Ditching Shop Class: Eliminating Vocational Education in America's Public Schools

Ditching Shop Class

Eliminating Vocational Education in America's Public Schools

Published by Joe Petito at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Joe Petito

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed only for your personal use. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Frontispiece

--In Dedication--

Private First Class Joseph Anzack, Iraq, 2007, Class of 2005

Captain Matthew Ferraro, Afganistan, 2007, Class of 2001

Corporal Micah Gifford, Iraq, 2006, Class of 1997

Torrance South High School, CA.

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Table of Contents

Part One: Academic Exercises

Preface, Back to School

Preface Notes

Prologue, Death of Vocation

Chapter One, Pilots, Planes, RATs

Chapter One Notes

Chapter Two, Set Up For Failure

Chapter Two Notes

Chapter Three, Raising the Bar

Chapter Three Notes

Chapter Four, Numbers

Chapter Four Notes

Chapter Five, Educator Bias

Chapter Five Notes

Part Two: Unintended Consequences

Chapter Six, Two Pounds/One Pound

Chapter Six Notes

Chapter Seven, Jumping to the Digital

Chapter Seven Notes

Chapter Eight, Multiculturalist Sink

Chapter Eight Notes

Chapter Nine, The Bus Driver

Chapter Nine Notes

Part Three: Biospheres

Chapter Ten, Legitimacy

Chapter Ten Notes

Chapter Eleven, The Green Angle

Chapter Eleven Notes

Chapter Twelve, The Shop Teacher

Chapter Twelve Notes

Chapter Thirteen, Accomplishment

Chapter Thirteen Notes

Chapter Fourteen, With Enough Shovels

Chapter Fourteen Notes

Chapter Fifteen, Where To Go

Chapter Fifteen Notes

Afterward

About the Author

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Part One:

Academic Exercises

Preface:

Back To School

Back-To-School-Night, that tradition where parents come in, eyeball the teacher and the facility, hoping to get the straight scoop on what's expected of their kid is well attended or not, based on the neighborhood’s affluence. Teachers craft the bulletin boards, lay out projects and posters, turn on the technological widgets and bluster through an attempt to convince parents their kid will be safe and actually learn something in this new school year. Teachers grouse about nights like these—feeling like a rare bug on a microscope slide where methods, mindset, intelligence are examined closely, so they smile through clenched teeth and shut the door and get down the road as fast as they can afterward, avoiding eye contact.

I've convinced myself to like it though. After the first few years as a tense and insecure newbee, wondering if my kid's parents liked me, what they thought of my competence and comprehension, I dumped the stock slideshow and stilted diction and began playing with back-to-school like an artillery target: uncovering my dissident worldview, launching it downrange and seeing how far it would accurately track. Would my nonaligned ideas gain traction or float like a dead whale? In so doing came the realization the act was genuine, they were seeing and hearing a deviation from the conventional caravan route that is public education, and liking it.

On a September night I was in the middle of the gig between one session and another where teachers get ten minutes to tell parents in each class session all about everything that will be done all year- class requirements, grading, procedures, disciplinary processes, etc; a demanding and impossible chore getting repeated back to back at least five times or so, depending on the individual teacher's schedule.

As fifth period parents shuffled out with the glazed-over look and sixth came in tentatively, a former student, twenty years old who had a brother in the class stopped me and began pouring out how much he agreed with my take on the narrow thinking of educators. I was wound tight from covering the necessities and bomb-throwing at the educational edifice, a little out of breath, when he approached and blurted up his life: He was frustrated there had been nothing in high school for him; he wished he could have learned something; a trade, a skill, something practical, anything that would help him get a job. He tried the local junior college for a while but realized it wasn't for him. He was casting about trying to figure out what to do, and having no real skills in any area (despite having earned the high school diploma) he was in a funk. It was on his face, in his voice, all over his bearing. He remembered my class as a safe place in an unsafe time, giving him freedom to make and build and learn about the real objects in his life, and he had kept those small projects. I encouraged as best I could, relating a couple of suggestions, one being military service, but having to address the next horde with my dog and pony show, that was the end of it.

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Anecdote, yes. Evidence of a type; another data point in a grouping of young people carrying the weight of educational misjudgment on their shoulders: not a statistic, not a research subject, not a theory but a breathing paradigm with an adult but still familiar face, stuck in an in-between world where his temperament and skills do not mix with our educational values and their relationship to the world of work after the high school. This kid was once my student; marginally attentive, but I had a connection with him and his family, having made calls home and sat in conferences before and after school and having his brothers in my classes. A fractured family dynamic in those years installed an attitude of distraction in class and anger at adults, making him useless for the academic, the theoretical, the conceptual relating to anything useful or real in his then-current life or the future he should have been making for himself.

He fell into the bracket labeled at risk by academicians and owed service by the programs for such, but despite all we had done at our little school and then at the high school, it didn't matter because the inspirational spark had to come from what he saw around him in the classrooms. The inspiration could not jump the gap from our delivery to his ability to receive-- he needed to know where his skills could fit in, improve upon what he had a propensity for, a thing he could do to prove to himself he had skills demonstrating competence and accomplishment to master his life and be productive, if only for his own consumption. Things practical, engaging his hands and body and mind at the same time were his forte, and despite the angry and recalcitrant attitude he pushed me with back when, he had skill and demonstrated it in the classroom. But after, in high school, it got bled out of him. He was sleeping on his mom's couch and sick of it.

