Congress Getting Back to Work on Vocational Ed. Law

After more than a year of inactivity, Congress appears close to hammering out its revisions to the main federal vocational education law, which governs the flow of more than $1 billion a year to career-oriented programs in schools.

The House and the Senate are expected to appoint members to a conference committee soon in an attempt to resolve differences between the bills approved in the two chambers last year by overwhelming margins.

Those measures would reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998. Both bills would keep the core of the program intact, despite criticism by the White House and others who say it is not academically rigorous enough, and that federal money would...