Directly altered from the text of CS Lewis' 

And now for the claim, which sounds arrogant but, I hope, is not really so: I have said and continue with the topic that the vast change which separates the present condition of public technical and vocational education from previous models has been gradual-- a bonfire on which we have thrown whole sections of the campus, bit by bit, and is now almost burned completely cold. Yet. See how educators are mesmerized by the 3D Printers, the CAD/CAM systems, the Hours Of Code, the invitation of real-wold practitioners to the classroom who lend validity to skills supporting the Common textbook and Common knowledge base.

Wide as the chasm of perception is between practically applied and purely academic skills, those who are native to different sides of the divide can still meet, and as you read this, are in a way meeting. This used to be quite normal at times of great change. That young people exit the public secondary institution and the Academy as well without kills commanding a basic wage, we no longer take up as a conversation of note in the teacher's staff lounge. And here comes the rub. I myself belong far more to the use of heuristic methods by means of the practical application of the maths and sciences and sociological practices than the educator who looks to the test for validation of pedagogical competence. These are skills, now lost, that are again needed to mend the Achievement and Poverty Gaps.

I am going to claim that this, which in one way is a disqualification for my task, is yet in another a qualification. The disqualification is obvious. You don’t want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modern anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling. One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modern scholarship had been on the wrong track for years.

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I practice skills and sets of skills as a native would of skills that you must merely observe as foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant? Who can be proud of practising fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father's house? It is my settled conviction that in order to get back technical and vocational studies at the secondary schools you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in the race to up the scores, preparing to preen before the Distinguished School flag.

And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic and communicator, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other practitioners of the vocations during the regular school day whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.

In debt to, and shamelessly modified from Lewis's Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, 1954:

http://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150423/html.php#c1

Refocusing the Conversations

Thank you all for bringing your time and excellent ideas to bear on difficult issues. There is no more valuable thing than time, and we here who struggle with the beast value your time and ideas.

Givens:

1) The translation to some form of district model to California would be a benefit, as shown by Michael C. et. al. * I believe most on the Left Coast would agree to believe the hard part is making the disjointed pieces fall into place, thus the arguments bordering on acrimony, which I personally despise, which serve us in no way. Thanks to all who have contributed constructively to the conversation.

* https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CZUGfLFV3NI8q8_t1uo8w-OKw3J4ZHLj1O96uuh4V0w/edit

2) The roll out of the District Model must be a success the first time out, the first year it gets implemented. Otherwise the whole thing melts into a cold pile of slag, deepening the malaise of school site admin who were never believers in the first place, and others at the school site (teachers) who tire of money problems and drama when the regular school day overflows with it. 1

3) In urban/suburban areas so large and contiguous, an acknowledgement that FRC programs are one of many excellent options for students, parents, school administrators, donors to support. This cascades into making it difficult to ask service-minded people to put in more time on another service, or introduce new people to the program when there are so many outstanding programs and projects on which to spend their limited time. *

* Some of dozens: skillsusa (skillsusa.org/competitions), VEX (robotevents.com/map), FTC, F1inSchools (f1inschools.com)

4) Placing a large emphasis on supporting those I call (for lack of better imagery, and in no way disrespectful!) the Janitor Closet, the Cafeteria Table teams. Many of us in FRC started there and know the multidisciplinary difficulties to overcome, wanting to reduce them for struggling teams.

5) Geography, placement of teams, placement of venues, travel of teams to venues is difficult to clearly and concisely express by those on the inside of the SoCal dynamic to those on the outside unless those on the outside have had lengthy, working experience on the inside. This is not a statement of exclusionary bias, but one of acknowledging the difficulties to be overcome are more complex than can be apprehended from a cursory inspection. It goes without having to say that those of us on the inside of this thing are highly devoted to the best possible outcome for our students, which appears to be the District model.

6) The strategic view: It's not about robots. It's about education. It's about education in the technical and vocational, leading to personal, individual success and replenishing the larger skill base of the USA. 1 The game on the playing field is an extension of a form of education almost entirely lost in urban/suburban schools, thus the popularity and support for FRC by the public, and the bundles of cash pressed upon us and our students by businesses large and small. 2 The result: more teams and the need to better serve them by making more opportunity to run the robots at the games.

Local Barriers to Overcome:

Location:

What appears from satellite view a measurement of forty-five miles up or down a major thoroughfare can in reality be a two-hour commute both ways, with no place to park our trash when we get there. This is street-level reality. The narrow view from something like MapQuest to give travel routes/times is a superficial method to adequately measure the actual conditions on the roads, in the communities where teams actually reside, influencing where we propose to place events. To address the actualities requires careful selection of venue and unhesitating support by school site/school district admin.

* The simplicity of the statement becomes difficult to implement due to the reality of school site interest and support by the admin chain of command: On average, school site admin moves or gets moved every three years, with approximately twenty-five percent giving up on the profession. "This "churn" is particularly acute in high-poverty districts. Students in high-poverty (schools) are unlikely to have the same principal throughout their enrollment at a school, according to Cone's report." 3 This in turn means an education or reeducation of school site staff who like it that the geeky robot kids are off the streets, but don't grasp the strategic view of skill-building with wrenches, drill presses, and tools that appear to have been salvaged from the era of steam locomotion. This lack of foresight translates into lame support for our needs in site access and facilities.

* The newbie site admin may or may not be supportive, or actively hostile. "Hostile" in my view could mean lease fees inordinate to a community-based volunteer-served event, inordinate priority granted to other groups that seem to better serve school prestige (in our view there is no better way to up a school's prestige than having a FRC team, but that's not common admin thinking. On their side, they must juggle impossible tasks and competing interests, thus the turnover in admin who get burnt out or tossed out).