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How many kids are out there like him? It's time we bent the compass needle guiding the education caravan. To that end, this collection is experiential. It’s not another stack of research evaluating student achievement in California or the wider United States, nor has specific criterion-based research been conducted on the specified theme to render the narrative, the process, the conclusions; adding more data to that pile just gets us a bigger pile, distracting from the needs of the short people in the chairs. A typical example, selected randomly, copy/pasted from the Pile; skip it if you like, you will miss little:

A strong correlation between student achievement and family background shows up as well in the international data for developed countries. The pattern emerges for comparisons both within and across countries. I focus here on test scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) managed by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). To facilitate comparisons across developed countries of children from similar backgrounds, the OECD has constructed a measure of the economic, cultural, and social status (ESCS) of the families of all children tested. This measure incorporates information on the household’s occupational status, the parents’ education level, and, as a proxy for the family’s income or wealth, household possessions.6 This measure is comparable to what we in the U.S. would call socio-economic status and is an absolute scale that allows one to compare students with similar family backgrounds across countries.

Figure 3 displays student performance of 15 year olds in reading by ESCS percentile for the U.S and each of the 13 countries whose students scored higher on average than U.S. students in 2009. The reported scores on the vertical axis are standardized as of 2000 to have a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100. 1

This un-academic use of copy/paste is an illustration of what’s become inconsequential to current practice in public education. We already know this. More of it has little meaning. Wonks of Public Policy who read this by the gross can affect little change on the topic or conclusions. Your average Joe and Jane with a kid in the public system doesn’t read this, doesn’t talk like this, they don’t socialize with people who talk, think like this; the majority of classroom-based educators don’t either. It’s a narrow field of scientism taking little account of the larger frame of reference that is the entity of public education. 2

Conversely, for you the reader, I assume a willingness to acquire familiarity with educational topics, and do not reference or cite literature if the idea, topic, or data is common and familiar to the secondary public school teaching/learning dynamic. Any day or night, sitting in your jammies with a flutefull of Two-Buck Chuck, oiled on a beach in your Speedos or other minuscule attire, (any beach most anywhere) you can access analysis like this: Dropping out of high school is related to a number of negative outcomes. 3 or: Poor students continue to lag far behind their peers. 4 Graduation is elusive for many. 5 Well No shit buckwheat. 6 That's the news based on our educational metrics, it's depressing, but what's behind the news; what's under the socio-economic, the drop-out rate, what's in the damp cloud of suppositions making it so?

Other stakeholders in this business tend to pursue the various pieces of our struggles in public secondary education as discrete domains, sometimes overlapping, with recommendations for the procedural repair of each, but rarely a synthesis of the entire mosaic; why it is what it is, how it got that way and then, what to do about it. 7

All scholarship is--or ought to be--a kind of intellectual autobiography, exposing the teller of the tale, his history, his flaws. 8 It's an audacious undertaking, better suited to one with a more excellent understanding and command of the English language, the educational dynamics and milieu than I. I am sure they will be vulnerable in matters of detail to the critical judgement of the experienced... If they serve as a stimulus to further thought on these problems and to worthier efforts by wider and more learned people, their purpose will be served. 9 Many Ideas and concepts found here have been culled from others, sourced to the best of my ability, and I’m responsible when their thinking and writing, their conversations, placed here, have been recycled without proper annotation.

This series of assays fall more into that category researchers and educator-data collectors so despise called anecdote, the stories of our lives. 10 Three anecdotes on a topic are curious, bypassed or employed for a few yucks with your foot on the brass bar at your local watering hole; a YouTube view of balancing an elephant on your nose. Ten elephants randomly set upon your doorstep is beyond curiosity, deforming the porch, should inspire a little flashlight investigation. But a million views, a million experiences, narratives of a specific nature on a specific topic, demonstrating an empirical outcome with trends affecting an educational, societal, industrial infrastructure must be dealt with; that kind of unbalanced ballast will shift the house, capsize the ship, put your economy in a sling. Yet, it’s experiential, bound up in the relationship actions and reactions making up public education and can be defined, possibly, as methodologically naive and verbally incautious. 11

Back to Table of Contents

Preface Notes:

Back to School

1 I mean no disparagement of no doubt outstanding researchers; the study is an example of many: Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence, by Helen F. Ladd, Edgar T. Thompson Professor of Public Policy, Sanford School of Public Policy; Professor of Economics, Duke University, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy. Written version of the Presidential Address to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in Washington, D.C., November 4, 2011 Page 7

2 ...'scientism'--- the imitation in the social sciences, including economics and political science, of the methods of the physical sciences. cato.org/publications/commentary/intelligence-services-are-not-intelligent, Accessed 11/17/13, Hadar, Leon T., Intelligence Services Are Not Intelligent, The Cato Institute, 7/24/04, Horgan, John, Preaching to the Converted,TWSJ, 5/30-31/15 p.C7

3 High school dropout rate climbs to 34.9%, , Section CB, LA Times, p.A6, 5/13/09, Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2007, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences: nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/dropout07/Accessed 8/13/10

4 New Jersey test results show poor students continue to lag far behind their peers, http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/education/article_bf1a04b4-17a1-11e0-82fa-001cc4c002e0.html Accessed 1/4/11, Madden, Vicki, Why Poor Students Struggle, The New York Times, 9/22/14

5 Rivera, Carla, Graduation is elusive for many, LA Times, 9/28/11, p. AA2, Porter, Eduardo, Education Gap Widens Between Rich and Poor, TNYT, p. B1, 9/23/15

6 Yes, I agree, thank you. Crude aphorisms have no place in scholarly works or those accessible to immature eyes and ears, and I enforce such in the classroom. Two observations: Your interaction with me here, outside the dogged-shut and pressurized compartment that is the classroom is not intended to be scholarly but a conversation, sometimes heated, obviously one-sided; feel free to shove it in the fireplace or digital either, and sorry for wasting your time and treasure. Second, having a directed discourse by a former Sergeant of Marines will occasionally exceed the bounds of conviviality. See the following for USMC expressions and acronyms- Wikipedia is adequate for such: wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine slang, Accessed 5/12/12. For mature audiences.

