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.

“In middle school, I hated sitting at a desk every day,” Lawrence said. “This gets my mind moving more….” 

….Yet many boys who might thrive in a technical high school are missing out, due to a systemwide 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….

….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? 

“We could add 1,000 more and it would be good for boys, not bad for girls, and give parents more choices,” said Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group….

….Still, the case for constructing more technical schools is hardly airtight. There have only been a handful of rigorous studies of the schools, and none has followed students long term. And there is little to no research comparing outcomes for students in different models of career education, so it’s difficult to say whether spending millions on new schools is worth the cost. 

Yet Reeves and other advocates argue that the existing evidence for technical schools is encouraging. They point to the Connecticut research, as well as a recent evaluation [by MDRC] of New York City’s P-TECH schools that found that males who attended the vocationally oriented schools were 10 percentage points more likely to have completed an associate degree seven years after enrolling than peers who weren’t admitted to the schools. That study, like the Connecticut one, found no significant gains for females….

…. Ultimately, though, the answer to gender gaps in education may lie less in expanding access to technical schools, and more in bringing elements of the schools — like career exploration and hands-on, project-based learning — into traditional classrooms. After all, even if Reeves realizes his dream of building 1,000 more schools, the vast majority of boys will still attend traditional high schools….

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