* Many suburban schools host non-school events at their site for the purposes of adding to the downtown office fiscal totals. One of our local schools, on weekends, hosts AYSO, community organization events, a foreign language school with hundreds of kids, teachers, and parents, besides school-based sports team events. The fees collected by the school district, throughout the district school system, are significant. Paying our way with market-rate lease fees is a doable thing, but puts out another community organization with long-standing roots, with the resulting animosity towards our programs.

* Urbana/Suburbia collect centers of technological innovation, driven by people with a great deal of education who put time into their kids, grooming them for future success. For their children they want the same achievement, if not identical education, despising the local schools, turning to extracurricular occupations for their kids. This in turn promotes kinds of extracurricular opportunities lacking in other parts of the country that are not attractors of this kind of education. 3A The result is competition for volunteers, competition for venues, competition for cash that could fund our own agenda. Attempting to reduce the "admission price" for entry into FRC by means of the District Model is a meritorious effort, but cannot mitigate the other forces competing in the dense urban/suburban areas for volunteers and venues. The dynamic must be recognized for what it is, and accounted for in our machinations. 3B

* The result of the above becomes overbooked facilities, parking difficulties, etc. The shuttle idea is meritorious, though bringing on a list of barriers to overcome that must be counted in cash and volunteer hours:

--Volunteer effort to creatively solve this problem, locating the off-site venue and dealing with insurance issues.

--Cost of shuttles, signage.

--Volunteers to staff the off-site venue and provide directivity and clean-up.

--Pre load-in directivity and instructions to teams and participants, bringing in thousands of pounds of gear.

--Web footprint to communicate, maps, etc.

None of these are deal-breakers; just allocation of already stretched resources. 4

* The overbooked time of volunteers; this is a cultural, behavioral affair, not an engineering problem with an engineered solution. Changeover and movement of people in the urban/suburban setting creates lack of stability despite our massive efforts to have key roles "shadowed" and having to beat the bushes for a larger pool of motivated volunteers. As a micro culture within FRC, event hosts want the best of officials, refs, judges FTA's, VC's, safety glasses hander-outers, etc.

* The venues themselves: Where weather is not so severe, facilities reflect it. In areas where schools support several large spaces like field houses and ancillary indoor areas to protect athletic classes and events from the weather, we here have architects who assume that athletic activities can be played outdoors school-year-wide with little difficulty. Ergo a single gym, smaller venues, fewer large meeting spaces we could use for pits, etc. This is not a deal-breaker, merely a check-mark beside venues in the various Circles we draw on GoogleEarth.

Back to location:

The views from Orcutt or Tehachapi or Madera are distinctively different than those from Redondo Beach or La Canada or Manual Arts High School. 5 The hurdles to overcome cannot be solved via the engineered approach. What seem to be engineering problems requiring engineered solutions are really behavioral problems requiring relationship solutions, many of which are outside our control; thus the solution continues to be the big three-four day regional spectacle, enduring the cost and limited access and limited play times, etc.

I do not wish here to step on more toes, but the difficulties cannot be solved via the engineering approach of counting the number of high schools/community colleges in the communities or region. The drawing of circles, collating with teams is a useful method to identify sites, then the solutions will have to be multidisciplinarian and relational, based on making relationships with administrators both at the site and the school district, teaching/convincing them of the efficacy of our programs. But these are things we are queens and kings of, despite their multivariable nature.

Proposals:

* Inclusivity: Those with the capacity to host, promote, and run FRC events need to talk to one another. We cannot raid each other's events for the sake of status or perceived primacy of programs or school/school district rivalry. It kills trust. The rumor mill runs wild with expectation, fear, and resignation, and the Players must be open and above board in their planning and fund-raising processes. I appreciate grooming donors. I've done some, don't like it personally, but appreciate that some of the background negotiation must be off the record. The events and placement of events must be in the FRC public sphere where good minds and altruistic motives can have their say.

* Start small, prove it, expand based on success. This is not like going to space or the moon where we killed people meanwhile. We built our capacity for spaceflight incrementally, with success propelling the next steps, and then the objective, a combined engineering/human relationship challenge. Maybe Northern Cal would be willing to be an incubator for the District model, proving it, gaining experience meanwhile to overcome our SoCal structural difficulties.

* It's incumbent on us to go to places where the District model is successful, poll, observe, interview, collect the data, shadow principal players to better grasp the macro/micro views and how to place ourselves within the mechanism. And how financing is acquired and parceled out.

* A simple, workable way must be found for teams outside the west coast Continental US to have choice of venue despite whatever District rules that others must adhere to. It's difficult enough to travel the distance to get here, deal with the language and cultural barriers, and exceptional accommodation must be provided.

Thank you all for your time, your excellent ideas, and willingness to collaborate in a venture so valuable for students.

Joe Petito

FRC 1197

1 http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-real-jobs-tragedy-in-the-us-we-ve-lost-the-skills

http://www.cornellhrreview.org/a-multilateral-approach-to-bridging-the-global-skills-gap/

http://mikerowe.com/2016/02/stopignoringskillsgap/

2 https://usfirst.submittable.com/submit/62717/2017-first-robotics-competition-rookie-grant-application

http://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/first-robotics-2016-champs.html

https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/boeing-bridges-stem-gap-first-partnership

http://www.firstinspires.org/scholarships

3 http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/11/the_high_rate_of_principal.html Accessed 6/29/16

http://www.ewa.org/blog-educated-reporter/impact-principal-turnover

3A A no-fault-item. This is not some holier-than-thou prescription--it's not meant to describe portions of the nation as better or worse educationally/socially; whatever. It's the hard reality of teaching and learning in schools, sited in their locales.