7 The original discussion on procedural parenting from which the term is borrowed focuses on the research and narrowly applied procedural-based actions to improve parenting strategies: Hymowitz, Kay S., Marriage and Caste in America, Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2006, P. 87

8 Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place Of Grace, Antimodernism and the transformation of American Culture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, p. XX

9 Kennan, George F., American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, University of Chicago, 1951, p. 7

10 Despite attempting to weave this into a coherent narritive, it's an overlapping collection and qualitative. It started while obtaining a single-subject teaching credential in 1997, meanwhile making a living as a building contractor, then pursuing a master's degree in Technology Based Education. The more I delved into how we teach the use of technology for data management, instructional delivery and the teaching of student use of technology for life preparation contrasted with the trends in secondary and university education in the United States, the more I saw, the more was described to me the growing proportion of students who are ill-served in the process. As the stories, the observations, the data accumulated from my relationships with students, with parents, with educational professionals, with people in business and industry, the more unavoidable this work became.

11 wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Campolo, Accessed 4/18/14. As a USMC Sergeant once told me in his Carolina manner: Private, opinions be like aniuses. Ever-body got one. (the lurid noun has been substituted)

Back to Table of Contents

Prologue

Death Of Vocation

A while ago on a Saturday morning my son and I went walking around a defunct military base, donated by the federal government to local government for various uses- we liked to explore the old buildings and foundations, fly kites, look at the island of Catalina upside-down through his telescope, throw grass and dirt clods at one another, and just hang out in a wild place. It’s prime real estate with spectacular views- one of many in the nation protected by the military, preventing it from being paved over by developers; the old base is full of local and national history. 1

It’s been host to several films, from attempts at history like a version of Pearl Harbor to the tongue in cheek National Security, and one area in particular had been used the previous night to shoot a scene with digital effects and pyrotechnics. The area has the old concrete artillery bunkers, tunnels, and huge earth emplacements left over from the WW I era; it once contained artillery that could throw exploding bullets the weight of a Smart Car half-way to Catilina: perfect for that just-right special effect on the cheap- little set construction required.

Fascinated with film-making, we walked down through the ninety-year-old concrete walls as they were tearing down the set and reeling in cables from the night's work, and found an open door to one of the underground ammunition storage areas. The padlock was missing, and unlike previous explorations, we swung open one of the big rusted doors and looked in, excited, expecting to see a drippy concrete cavern to explore, with a chance of accessing the many tunnels penetrating the defunct hilltop base. The trailers for talent and makeup and catering were long towed away, the movie grips on the ground above were focused on lifting and rolling up a big blue screen with a crane, and payed no attention to us.

Looking in after the bright sunrise, the place was huge and full of dark forms. The thick steel doors were designed to drive trucks through for unloading heavy silk powder bags and hoisting four-foot long, fifteen-hundred pound bullets, but the underground bunker was jammed full of machinery and junk all the way to the back, a considerable distance. My first inclination was to back out, close the door and sneak away, but curiosity insisted and I pulled the squeaking slab of steel a few more feet to let in the slanting light. The equipment looked familiar. Looking closely, we found the former ammunition storage bunker jammed and stacked with machine shop tools: lathes, mills, furnaces, surface grinders, precision measuring tools in their velvet-lined wooden cases, welders, worktables, lockers- everything you would need to equip a high school machine shop, and the tools and equipment had the local school district property sticker and numbers engraved on them. It was familiar because it was identical to that which I had used when I was in high school machine shop class.

We poked around for several minutes, opening lockers and boxes, finding pristine carbide cutting tools, stocks of rusting collets and chucks in wooden racks, dial indicators in Styrofoam sleeves, band saw blades in their cardboard boxes, and then closed the door and walked away, around the craftspeople and electricians taking down the sets, dismantling the lighting and generators and reflector screens.

After the immediate shock and appall, the first idea to surface was to run out and rent a truck, bluff my way back in and heist away as much of the gear as I could haul out of there. The second was to find teachers who could use this stuff. Snapping out of the unlikely vision, I stumbled up the steps and out of the gun emplacement, my son trailing and excited by the behind-the-camera movie activity and new views of old scenes. What’s all that junk dad? What's it doing in there? Where are the tunnels? Can we get some lunch? I clenched my teeth, not trusting my emotions-- all that junk represented probably two million bucks in today’s market. My own, depressing questions swirled: Which schools had the equipment and tools come from? There was enough gear stashed away to equip two or three high school machine shops, and it was obvious from the pigeon nests and cobwebs and rust that the gear had been sitting awhile. Who had the lack of foresight, who made the decisions to tear it out of the shop classrooms and jam it into a damp, concrete-lined hole in the ground? How long had it been there? Why had it been removed?

My secondary school experience in that school district took place in the early to mid-seventies, a time when vocational studies were viable options for young people; at the end of three years of high school, in combination with two or three years of middle school career and technical studies and Project Based Learning, high school graduates could have an excellent entry level job at a local machine shop, auto dealership, in a multiplicity of trades, and now, thirty or forty years later, be making eighty or ninety grand a year as a master machinist, mechanic, heating/air conditioning technician, a hundred others, or be the operator of one's own business in any number of skilled professions. 2

In a great part of the country, vocational options at the public school have been wiped out.

