This paper argues that the federal government's role in vocational and technical education (VTE) should include a greater emphasis on systematically testing promising strategies and interventions and subjecting them to rigorous evaluations of their effects, implementation, costs, and benefits. Section 1 presents a rationale for rethinking the federal role in VTE at the secondary level and highlights several potential benefits of moving to a greater focus on systematic innovation and rigorous evaluation. Section 2 outlines a set of guiding principles for what systematic innovation and rigorous evaluation ought to look like. Section 3 touches on several strategies that might be used to help shift the federal role toward a greater focus on these principles. (Throughout, the paper implies that a federal commitment to systematic innovation and rigorous evaluation should not be confined to VTE. It contends that the current administration's focus on ensuring that "no child is left behind" appears to be particularly well-suited to using federal resources to leverage state and local investments in promising strategies to improve schools and to rigorously evaluate them in ways that assess the impacts of the reforms and help develop accountability systems for further improvement.) (YLB)