3B This weekend (11/5/16) I was herding my FLL kids and parents around an event sited at a Chartered school in Westchester, CA. A FRC team rolled in to do a presentation, and my single-minded thinking assumed they were there to promote FRC to the FLL crowd. Unbeknownst to me was another group in the library that the FRC team was slated to do their presentation to. Finally figuring it out and getting the FRC kids and their gear to the library, I chatted with the organizers of the library event, finding they too were volunteers intent on pushing/pulling inner-city kids into successful professional careers. Commendable by several multiplication factors. This anecdote though exposes the "rivalry" (a bad word, not meant in a competitive sense…) for sites and volunteers and participants. Out on the playing field meanwhile were soccer games and clinics with maybe two hundred kids and parents, operated by a Professional British Football Bloke, renting the facility through official channels, and paying the fees. There was no parking anywhere, and the upscale neighborhood was jammed with vehicles. The local shopping center has warned the school repeatedly not to permit event parking in their lot.

4 Those who are quick to propose parking be held off-site are incognizant of an urban/suburban truism: There is no off-site parking without paying for it * (and getting a million's worth of insurance to cover liability). In areas of the country where open space between towns and cities means finding a vacant lot somewhere, there are no vacant lots to be had. The BigBox Marts with their seemingly vast parking areas will not accede to having customer convenience quashed by our traffic in rental trailers and vans and busses and pop-up tailgate lunches.

5  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/us/los-angeles-drivers-on-the-405-ask-was-1-6-billion-worth-it.html

* Which of us will park a quarter mile from the venue, haul our gear, chaperone our students through the neighborhood and pay confiscatory fees for the privilege? http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-rams-parking-20160918-snap-story.html

STEM/Maker Education Funding

Richardson Middle School

Administered by Joe Petito since 1999

I've been asked by PTSA to provide hard numbers regarding the financial needs of the programs I administer at Richardson Middle School. As much as I teach classes like other teachers, the nature of what I teach must be regarded as types of materials and equipment-intensive programs with a multidisciplinary project-based approach to skill-building. 1

Annually:

Regular day STEM/Maker funding via donations: Approximately $2500.00

Regular day Ceramics for 6th grade donations: Approximately $1500.00

After school Robotics Club donations: Approximately $3950.00*

* The above numbers reflect the school year 2015-16 with the year's particular schedule of classes. A different schedule of classes, a different mix of donations will obviously create variables.

Notes:

--All amounts vary from year to year

--Amounts do not reflect actual costs of operating the STEM, Ceramics, Art, and Robotics programs: Some years I get more donations than others which carry over to the next year, some years I've received grants of cash or in-kind from various individuals and entities; other times I've collected lumber or Legos or popsicle sticks or other materials from community sources for use in the shop that no dollar amount can be attached to.

For instance: a parent recently donated a batch of hardwood flooring-- an overbuy and scraps from a construction job. The value of the material exceeded a thousand dollars, but was merely a gift by an interested party who believes in what I'm doing for his kid and wants to support it. I'm unable to quantify these oddly timed donations with specificity, but they add a great deal to the bottom line that the above figures do not reflect. I cannot estimate how much defunct furniture I've salvaged and repurposed for STEM/Maker program projects.

(Photo: Portion of parent-donated materials)



(Photo: donated lumber by Torrance-based hardware company)

--Other times I'll get tools & equipment donated to me personally via outside school/school district sources and individuals, sell the gear on Craigslist or at the local Narbonne High School swap meet and donate the funding and my personal time to repair equipment, or purchase computer equipment like hard drives. All my computer gear and printers (I've a network of fifteen computers and three printers) have been donated by various government entities, and most arrive sans hard drives or needing toner cartridges or cleaning/refurbishing (see this link: https://computersforlearning.gov/ ). I use the outside funding to get the equipment operational, rather than ask for school site or PTSA funds. School district service/repair personnel will not work on or repair non-school district property, and I acquire, service, and repair it on my own time.

-- A component of the regular day classes are occasions where students get to learn repair practices as a component of STEM education-- for instance; we do a lot of chair repair. The chairs used throughout the school cost us about twenty five bucks each, but can be repaired with a couple of nuts and bolts and washers costing about twenty cents. It's been some time since we've bought chairs because my students have been repairing them, putting them back into service. Other examples regarding PE equipment, rolling carts, musical instruments, things like pencil sharpeners etc. can be made.

(Weld repair on ball cart used for PE equipment. Saved $375.00)

Needs:

--Replacement of computers. Our newest computer is four years old, others go back ten years or more. As we move to controlling equipment like 3D printers, CNC machines, and do Computer Assisted Design work, we must have the hardware and software to do so. Cloud-based apps, connectivity devices like iPads/ChromeBooks will not serve.

--Dependable funding; about $1000.00 per year to repair and upgrade equipment. TUSD once funded all the STEM classrooms to this amount, but has cut back. The last several years the PTSA has made up for that with a grant, but this has been cut as well.