Prologue Notes:

1 (AP) Rare deer's haven to go up for sale, LA Times, 11/16/15, A13, Fleshler, David, Cold War military base fills with new (wild) life, LA Times, 12/13/15, A23

2 Talked to an electrician on Friday (12/9/16) about how much money electricians make. We were in the middle of a school renovation, paid for by bond measures floated by the district a couple of years ago, and during a break, he told me (the condensed version) there are three tiers of electricians: the guys who can pull wire and do basic electrical work and have basic skills are making maybe 40-45K a year. The second are the self employed contractor electricians who go after their own work, set their hours and pay and do the other jobs of being in business--they make maybe 80-90K a year--unless they're real go-getters and make as big a business as they want. The people who do government projects (like this one) are making prevailing wages (same pay as union, but non-union) of about 130-135K a year. And unlike teachers, they leave work at work.

Back to Table of Contents

Chapter One

Pilots, Planes, RATs

California became what it is because it was rich. Stretching back your historical reach to the Spanish and Mexicans and Russians and the rest who took the land from the Natives, we've cycled through every kind of material richness that, when combined with communicative technology, inspired people to risk all they had to come here and share (or take, a better term) a position of personal affluence. Name a resource: open space, forage, fresh water, timber, metals of all sorts, the sea's abundance, oil, human labor. It was all here and ripe. The towns and cities that boomed and busted with the exploitation of the resources made for the great yarns told by the great yarn-tellers, though who now from the Gothams know of wasted communities like Swansea and Ivanpah, Eagle Mountain, East San Pedro? 1

Torrance, California, endured no boom and bust of such devastating scale. It rests on a salient of sulfer-heavy crude stretching on a NorthWest/SouthEast axis from the ocean off Huntington Beach through to the Santa Barbara Channel, where naturally-seeping tar balls drift ashore, blackening your recess from the city. Where once wood and later steel oil derricks punctured the brush-covered hills and ephemeral swamps, suburban neighborhoods have taken root. In pockets across the community are light and medium industrial tracts employing large numbers of people with expert technical skill, occupations making home ownership in the city an affluent aspiration and the school system a selling point for real estate brokers. 2

On the south end of town is The Robinson Helicopter Company, world's largest manufacturer of these things, making them for the commercial and general aviation markets, adjacent to an airport named after a World War II B-24 Liberator crewman. 3 A man with multiple stories to tell, from a brush with Hitler during the 1936 Olympics to being lost at sea in a small raft to imprisonment by the Japanese, Louis Zamperini was a local boy whose life story makes most of our daily crises, in comparison, appear unremarkable. 4

Zamperini Field is one of many from which members of the Experimental Aircraft Association offer free familiarization flights in small general aviation aircraft to young people between the ages of 8 and 17. The EAA created the Young Eagles educational program to interest young people in aviation, and program members offer free flights on their personally-owned aircraft to provoke an interest in the technological world of flying and aeronautics. The Young Eagles former honorary chairman, actor Harrison Ford, described another angle: It is also good for them to see that there are adults in the field who are interested in their futures and encouraging them to stay in school and study. This encourages kids in all the right directions. * A love of learning, focusing interest in a highly technical field involving science and math, and the social capital invested in making life interesting and challenging for young people are commendable attributes among experts in any technical field. But keeping kids in school and studying to make a future for themselves, an obviously worthy goal, is a supporting adjunct to the understated goals of the Young Eagles program. 5

* The current Young Eagles co-chairman is Chesley Sullenberger. More about him and US Airways flight 1549 in a bit.

Since 1980, the number of licensed pilots in the United States has declined from a high of 827.000 to around 609,00 in 2017, a decline defining a far more disturbing trend. 6 What's the decline in the number of general aviation pilots attributed to? Why are fewer young people going into vocations and trades related to aircraft and flight technology? This isn't about raising up more pilots to purchase more aircraft, or increasing the size of the Aircraft Owners And Pilots Association, or merely the commercial and general aircraft industry itself; the EAA has realized a bigger picture: It's about the industrial skill base of the United States and its erosion due to the lack of technical and vocational education in public schools: the EAA is attempting to provoke young people's interest in technical and vocational education by making an end-run around the limited curriculum taught in conventional public education. 7

Members of the EAA have realized that public education has walked away from the old idea of preparing a student for a lifelong career, and are taking educational matters into their own hands. 8 Their target audience ages eight to seventeen is the potential pool of precursor talent from which airline pilots, mechanics, machinists, air traffic controllers, air-worthiness inspectors and more are drawn. 9 As the pool of skilled individuals shrinks due to age attrition, demand for talent rises, salaries rise, costs increase, and airline safety impacted due to a dearth of talent in these fields, unmentioning that domestic aircraft maintenance will move offshore with its high paying jobs and the need for equipment, sophisticated parts, specialized tool fabrication in a continuously evolving environment due to the need for designing and manufacturing fuel efficient, quiet, safe aircraft capable of operating within a more congested air-traffic environment. 10

This talent, including the non-commercial or General Aviation subset makes up the majority of licensed pilots in the United States, people who many times build their own experimental aircraft. These amateur-built experimental (kit) aircraft represent a test-bed for new technologies eventually introduced into the development and manufacture of the next generation of light general aviation production aircraft and once proved, become integrated into the commercial aircraft environment. 11 As with other specialist technologies like automobile racing, what starts out as Rat-Finked it'll never work experiments (disc brakes, carbon fiber bodies, direct-shift-gearboxes) end up eventually as widely disseminated consumer or industrial products; the same holds true with aircraft technologies. 12

Flying about the planet's airspace is safer than houses, (at least in the developed world) though spectacular stories of an aircraft's skin peeling back in-flight makes one look harder at the comparison between flying and taking the train. 13 You don't just cut up and throw a fleet of Boeing 737s in the dumpster or turn them into laptop frames and pie-pans when they accumulate a lot of flight hours or a couple of them crash unexpectedly; they get custom renovated and renewed front to back by skilled people, inspected by all manner of technically trained people and then towed to the jetway where you will step aboard and predict with an extremely high degree of certainty you will arrive, maybe jetlagged, at the destination printed on your boarding pass.

