importance has grown after Russias interference in the 2016 U.S. election and enormous data breaches suffered by corporate giants such as Target and Equifax.

These are inner-city Newburgh kids, the mayor says of his P-TECH students, and this program has changed the trajectory of their earning potential and their career potential and their education.

Newburghs P-TECH campus opened in 2014. Principal Kevin Rothman talks to Mayor Torrance Harvey, who also teaches history at P-TECH. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Newburghs trajectory is changing too. Gun violence has declined 80 percent since 2015. City Hall has launched an aggressive revitalization plan, bulldozing buildings that had stood abandoned for decades. We were able to get businesses to return back to the city, Harvey says. We were able to get new home ownership. People are investing in our city like you wouldnt believe.

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The P-TECH idea was invented in 2010, when then-IBM CEO Sam Palmisano was chatting up his friend Joel Klein, then New York Citys schools chancellor. During a rain delay at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, Palmisano told Klein that the tech industry was having trouble finding young people with the skills it needed. Klein proposed opening a six-year school with the City University of New York and curriculum input from IBM. Students could work IBM internships and, if they passed a company certification test, would be first in line for job interviews at IBM. Palmisano agreed. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the plan in September 2010 and gave the partners a year to open the school.

When Klein and Palmisano shook on the deal, vocational education was just beginning to emerge from the academic backwater where it had languished for decades. Conceived a century ago so high school students could learn a trade if they werent going to college, vocational education had developed a reputation as a dumping ground for students who werent doing well in regular academics. Harvards influential Pathways to Prosperity report, released in 2011, warned that nearly two-thirds of new jobs of the 2010s would require more than a high school educationyet only 40 percent of Americans had obtained a bachelors degree or associates degree by their mid-20s.

Downtown Newburgh has been hit hard economically. Vincent Lacertosa, 18, from Newburgh, is a P-TECH graduate and an apprentice at IBM where he tests main frame computers. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

By contrast, the report noted, 40 to 70 percent of high school kids in many European countries spent three years in career programs that combined classroom and workplace experience, where they earned diplomas or certificates strongly valued in the labor market. Eight years later, critics of American career and technical education, as its called today, still complain that it needs to become more academically rigorous, better prepare students for education beyond high school, and provide actual work experience based on the needs of todays employers.

The first P-TECH, in Brooklyn, emulated the workplace learning focus of European vocational education while eliminating tuition costs. It established design principles that still apply to all the 200-plus P-TECH schools today. The entire program, including the community college courses, is cost-free. (P-TECH schools are funded through various combinations of local tax dollars, state funding, federal career-ed grants, and cost-sharing with local community colleges.) Theyre open-enrollment schools, with no testing or grade requirements for admission, and they focus on disadvantaged youth. The high school, the community college and the industry partner work together. The curriculum includes workplace skills, such as public speaking, as well as company mentors and paid internships. Graduates are first in line for job interviews at the partner company.

Suriana Rodriguez, 19, is the first Newburgh P-TECH graduate to get a full-time job offer from IBM. Shes currently an apprentice at IBMs campus in Poughkeepsie, above. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Political leaders quickly embraced the model, excited by its combination of career and technical education, paid internships and early college. Barack Obama praised Brooklyns P-TECH in his 2013 State of the Union address and visited the school later that year. This is a ticket into the middle class, and its available to everybody whos willing to work for it, Obama said in an address at the school.

A year earlier, in 2012, Chicagos then-mayor, Rahm Emanuel, had inked a deal with IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Verizon and Motorola to open five P-TECHs there. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo debuted a state P-TECH program in 2014, pledging $28 million over seven years for 18 new schools, including Newburghs. Connecticut opened its first P-TECH school, in Norwalk, in 2014, with then-Gov. Dannel Malloy cutting the ceremonial ribbon. P-TECH schools are popular in Northeastern cities and states, but have also caught on in Dallas, Baton Rouge and Colorado. Though Democratic governors and mayors have championed them, their public-private collaborations have also won over Larry Hogan, Marylands Republican governor.

Danille Jager is the liaison between Newburgh P-Tech and IBM. At a recent exposition for P-TECH interns, attendees got their passports stamped after they heard presentations from the students. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

In Baltimore, a conversation between Hogan and Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels, soon after the citys 2015 riots, led to the creation of two P-TECH schools in 2016. One is affiliated with IBM, while the other, located on the edge of Johns Hopkins hospital campus, is focused on health care, with the hospital and Kaiser Permanente as industry partners. This summer, 10 of its 200 students completed internships at the University of Marylands shock trauma center and John Hopkins anesthesiology, neurology and orthopedics departments.

Now, eight P-TECH schools are operating in Maryland, including four in Baltimore, with some state funding. The Maryland Chamber of Commerce has organized a consortium of 400 businesses to offer mentors, internships and job interviews to P-TECH students. The challenge in the P-TECH schools is not whether or not the individual jurisdiction wants to do it, says Keiffer Mitchell, a special adviser to Hogan. Its just finding enough businesses that can take on internships for the kids, and also have ideas [about] hiring those kids.