--Access to funding: Every period, every day is essentially a series of lab activities. When the current layout and design of TUSD middle school shop classrooms was instituted, they were called The Tech Lab. The use of expendable day-to-day materials cannot be accurately predicted, and the ability to purchase on the way to the classroom and then be reimbursed is key. Being forced to use the cumbersome TUSD funding system makes for lack of student instruction. 2

I'm reluctant to cede monopoly of my programs' finances to an entity whose leadership changes from year to year and the flavor of the moment decides purchasing, based on the preferences of those making the decisions. With rare exception, those here today will not be here in three years. The result is a zig-zag of commitment to projects and themes championed by current trends and enthusiasms. See the recent push for things like iPads and ChromeBooks, massive investments having marginal effect on the real learning taking place in the classroom, but following social trends and troughs.  Once control of this area of finances has been given over to an entity with larger goals that compete with funding, the less the student in the chair will be served.

Having little to no control over funding sources, having to ask permission via complex administrative processes that tread heavily and absorb great deals of time in order to access the funding that has kept my programs stable for a decade and a half will reduce learning to the common themes that have taken over current educational practice. 3

In years of surplus, I've been able to upgrade equipment or do repairs to gear the school district will BER. 4 An additional concern is when funding surpluses happen with more in-kind or cash, I'll be "encouraged" to use or spend them down on everyday classroom operations rather than on what some consider "capital" improvements, or asking from the PTSA the amounts originally set aside for the shop/arts programs.

As much as the school or school district should foot the bill for the expansion of technological equipment and physical equipment repairs/upgrades, there is no will to do so. 5 The last time a piece of equipment was replaced due to the BER tag was in 2002

Please forgive a possibly elitist tone; it is not meant to be so: It is beyond concerning to me that others without my experience, in education, the trades, in business, in non-profit organizations will dictate the finances outside the systems I've built that fund STEM education as good or better than any other program in the middle school STEM education network. Ask anyone in the TUSD system, from school board members to teachers and administrators at other schools to the parent of the recent high school grad the efficacy of my programs. One of several things keeping me in this business is to hear from parents of former students how they are doing at MIT, CalTech, and Harvey Mudd, among others.

One of the reasons the shop classes, vocational education, many of the arts and business topics have been eliminated from public education is because funding and materials and equipment cannot be accurately tracked the way you can upload the math test results to the cloud and review them on your digital device while driving to work in the morning. It is though this messy dynamic that makes for excellent achievement for students disenfranchised by the existing establishment that's pushed us into one type of education for all. 6

I'm available any time to add nuance to the above attempt at describing finances.

Respectfully Submitted,

Joe Petito MA. Ed.

STEM Education

Richardson Middle School

Torrance Unified School District

-Mentor FRC team 1197 TorBots: torbots.com

Board of Directors, Los Angeles Robotics: larobotics.org

Veteran, United States Marines

Author of Ditching Shop Class; How Educators Expand the Achievement Gap

Classroom website: STEM Education, Richardson Middle School

1 The latest nomenclature taking the place of programs that once existed is Project Based Learning (PBL), a recognition that students learn best when offered materials to work with and create with, connecting the academic/intellectual with the real world.

2 The Torrance Ed. Foundation gave me some specifically allocated funding to support my after-school robot program. I'm stuck though in a situation where the TUSD cut-off date to expend funds was three weeks ago, but the larger robot competition organization we are a part of did not open registration for teams and permit purchasing until last week. I will not be able to access the funding until September, but need it now to be ready and practiced with the robot equipment before school starts.

3 A current student as of this date applied for and won a grant to fund STEM education for my classroom to the amount of $1000.00. It was awarded a year ago but got lost in the transition of administration, a no-fault item. My portion is now $750.00, but again inaccessible for classroom purposes because of TUSD disbursement rules.

4 Beyond Economic Repair status, usually meaning too many work-hours put in repairing the equipment contrasted with some value placed upon it, or someone doesn't want to do the research to find the exact part to provide for the repair, and take the time to make it happen. Surprisingly, there are more repair parts available currently for old equipment than even five or ten years ago, what with the connectivity element).

5 This is another, mostly no-fault item at the school site. Budgets being what they are, the lack of interest to fund STEM-type vocational education being what it is means technological and equipment repairs and upgrades must come from grants or outside sources. There is another state funding source called the Perkens Grant, but it's been delegated specifically to high schools. My last Perkins funding came in over ten years ago. See the chapter The Shop teacher in Ditching Shop Class.

6 Duncan, Arne, The STEM gap, LA Times, 8/18/15, p. A13

Shifting the Paradigm

Great education is a difficult task- great educators are divergent, efficacious programs are too, in an organization that would stifle both.

We will accept divergence marginally, only as we recognize it relating to what we know, in an era of specialization where what we know as educators is an ever narrowing realm of subjects. We would teach for instance the movement of air in a closed space as it relates to heating and cooling, condensation, pressure, etc., topics of physics within the ecosphere of standardized school. We won't however teach air conditioning and heating installation and repair principles because they are too foreign to our sensibilities relating to what modern education should look like. And we have dismantled the facilities at the school site, disposed of the people that once taught these domains. That the air conditioning/heating mechanic is making thirty bucks an hour starting wage and can parlay it ever higher with OJT we don't quite comprehend- they are not university graduates after all-how can they be that successful without the academic program in their resume? How is it that the elevator repair tradesperson or the auto mechanic with a couple of junior college classes in the resume makes more than the credentialed teacher with fifteen years in the profession? The recent university graduate on the other hand must work the cash register at some retail food conglomerate where the device does the thinking for them; rote-based work becoming ever more automated by the app and the robot, and will become ever more so as we translate to the Living Wage era. Their education is commonplace in an era of more graduates with like credentials, struggling under a load of college debt at an early age, stifling a kid's desire to become independent.