Though it makes a good story to fret about the fears of flying in older aircraft, air-worthiness inspectors repetitiously say that with conscientious maintenance, older jets can fly safely:

…For its (Delta Airlines) customers, meanwhile, older hasn’t meant later in terms of flight performance: The carrier ran 86.3% of its domestic flights on time through the first three quarters of this year, fourth among the top 15 U.S. airlines, and the largest to be so punctual, according to the most recent government figures.

…There is no consensus about how old is too old when it comes to a plane. The FAA and industry safety experts generally believe planes can fly for 30 or more years, as long as they are well-maintained and the carriers follow all the manufacturer and regulatory directives that require more frequent inspections and fixes as the planes get older. Age really doesn’t play much of a factor if the airplane has been maintained, said Kevin Hiatt, chief operating officer of the Flight Safety Foundation, adding that planes are generally retired for economic, not safety, reasons.

…John Enders, an aeronautical engineer and aviation safety consultant, allowed that airplanes have no practical end date. But older planes require an extremely careful inspection and maintenance system… 14

The proof exists at every airfield across the land where ancient personally or consortium-owned aircraft are maintained, the not-so-ancient, just old commercial variety carry you to your destination while sight-unseen the mechanical, electrical, hydraulic widgets do their duty as you sit captive to your digital devices or sleep the flight away. *

* In 1976 I joined a parachute club at Camp Pendleton, jumping out of old Cessna 182's, 206's and later, on Okinawa, from a Marine Corps C-117; it was one of the last of the old DC-3's still in military inventory, built in the forties to ferry jumpers behind German lines on D-Day.

And this work of maintenance and repair is performed by people with skills becoming rarer due to age attrition in the workforce and lack of young people prepared with skills to go into the aircraft maintenance business. ...ordering airlines to enhance and increase the frequency of inspections for older, heavily used Boeing 737-300s, 400s, and 500s after they reach a certain number of flights.... has always been standard operating procedure, but new dictates by the FAA, stories from handwringers with access to the Fourth Estate rarely talk about who's doing the inspection and renovation work, or dig into the plot lines of the people twisting the bolts and wires upon which our lives suspend, or reveal the money they make while doing so. 15

Make all the laws and procedures you like; it’s happytalk to comfort your fears if there aren’t enough educated and competent people in the hangars and flight lines and air traffic control rooms to do the work in a skilled and capable manner.16 A lack of technically expert people getting issued the work orders to service aircraft and sophisticated technical support equipment produces mistakes due to task overload, and it's not just profit-taking by large corporations eliminating jobs to pad the bottom line. If people with the right skills can't be found at any price, mistakes will be made while demand for services increase, obtaining for us accidents due to faults or inadequacies in skill or oversight in inspection. We have been on a roll of late where fatalities involving commercial aircraft have been the lowest on record, and I don’t know about you, but next time someone funds my attendance at an educator professional development gig cross-country, I’d rather be confident I can grab my duffle off the luggage carousel instead of having a FAA inspector picking bits of me from a crisped JP-5-stained coach seat with a tweezers and putting them in a baggie for later DNA analysis. Flying back to LAX in the narrow air-traffic corridor over Johnson Valley and the artillery impact areas of 29 Palms Marine Corps Base, I enjoy looking from the window seat to see the California desert come up at me. Gradually. 17

Recently, a hose clamp on a pneumatic tube in the overhead of the crew compartment of a Boeing 737 was installed backwards due to oversight or mis-reading the plane's maintenance documentation. The resultant chafing of wires on the clamp during more than 2000 flights caused a small fire, (while the plane was on the ground being serviced in Alaska) leading to an FAA investigation and possible assessment of a $25,000 fine for each flight taken by the aircraft with the mis-aligned clamp, amounting to a potential $53 million dollars for that one aircraft. An investigation by the airline found the same clamp problem on nine other jets. 18 Was it a mistake by one mechanic in charge of this aspect of service or renovation on those ten planes? Not enough oversight or supervision by another expert to verify the correct service had been done? The lack of time on the part of technicians/mechanics to adequately research the photos/drawings of the proper positioning of the hose clamp?

To the average wrench-turner, a hose clamp is small in scale and importance; there are scores on the vehicle you drive to work or school and their orientation rarely matters unless difficult to conveniently reach by the tool required to install/remove them. If one comes loose or chafes a few wires, the result becomes merely an immobile vehicle at the side of the road, steam exiting the hood or fluids of various sorts dripping. But a hose clamp in close proximity to vibrating electrical components on which hundreds of lives depend, at five hundred fifty miles an hour gives us a higher order need for meticulous t-crossing, i-dotting of both documentation and the practical application of one's depth of technical expertise. It's not nearly good enough to tighten the thing to spec, closing the panel, putting away the ladder. Turning the nut-driver or socket wrench to the proper torque setting must be combined with a systems approach to the placement of this component in the larger frame of the multiple systems of the aircraft. The interaction of this one part with thousands of others requiring the varied expertise of many other technicians in many other disciplines of avionics, mechanics, and more will make the aircraft flight-worthy and safe for your easily-damaged body.

RATs, APUs, and the Chilled Hudson

Representing the erosion of our technical base on a national scale is the trend of businesses that employ technically educated people to jump on their own hook and educate public school teachers in the delivery of math and science education from a practical, hands-on perspective.