This May, Hogan signed a bill allowing for three more P-TECH schools in Maryland, after the state Senate killed his proposal to remove a state cap on the programs expansion. Were not against it, Paul Pinsky, chairman of the Maryland Senates education committee, told the Baltimore Sun. Its just we havent gotten the data back about whether its working or not.

Results have taken a while to emerge, since P-TECH schools are six-year programs, and most arent six years old yet. But the inaugural class at the original P-TECH in Brooklyn achieved a stunning 100 percent high school graduation rate, followed by 87 percent for the second class and 93 percent for the thirdcompared with graduation rates of 71-74 percent for their peers across New York City. Fifty-seven percent of the first class and 39 percent of the second class also graduated with the no-cost associate degree in a computer science field. Brooklyn P-TECHs principal, Rashid Davis, notes that many students who didnt get the associate degree took college courses, then transferred the credits to four-year colleges.

At Norwalk High School in Connecticut, P-TECH students study web design. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

About 70 percent of the Brooklyn P-TECH students are low income. Just under a third of the student body female and 55 percent of the students are black males. And P-TECH is not achieving those high graduation rates by taking it easy on the students. Davis says students at the open-enrollment Brooklyn P-TECH are achieving results on New York state college-readiness tests that are comparable with New York Citys screened and specialized high schools.

Students are buying into the culture, Davis says. Our attendance rate still hovers above 90 percent. That is a key indicator that students are wanting to be in this environment.

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Vocational education used to teach students how to weld or how to fix a car. Todays career and technical education means something much different. Students are learning to code software, design websites, or operate robots and AI systems that have replaced manual-labor jobs across much of the economy.

China Tinnen and Nico Tullio are juniors in the P-TECH program at Norwalk High School. As part of the six-year program, P-TECH students take classes at nearby Norwalk Community College. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

This August, rising seniors at the P-TECH high school in Norwalk, Conn., gathered at Norwalk Community College for the P-TECH Norwalk Intern Expo. To mark the end of their summer internships, the students gave presentations on their work for their parents and their IBM mentors.

Bianca Velez and Pongsa Tayjasanant, both 17, stood behind a table and told passersby what they did with their summer. For eight weeks, at IBMs offices in White Plains, N.Y. (a half-hour from Norwalk via school bus), they worked in IBMs digital sales team. They used the companys Watson Language Translator, an artificial intelligence tool, to translate sales documents for IBM employees around the world.

Bianca Velez and Christian Tapper, both P-TECH students, take classes at Norwalk Community College. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Instead of translating word for word like Google Translate, it looks at a document holistically, Tayjasanant explained, his polished presentation reflecting the public-speaking element in P-TECHs curriculum. Its able to keep the tone, able to keep the diction, the nuances to language that are so important.

Velez and Tayjasanant have each taken seven college courses already. Theyre on track to graduate next spring, in four years instead of six, with associates degrees as well as high school diplomas. At first, says Velez, the personal draw to me was, obviously, free college. Then she embraced P-TECH Norwalks path toward an associates degree in web development. Im really into things like design. I was thinking, maybe learning how to code and design websites was something I would really like to do. Now she knows she likes coding websites, but shes also considering careers in chemistry or chemical engineering, attending a four-year college, and working with IBM.

Velezs mother, Annette Velez, says P-TECH, especially its college classes and public-speaking course, have helped her daughter grow as a student. She was a very timid child, she recalls. Now shes very open, loves talking, sharing ideas.

Karen Amaker, principal of Norwalk High School, in a P-TECH web design class. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Karen Amaker, has been the principal at P-TECH Norwalk since 2014, when it was founded as Norwalk Early College Academy and adopted the P-TECH curriculum. She says the model works for students like Velez and Tayjasanantour high flyers who are on that fast track and for the typical P-TECH student, who completes the program in 5 to six years. For those families for whom college wasnt necessarily in their plannot because they didnt want it, because they didnt see it as accessibleI think P-TECH makes that accessibility and opportunity very much visible. Most P-TECH Norwalk students go on to pursue a four-year degree, Amaker says, and some choose careers outside tech. For instance, a recent graduate, accepted into the Rhode Island School of Design, didnt finish the associates degree, but transferred her college credits to her new school.

The Norwalk school, one of four P-TECH schools in Connecticut, launched with state funding. When that dried up after a year, Norwalk Community Colleges then-president used discretionary funds to pay for the students free college courses. Now P-TECH receives an extra $1,000 per pupil from the Norwalk school district to help cover the cost. Pell grants also help, as does federal funding from the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act.

I think one of the biggest mistakes Ive seen in education is this trend to do away with technical skills, Amaker says. Instead, she says, schools need to help students to develop those skills, be that auto mechanics, computer science, [or] now culinary arts, and all the things in between. We have to move away from this cookie-cutter model of doing education as rote memorization and really think about project-based learning and design thinking.

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How Vocational Education Got a 21st Century Reboot - POLITICO