As educators, we've mostly become theoreticians promoting the conceptual, not practitioners promoting practical application. It better fits our perception of what skills we think are needed in the workplace (Bloom et. al.). We have peeled off the practical application to teach the underlying, foundational concepts, the academic skills needed to understand the new academic environment, meanwhile promoting more purely academic achievement. 1 Where once we made students connect the academic within a practicum environment, students now exit the public institution with merely theoretical and academic skills with an inability to apply the academic to the real world where both must coexist in a multidisciplinary workplace. We make kids do a singular type of learning without the connectivity to the far broader environment they will inhabit once we and they have parted ways.

But once one gets labeled Smart in a zone of operation or profession, we tend to stick with it to continue owning the label, defining our expertise into narrower channels. We shut off divergence and risk, avoiding failure from attempting to operate in a sphere where we are ignorant. The risks inherent in divergence which may lead to failure get sidelined into conventional thinking and action: the cliche System Capture. The progressive educator with a different view supporting differing action in the classroom gets bounced out on her/his ear and a conventional body made to take her/his place. Who was it that said: "It's more acceptable to fail in conventional ways than succeed in unconventional?"

But promoting divergent styles of education make one's voice illegitimate in the current conversations: we have made the college track the only track there is, and any diversion from the current goals and benchmarks brands one as being off the reservation of approved curriculum. That the divergent view is actually useful in the workplace outside of the academic track is a conversation the educationist intelligentsia doesn't want to have, we avoid having; leave that to the workplace, the for-profit trade school, the junior college.

As the numbers of the underserved mount, as the achievement gap persists, we would all be better served by embracing the divergent and put this form of education back into the public secondary school. We must shift the paradigm of College For All to a divergent, diversified model, refocusing on the technical and vocational for those students and parents who want it.

1 http://www.epi.org/publication/the-need-to-address-noncognitive-skills-in-the-education-policy-agenda/

Public K-12 school was once a place where we taught and prepared young people for the world of work in the economy either directly out of high school, or after a continuing education program at the academy. It has become a singular place where we train young people to be educated and be receptive to more education. The difference is now forty years in the making, but the change has widened the income gap and left our expectations of educational success for a wider variety of students unfulfilled.

Young people once exited the public school environment with skills to both enter the university or go straight to the job on the Monday after high school commencement. This model though has been discontinued due to the reality and continuing perception that it kept down kids of color and the low socioeconomic. 1 With the encouragement of succeeding generations of educators, students (and their parents) now are made to want four more years of schooling, pushed to it by our promise that the extensive education will make them more employable than those owning lesser educational stature. That the model no longer works as it once did dismays us, provoking worry for those who would prevent more from falling into The Achievement Gap and eventually The Poverty Gap. 1A

Young people who do not find in themselves an organic interest or ability to endure four or five or six more years of additional schooling have no skills to enter the economy and make their own way, meanwhile sucking on governmental paternalism or familial largesse. 2 How many late-twenty-somethings in your circle of acquaintance are having difficulty moving off mom's couch and into their own ability to provide for their own livelihood?

The Net Negative:

There's a perception disconnect among the educationist intelligentsia: they require us (teachers) to follow their prescriptions for curriculum delivery, claiming adherence to the plan will make students college/career-ready, the students take the tests producing the data proving highly qualified metrics, and we turn them out to the real world expecting them to be a smashing success in whatever field they enter. The perception disintegrates when they prove to be a labor drain on whatever organization they fall into, siphoning off productivity due to a lack of basic skills: a net negative.

The result: business moves to trial/temporary models for evaluating new hires, hiring only part-timers until they prove themselves, or making more become "contractors," disposable at any time, providing yet another reason for the politically progressive to vilify business for not training them. 3 As we (educators) promote the sharing/gig economy, more students are made to fit this model, but without skills to progress to the expert status that will command a decent livelihood, or at least owning minimal qualifications needed by employers who can then up their skills into the next salary bracket. Then more jobs move offshore from lack of skill here in this land, or the skills are so rare they demand compensation that the wider consumerist economy finds mystifying. 4

Our expectation as educators is that we've given them enough skills to access and thrive in the real world of work. Once arrived though, we find they can't comprehend, much less learn the skills needed in the environment- a net negative and productivity drain on organizations large and small. Because we as educators are made to be highly qualified in the domains we teach within the classroom walls, we have little experience with the skills needed and used outside the classroom, and so produce students with skills like ours, skills not needed in the real economy where real work is performed and real accomplishment rewarded.

The kids appear so smart whey you're having a conversation that you take a sidestep into assuming this acuity translates into skills with other domains that for you appear so simple. Really--how hard can it be to put hinges on a big, hot-off-the-press plastic box moving down the assembly line? But the kid who needs a job, any job, who can't competently manage a small hammer, or understand the real-world application of something like Newton's laws of motion related to an effect with a pair of pliers without damaging or destroying the product will fall out of the well-paying organizations needing this minimal level of expertise. Let us not get into describing the entry-level skills needed to service vehicles, electric or carbon-powered, repairing twenty-ton air conditioners, elevators, the like, and the remuneration acquired, meanwhile bypassing the university degree and the debt load acquired while so doing. At the workplace, the kid who has no ground-level experience with the use of something like hammers or pliers and screwdrivers gets shuffled off to a minimal-wage area of the facility, or bounced back to the street. 5

I've got no problem with Educating For The Future. Not even "for jobs that don't even exist today." But when young people don't even have basic skills that will gain them entry into the present job market, we've done them a disservice with our high rhetoric and low return on the time and treasure invested in the high academic domains we presume will make students work-worthy. On first glance it's brilliant: we teach students to direct themselves in their own actions, producing products of their own invention. It's in keeping with our desire to produce the autodidactic presence that can anticipate the next action, the next trend, and jump on it for the ride to the future.