It's one thing to understand Newton's laws of motion and regurgitate purely academic/theoretical knowledge of the three laws on a test or click the proper radio button next to the picture or drawing of the correct application of the information. It's a different world quantitatively and qualitatively to design and build an efficient working device (like a wind turbine, fuel-efficient automobile, or even a mobile toy) that will overcome the physical properties and effects of friction, mass, inertia, and the rest of Newton's concepts that have founded the domain of Classical Mechanics. There are so few young people exiting public secondary schools with heuristically-based math and science education that these technology companies have taken it on themselves to pick up the slack where once there were whole classrooms and programs in public education to educate young people in technical fields with the capacity to solve the practical problems presented by our technological culture. But there's a twist on the teaching/learning:

The Honeywell corporation produces products used in homes, automobiles, industry and aircraft, and you cannot fly in a commercial aircraft without your safety being affected by equipment designed and manufactured by this organization. The spectacular event of US Airways flight 1549 crash-landing in the cold Hudson River with no deaths and few injuries is in large part owed to a Honeywell-manufactured device that continued to operate and produce electricity and thereby hydraulic system pressure despite the loss of engine thrust resulting from multiple birds ingested into the plane's jet engines. The Ram Air Turbine (RAT in pilot jargon) is a mechanical fan-type device * that will power an aircraft's controls when the aircraft has lost engine thrust, and in this case was able to power the electrical and hydraulic systems enabling Captain Sullenberger and his people to make a superbly controlled crash into the river.

Landing jet aircraft is more like a highly organized and carefully controlled crash anyway, where aircraft and people end up on the runway in one piece; ask any pilot about dead stick flying** and they will tell stories convincing you that driving to your next Hawaii holiday is a safer option. Without Honeywell's auxiliary power unit in place and operating properly, despite Sullenberger and skilled crew, flight 1549 would have become a big smoking hole in the Bronx and a new cycle of Fear Of Flying would have ensued until FAA accident inspectors tested the shreds for explosives residue, dissected the engine bits to find the bits of geese that brought down the aircraft.

* More pilot jargon: APU, or Auxiliary Power Unit

** Dead Stick: Attempting to pilot an aircraft with limited or no control capacity due to multiple system failure. 19

Honeywell can't find enough technically-trained young people from our local school systems to populate their design and machine shops, test labs and innovation divisions, fabrication and production lines, and the twist alluded to earlier is their move to educate school teachers on how to teach math and science from a practical and experiential perspective, provoking an interest in mechanics, engineering, math and science in young students. 20

One program they developed in conjunction with NASA is called Space Academy for Educators: Visualize twenty to twenty-five teachers selected from nationwide schools parked in a room, some international teachers as well, rubbing shoulders, building chemical-powered rockets, operable mechanical toys, playing with small robots intending to go back to the classroom and teach engineering skills, hands-on science and math integrated into mechanical realia.*

Teaching from the textbook, from the digital app, from academic models has a certain utility. We do this reflexively and attempt leaps of instructional creativity to install some pedagogic intoxication and make the curriculum interesting. Taking the next step, doing practicum-based engineering with operable materials, getting fired up from the energy and conversations between one another, a few international teachers mixed in, and the possibilities of what can be done with this new style of teaching blows the lid off of the standardized, common molds we’ve been forced into. For the teacher, the hands-on aspect of the professional development promotes an endless link of possibilities for the use of these methods in the classroom to keep kids interested in learning, in staying in school. Multiply this individual teacher professional development by two or three hundred individual teachers per summer, a full ride scholarship including air fare, accommodation and meals for a week, all kinds of educator swag, lesson plans, stuff to take back and use in the classroom, access to online resources to follow-up and expand where the professional development left off. Not to mention the relationships made, the shared purpose with like-minded others at the top of their game, the continuing connective ability to share instructional strategies. A bunch of high tech organizations are in a bind if they’ll expend that kind of coin to fund a teacher educational holiday that may or may not eventually produce students with an interest in eventual work in hands-on engineering and the sciences.

Industries unrelated to aviation or aerospace also struggle to hire competent young people and so directly contribute to the teaching of teachers how to communicate these subjects where struggling learners incorporate 'hands-on' activities that help students work through the concepts and coach other teachers in these new techniques. ** 21

* Realia: For the non-educator, working, learning, teaching in the classroom with stuff that can be manipulated, fabricated, built, operated by hand that assists in the delivery and understanding of instruction.

** Using a term like New Techniques reveals much about the current thinking of educators and their knowledge of the history and practice of American public education. What some are labeling new is merely a return to the teaching of disciplines that have been thrown in the dumpster during our pilgrimage to the belief that only the academic should dominate the focus of public education.

Numerous technology companies are collaborating to bypass even the teachers in the teaching of subjects related to the engineering and scientific disciplines. Called The Engineers Week Foundation, they support and promote student exposure to a richer technology education and engineering experience than offered by the neighborhood public school. 22

Though the educationist intelligentsia have their shorts in a knot railing against the conflict of interest when business and industry contribute to the funding intake of the education pipeline, lecturing us on how education should be exclusively funded by the State, the opposite side of the funding issue gets little mention. Drink companies desiring to obtain vending contracts, curriculum and textbook publishers offering free materials for review, building contractors buying pencils and paper, all hoping to influence the direction of contract letting on the front end is not part of this trend. 23 It’s not even people like Bill and Melinda Gates, Eli Broad, The Walton Foundation, others with deep pockets putting down cash to fund school sites and school district initiatives making the news, getting a high degree of scrutiny from the insider stakeholders during righteous attempts to fund the push for honest-intent reforms that I’m reviewing either. 24 It’s the influencing of teacher training, one at a time, providing professional development, giving away assets for teacher’s direct use in the classroom at the teacher's discretion with no strings attached. It's the willingness of small businesses and large to release employees during work hours to volunteer in classrooms, compensate for travel miles, match charitable contributions to provoke student interest and curiosity at the chair and whiteboard level, breaking into the education stream from an oblique angle to the pipeline.

These high technology organizations need the final outcome of education, the human element product, not the ability to provide goods or services for profit-making on the front end, and are willing to cut profit off the bottom of their ledgers to fund it.

Girl Engineering Day

The fourth academic quarter of school is when shoulders slump, knuckles of teachers and students start dragging the ground, seinoritis sets in; a time frame I call the Dog Days of School. No one wants to be there, and some years it takes all the internal fortitude you can squeeze out of your quivering little body to complete the course with your professional composure intact; perfect time for a field trip.

At the beginning of a recent fourth quarter I was invited to participate in one of the International Women in Engineering day events sponsored by our local refinery, called Introduce A Girl To Engineering Day. They sent us three buses on a Wednesday morning to pick up all the eighth grade girls and carry them down the road for a little engineering show-n-tell at their facility. Not the traditional yellow school busses though-- the cross-country coaches with the plush seats, the window shades and WC in back, a microphone for the tour guide up front; the experience put another bolt in the bracket holding up the sign pointing to the lack of technical and vocational education in public schools.

The students were introduced to successful women telling stories of where they came from, what they do, how they earned success; enlightening experiences for young girls at an age where they decide what they want to know, are looking ahead to what they want from life. These professional women were showing and telling the right messages young girls need to hear and see: work hard, get your education, be in charge of your life, learn how to make good decisions, showing by way of example that their future potential in any domain is unlimited if they grasped their inherent fortitude and pressed it to service the larger goals of a strongly expressed successful life.

Being the only male teacher invited, I attempted to fade into the grey concrete block wall of the refinery gymnasium while the highly organized program ran its course, chatting up any of the facility's engineers who would stand still long enough. The organizer of the event, the refinery community relations director, chose the youngest engineers and tradespeople, men and women, to run the student seminars, conducting hands-on activities like building a motor out of wire, a battery, and a magnet; fomenting a chemical reaction experiment, trying on refinery safety gear, using chemical sensing equipment, building a mechanical catapult from what looked like random junk, and interacting with the students on a personal one-on-one level, giving advice, drawing out the girl's problem solving abilities to bear on elemental and esoteric engineering questions and practices. 25

Always on the lookout for a source of technical experience and stories to tell, I talked to one young man, a local graduate of our school district who wouldn't directly answer my direct, impolite question of how much money he made as a welding inspector. People who do this kind of work make anywhere from 90 to 200K was all I could twist out of him. I was impressed; this young person twenty-five-years my junior made way more money than me in a field requiring far less formal education. He began with an internship at the facility part time while in high school, later acquiring technical education to earn a couple of welding certificates, getting a few year’s experience meanwhile, and after a few more years with the organization was doing quite well. All without a university parchment behind his name.

One of the technical pieces of gear on display for the girls, an automated, remotely controlled 8-inch gate valve whose internal circuitry and wiring had the appearance of a cubed and frozen batch of colored spaghetti, full of magnetic relays and solenoids particularly fascinated me. The thing is used for determining and controlling quantities of liquid flow within refinery processes to obtain the final refined products, and the device is controlled by operators far from its location, sometimes deeply imbedded within the refinery complex.

Another engineer, when asked where one learned how to repair or replace parts in the automated valve made the statement that some things had to be learned on the job. Getting his university degree in chemical engineering was all about learning how to learn. He was grabbed up by the refinery directly from school, and as a newbie technician would sit in meetings that would make his head spin, embarrass him because of the ground-level terminology he was unfamiliar with, his dearth of hands-on tool use skills despite his engineering degree. He had to learn the realia-based hands-on skills while combining it with his theoretical knowledge base and wished he could have taken a shop-type vocational class that would have taught him the basics of working with tools and mechanical devices- he had to learn those tool-handling-equipment-manipulating skills later, enduring much frustration and delay in career advancement. 25A

***

So a deep-pocketed high technology corporation needing to employ technically educated people throws around its generosity to promote its agenda; another publicity stunt by an oil company to burnish public esteem when vehicle gas prices have put their reputation in the toilet for profit taking? When the Gulf Oil Spill, Middle-east dysfunction, pipeline camper controversy continue to provoke the headlines? Perhaps. Few in the pointy-headed educational chatting circles are willing to acknowledge that in order to have motion, any motion, from electrons flowing through a printed circuit board in their connectivity device or down a wire to toast the morning muffin, to the movement of aircraft, to ships at sea hauling the containers in which are secured the consumer goods they are willing to pay top dollar for, something will most likely have to be burned, from the carbon-based stuff out of the ground to the heavy elements inside a nuclear reactor * to more mundane stuff like products distilled from corn, grown on leafy, heavily fertilized acreage in the Midwest. Even passive solar electricity generation, windfarms, hydropower, battery manufacture leave a nasty carbon footprint, treading heavily on the ecosystem. **

* Yes, you’re right, radioactive elements do not burn, implying an oxidation/exhaust process. ** See chapter With Enough Shovels.

Residents of Blythe, Calif., near the border with Arizona, showed up at the recent groundbreaking of Solar Mellennium's massive solar plant there to protest its proximity to sacred Native American sites. Gleaming mirrors will blanket nearly 6,000 acres, helping to generate electricity for Southern California Edison... The growth is being propelled by federal incentives and state clean-energy mandates. In April, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law that requires California utilities to get 33% of the state's electricity from renewable sources by 2020. As of the first quarter of 2011, they're at 17.9%...

(wind) Turbines are multiplying at blistering speeds as wind developers, drawn by the area's powerful gusts, attempt to meet an insatiable demand for clean energy... Tehachapi activist Terry Warsaw said he's worried his community will soon be surrounded by turbines.