Then there's the whole messy social manipulation thing: creating an educated mind with the ability to make decisions for the progressivist social structure outcomes will produce more people with socially-progressive votes, more liberal thinking and action in the relational circles of our lives. This topic on its own is another reason for the dismemberment of vocational programs in the public school biosphere. The working-class Blue-Collar slobs could never be depended on to make decisions best in keeping with our liberal notions, so the more we can educate out the lesser varieties of conservative thought, the kinds of education that retain what many call "low order" cognitive skills, the better.

Who are we to dictate our views the only views, that others of differing skills and dispositions can step aside, defer to our manipulation of the social structure of the nation? These purely academic skills, the social dimension outcomes we want though do not serve all students--not all have the willingness or capacity or tenacity to acquire them. Many more resist the liberal worldview promoted by the small percentage of vocal activists of varying stripes that would silence dissent with a label like MicroAgression. The academic and social-outcome skills hold no candle to the need for skills that prevent bridges from disintegrating into rivers, aluminum skin of airliners peeling back while in flight, the skills needed to innovate/design/build/install/repair/replace parts on wind turbines and hydrogen-powered vehicles. Or increasing the number of air traffic controllers, retiring at increasing rates. 6 The high percentages of kids, quite bright, who need other kinds of education are made to go on the breadline for subsistence, or accept undemanding employment, made so by our lack of understanding and experience with the real world of work outside the confines of the school fence, our unwillingness to actually promote political and cultural diversity of thought.

Our progressivist insistence that all earn "a living wage" does not take into account how we have left so many students without actual, compensation-worthy skills, meanwhile reorienting the education organization away from teaching these skills. By modifying the educational establishment course structure to accommodate the technical and vocational, we would be able to educate a larger percentage of young people for work in the economy where real things are made, real deeds are accomplished, and the Middle Class aspirations we have for them will be acquired.

Notes:

1 See the chapter Set Up For Failure, in Ditching Shop Class; How Educators Feed the Achievement Gap, by Joe Petito, Smashwords.com: smashwords.com/books/view/448735

1A http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholaswyman/2015/09/01/why-we-desperately-need-to-bring-back-vocational-training-in-schools/ Accessed 10/21/15

2 See the massed research on the lengthening time it takes to obtain the traditional four-year BA/BS degree.

3 Holding to the model or assumption that business should have the task of "training their own workers" misses the nature of how it's far more difficult to learn basic mechanical aptitude skills later in life when the brain has culled the neural pathways into excelling in some skills over others.

4 Hired a plumber, electrician, air conditioning mechanic, building contractor, auto-repair person lately? Satisfied with the cost-to-outcome effect?

5 A sideshow: In education, we give some hands-on realia training (student teaching), yet still half bounce themselves out of the profession, recognizing their persona or goals or sense of honor do not fit the constrictions, the locked-down creativity of the school environment compared to the compensation earned for your trouble. And some hang on, who should have left the profession twenty years previously, another appalling Net Negative.

6 Shortage seen of air traffic controllers, AP, Los Angeles Times p. C4, 10/14/15 One need not have a university degree to be an air traffic controller: http://faa.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/430/ Accessed 10/18/15

It could be the worst or best news of summer vacation: "I regret to say that I have taken a position at (fill in the blank), and will not be back in September. Thank you all and good luck." The wheels of instructional delivery grind faster despite the summer break, and now we must pick a principal.

In many places the choice gets made by the upper level management and you, the teacher, the clerk, the custodian will make do with the outraged feelings inspired by what seem like arbitrary dictates. The teacher's union has in other places negotiated a playing field where teachers must be included on the board for hiring, and these districts include school site staff on the hiring selection panel, usually a better deal for all concerned. What some call Outsiders* are involved; the head of HR of course, but also community members like the PTSA and odd parent volunteers. But decisions by such do not guarantee acceptance of the recommendation to the upper division leadership, to the school board, will be followed. Occasionally the hiring board is a pro-forma deal where the candidate has already been selected in a back-room meeting, and despite a different recommendation by the review panel, the insider choice progresses to the principal's office. **

Basically smart people get chosen for the top school slot- they will outsmart us most of the time; the staff as a whole will outclever them most of the time. The Darwinian nature of administrator selection guarantees a highly educated, mostly bright individual will make it to the hiring board; the board must select and filter to the best of their ability, based on experience to get the best fit for their school community.

Before they ever got to the review board, they had an interview or two with the district curriculum stakeholders to verify they're fit for the district's goals for stuff like Common Core, STEM, Special Ed., GATE, the like. Meeting before the candidate interviews, the host of the meeting, the head of HR or his/her delegate, issues a set of paperwork including a raft of stock questions for the examinee. These are all inside-the-box questions, for which one usually gets inside the box answers. Anyone who's reached this point in their career has heard all the questions, and rehearsed them in preceding weeks. As it's such an emotional moment for some, there's a sense of fairness in the stock queries. But occasionally the mundane will elicit a thought or two unguarded, revealing the true nature of the candidate. A simple question like "why do you want to be a principal" produces answers like "it would be my dream job, to "I've done everything else in this district and this is checking the box on my career as an educator." One, the compassionate, skilled leader, could have blurted out an innermost, guarded thought; the other a soundbite meant to spoof the examiners. Who to select? Candidates with a relaxed sense of confidence show through. They know the stakes, but feel confident enough with their own competence or lack of that they will speak freely.

The brittleness of people under stress can be palpable; People who must naturally screw up their courage when meeting in high-stakes situations have a just-repressed emotional turmoil under a thin surface of professionalism, and the body language, the stilted affect under the veneer of composure translates through to people who have been in the business awhile, can smell the genuine and the bluster.

Administrators come and go, and are replaced by others who most usually want to up their pay scale, many having their eyes on the prize: Superintendent, or Director of Instruction, or high school principal. A few say they "are in it for the long haul," "I'm not going anywhere," but usually leave after three years, an average with our little school. None of the candidates are willing to say "I'd like to work at your school for three or four years and then move up to district management or become a high school principal." We can work with that. You say that, teachers have a known value to work with, have a level of honesty and trust between us, and can advise and coach you to your goals.

The average teacher on the surface is not very impressive; put thirty or fifty in a room and the experience quotient will make you great if you pay attention. You come to us with some other story, we can smell it from across the hallway. If every candidate smells like that, we're reduced to attempting to sort the lesser evils- the individual who we believe will do the least damage to our school environment and our relationships with one another, with the students.

And on the first day of school, we put it all in play.

* Both inside and outside the school finceline the normative term is Stakeholders. But inside the classroom where teachers do the educational triage, second-guessing by Stakeholders is what makes a hash of things like test scores and career preparation.

** You've seen the same happen for other job descriptions: A job gets floated pro forma to the public with narrow parameters intended for a back-channel selected individual, the interviews held, the resume's parsed, but the pre-selected body gets the slot.

The LADWP linemen* were out this morning on my street, replacing a transformer and some crossbeams at the top of a wooden pole. Seeing as how it was neighborhood street-sweeping day, that side had no cars, a convenient time to park two bucket trucks, a pickup, and a dual-wheel service truck. As it was the first week of summer vacation (I'm a public middle school teacher) I walked over to see what I could see.

The foreman was half-sitting on the passenger seat of his pickup, entering something into a pedestal-mounted laptop, so I stood around for a couple of minutes so as not to disturb his train of thought. Meanwhile the other guys, two in one bucket truck, one in another on the other side of the pole were encircling the overhead wires with rubber sheets, clamping them with plastic clamps, A fourth guy was pulling on safety gear and foot spikes, a few minutes later climbing the pole inchworm-like, opposite to where the three bucket guys were working.

The foreman was perhaps forty years old (he had a son in middle school), and with me being the insistent, data-gathering dwebe I am, we had a chat about working conditions, pay, the qualifications necessary to get into his organization. His job as supervisor was to monitor the radios, oversee and interact with the public, and as his crew were well trained (partly by him) he could stand back and observe all the motions, safety procedures, and have a chat with one of his organization's customers.

Entry-level positions at my local power utility pay $70,000 a year, and the company will additionally pay for education for a move into management. A high school diploma or GED gets you qualified to begin their apprenticeship training, though prospective employees must have precursor mechanical aptitude skills, tool and materials process skills as a qualification floor for employment. Drug test and background check are a mandated procedure.

One of my neighbors walked up to us and asked: "Hi--when are you guys gonna turn on the power?" The foreman gave a polished, smooth answer giving a possible time frame but qualified it with essentially a polite: "We're doing the job right and we'll get done when we get done."

High danger jobs like these operate under the pressure of correctly performing intricate work with tools and materials in a performance arena that include all weathers, times of day, stressful conditions (like a brushfire burning in the background or splintered houses and trees all over the area). Serious mistakes in this business will turn you into something like a portion of well-seasoned blackened chicken on the dinner plate. Added is the pressure by the public and fourth estate to get the highly necessary utilities up and operational in the shortest time frame. Training goes a long way toward minimizing mistakes and risk, yet the situated, unanticipated nature of the jobsite, environmental conditions, the pressure applied by public expectations make for stress that no training can fully ameliorate.

The behind-the-scenes view the public and press and politicos don't see is the highly variable nature of the work, and the high degree of skill needed to do the work. When breakdown due to age or accident occur (the streets in my neighborhood-Harbor Gateway-were laid out in the late 1920's, the houses backfilled on the lots in the late 30's-early 40's), the service-people must deal with the old and decrepit gear, update and integrate it with the modern version in a way that's safe for all concerned, providing utility for another possible eighty or ninety years.

These utility people have for the most part been paid prevailing wages, higher than the non-union salaries of others. But as our willingness and agency to teach young people to do this kind of mechanical and materials-process work shrink, wages have gone up, reflecting the scarcity of people owning the precursor skills to do this work. Where once in public education we taught and trained for these types of technical workplaces, we've replaced it with manners of education more suitable for work in white collar while sitting in the cubicle. It is us, educators, who have caused this slide, and by extension, has eroded young people's ability to attain middle class status.

It's one thing to labor in a factory, pressing a green button on a machine that will injection-mold plastic luggage or automatically fabricate rubber cell-phone covers. That work pays minimally, the numbers of people who do that work have become minimal due to the ability of designers and engineers to automate and reduce the skill needed to do the work. It's another to design, build, assemble, and maintain the machinery and facility that does so. On another level entirely are the technologically-based skills needed to perpetuate the community infrastructure, transportation, services that provide for the individual pushing the buttons, hauling in and handling the raw materials, hauling away and distributing the outcome. These medium to high skill fabricating and maintenance jobs go unfilled, demanding higher wages, because of the sneering attitude of educators believing this kind of work is beneath our students, or rest under a cloud of perceptions that this infrastructure work is undesirable for the so-called information/service economy. It's unfortunate that those who proclaim the transition to the New Age of Economics have never worked a job or jobsite that would quickly disabuse their specious notions.