Alternative energy has lulled us into a sense of complacency, he said. The potential is here to take over every ridge and every mountain if the community isn't careful. 26

You in your short lifetime * cannot exist in your comfortable state of affairs without the use of products made from refined petrochemical materials used in everything from cosmetics to food, the making of paper, or the lubricants in a wind turbine generator providing Green electricity for the heat your slowly crisping breakfast muffin is soaking up. You can ditch the mirror and line-erasing cream and maybe grow your own food, grind the wheat and make your own bread. Maybe you’re allergic to muffins and seaweed better suits your insides. Hope the wind blows 24/7 though, the sun shines likewise. 27 When it does not something predictable and reliable will fill the energy gap, and for the foreseeable future it will be the gas/liquid/solid carbon stuff from underground or undersea even as we virtuously attempt to reduce our dependence on it.

* ...you are clueless about tomorrow. What is your life anyway? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. (Paraphrase of James 4:14-15)

Who will do this technological energy and infrastructure work? As we attempt the translation to greener energy sources, who will do the work of innovation and development, fabricating, installation, maintenance of the low-poo devices and equipment?

Despite environmental religious reprimands, condemnation of corporate wickedness from all vectors, the high technology we promote in the larger society on down to its integration within instructional delivery in the classroom depends on people with skills to build or make it, operate it competently and safely and service it for optimal operational utility, and organizations who produce and maintain the technology lack the people with skills to do this work, earning solid middle class wages. Thus events like Girl Engineering Day, Space Academy for Educators, Young Eagles, and their back-alley attempts to promote young people's interests in it, bypassing conventionally structured education that has forbidden individual freedom of choice in the type of education young people aspire for themselves. 28

***

But the all-day girl engineering gig with a tasty free lunch, a little afternoon adrenalin in small aircraft is a day's worth of activities when we once in public education had whole portions of the campus set aside to teach these domains; one day out of a hundred eighty might spike an interest. What next? Back to the grindstone that is public education, making fine powder with its limited experiential content and narrow academic outcome, while industry and business will pay more for technically-informed experiential skills than merely academic skills. The high wages they pay illustrate the reality that public education has for decades abandoned the preparation of young people for this work, while the need for the experiential skills increase.

The demand for pilots will be so great that the industry could ultimately face a shortage, sparking fierce competition among airlines across the globe vying for candidates qualified to fill their cockpits. "We're already seeing in some spots around the world a shortage of pilots... Where is our pipeline of new pilots going to come from, and how are we going to finance them?

The average starting salary for a (part time) pilot at a regional carrier is roughly $21,000 a year, while the most senior captain flying the largest plane at a major airline typically makes more than $186,000 a year, according to FltOps.com... the technological developments going on in aviation are now as... robust (as) that in some of the software fields. So part of it is reminding people of that and trying to attract them back to aviation. 29

Here's a math word problem: What's the average pay of a commercial pilot if part-time entry-levelers make twenty-one K and experts make one-hundred-eighty six? My pencil gives me about a hundred six as the average pay of a commercial pilot, the guy or gal your temporary life depends on next time you step off the jetway threshold and attempt to avoid the confiscatory baggage fees by squeezing your oversize carryon into the overhead bin. Not bad for some technical education, lots of OJT, but not necessarily a college degree. Air traffic controllers likewise. 30

Teacher Professional Development Gigs with Guns

I’ll presume you, like me, are more comfortable speaking to strangers about that which you know, and one of those things about which I’ve learned a great deal is the United States military. In 1975 the Marine Corps* and other service branches were having to operate with a percentage of druggies and malingerers held over from the imposed destruction of military morale and discipline via our suction by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations into the unpleasantness of Vietnam, under the disguise of pay(ing) any price, bear(ing) any burden.

In California, Camp Pendleton that year was awash with Vietnamese escapees fleeing the dictated reeducation curriculum in the new Common Core, having been encouraged to that high bar of educational achievement by the possibility of bullets to the backs of heads. Multiple families were living temporarily in tents or open squad-bay Quonset Huts,** their hand-washed laundry flapping in the ocean breeze just west of Pendleton’s Infantry Training School. On a parcel of land next to Basilone Road leading out to the San Onofre nuclear power plant and then off-base towards Nixon's San Clemente retirement home, these destitute people were fed, clothed, housed by The Suck for a few weeks or months until we could find a place for them in proper society. 31

* Corps pronounced like apple core

** Visualize a fleet of sixty galvanized, corrugated sheet-metal pipes, fifty-five feet long, thirty feet in diameter cut lengthwise, bolted to a concrete slab with a door on each end and no partitions inside. Some had windows and insulation.

One of my Pendleton roommates, John D. from Houston, kept a big metal box fan in his barracks wall-locker to exhaust the fumes from late-night surreptitious smokes, having signed on for a hitch in the Marines when offered by a judge a selection between reporting to the local U.S.M.C. recruiting office the next morning or the county jail. After almost four years in the Marines, he was a Terminal Private,* twice busted in rank for possessing controlled substances; it was my first exposure to the maxim: Dope gets you through times of no money, and money gets you through times of no dope. During the era there was no getting rid of this variety of actor and we suffered through until Jimmy's 444 day Hostage Untidiness, a presidential election, and the turn-around in morale and fortitude exhibited by the upper echelon of the political establishment. 32

A surprising number of educators continue to believe military service is a refuge for young men who would otherwise be sent to jail. It was once, but those poor worms have been turned out and a fair number of teachers, counselors, administrators are again ignorant of the realities extant outside the insular education biome. …Military service is not an alternative to incarceration or paying a debt to society, and for the Marines at least, high school graduates make up more than 99% of new recruits.