It's our desire as educators and the sum of our efforts to promote science and math, communicative, social responsibility skills within the classroom walls, hoping to teach and encourage the next generation of scientists and app-builders and good people. We neglect though to make for education in how the physical sciences and mathematics and the rest get applied to materials that create the structures, utilities, processes, products, services we take for granted. When the elevator quits or kills somebody, when the Amtrak locomotive and a few cars go off the rails, when the electrical grid goes off-line for a few hours or days, we feel put out that in a first-world country these things should happen. But preventing it and fixing it requires us (educators) to make for education in the building and maintaining skills, something we've been for forty years dismantling.

If only to keep your phone and computer operational (nevermind your death or dismemberment by random breakdown), we must take back the technical and vocational education, put it back in public secondary schools.

*Despite whatever equity nomenclature is normative in the DWP or your own practice, the crew of five working on the pole in this instance happened to be guys.

Teacher's union hacks have their shorts in a wad about what the intelligentsia and the wider culture call Teacher Tenure. The union points out that it's not really called "tenure" by the work rules, but "permanent status," and they are factually correct-- the school district/unionist contractual language uses the "permanent" terminology. In the wider cultural perception however, we might as well call it Tenure, and despite the stitchcounters, it looks, acts, feels like, is perceived as such.

Teacher Tenure has taken a hit of late because it seems to embody all that's wrong with school: stuck-in-the-mud teachers who don't give a rat's posterior about kids, about teaching and learning. Or people who can't make it in the real world of work outside the school fenceline, trading the competition of the business world for the posh work environment, the perks, and the pension at the end.

The old gals and guys in the classroom appear contrarian to the new set of ideas and the people who push them: the fourth estate, the intelligentsia who want to narrow the Achievement Gap and the Poverty Gap, and administrators sitting atop stacks of research defining the One Best Way for students to acquire higher scores. 1

***

New administrators coming off the Ed.D programs have had to dig deep to come up with an innovative topic for their thesis, and are full of innovative schemes to up the scores from behind whatever principal's desk they land. They love to experiment with what they enjoy calling Best Practices, and push the direction of the school toward proving their curricular formulations are efficacious for excellence (or at least for raising the Numbers at the school)

Old teachers have too their own ideas, based on the experiential and empirical knowledge gained by years of standing up in front of the chairs and desks and whiteboards, and contrast that experience with administrators having spent minimal time in the classroom, "…looking for a credential to get a pay raise." 2

It can get ugly: Teachers with an agenda based on their body of acquired experience turn cross-purposes with young administrators stoking the zealous fires of their personal theories, wanting to promote their own agenda into the classroom culture. The old teacher with an outstanding record, beloved by the community within and without the school because of actual teaching excellence looks weak and obstinate and obsolete when confronted with a new agenda promoted by the administrator promoting methods the old teacher knows are merely the latest ephemeral program. 3

Old teachers have seen it all come and go and are truly jaded. Even the most affectually expressive toward students have within a hard core of discriminating ability to immediately decide what new method to use, what to ditch in lieu of its efficacy.

Having the power to classify teachers as competent or not, the administrator prefers a young body he or she can mold into the new agenda, permitting their version of successful appearances at the school site that may later promote them to the next echelon of leadership in the school district. Old teachers with their own ideas have to get down the road and find another place to set up shop when the administrator promotes a "my way or the highway" mentality.

Young teachers are credulous at a time in their career when everything's chaotic, needing all the help and support they can scrape together to manage the classroom so learning can take place. Having expended a great deal of energy and treasure acquiring the teaching credential, they are impressed by people with more education than them. They aspire to greatness and work hard, and the best are preoccupied at all hours with classroom imagery. They invent innovative stuff to try out, and the good ones get accolades from the expert teachers and from administrators for their work. They are smart people who learn fast-- the best ones have the creative ability to discriminate the nuances of where instruction is working and where it is not, where and how teacher/student relationships are the key factor in any one kid's learning profile. And district-level administrators like young teachers. They cost less in the era of stretched budgets and public anger over plush pensions. 4

Then there's the common perception that Old Teachers are slow to adjust and lazy, taking as much time off as the union work rules permit, having thrown in the towel during the fight for classroom control and accommodating curricular mandates. The cartoon of the teacher with the feet on the desk, reading the newspaper in the midst of a circus makes grand and funny, if outraging imagery for stakeholders on all sides.

But another sticker on the educational Rubik's Cube: Old teachers are two or three steps ahead of the students; they can look around, seeming to divine the ether and predict what's going to happen next, and shift classroom management or curricular delivery in that direction before the kids can shut off their head or become king or queen of attraction for the day. "Anybody who's ever had to control a room of 40 kids knows that you have to be on your toes every minute to interest them enough to keep your own sanity." 5 If you, the classroom teacher, haven't got this sixth sense finely sharpened, the kids will eat you alive a mouthful at a time, and you will hate them for making you look like an idiot. But then it's your fault for letting them make you look like an idiot, part of the reason half the teachers quit within the first five years of being in the business.

This attrition thing is a no-fault sideshow, not a qualitative judgement or pejorative description of the character or quality of any individual; merely the recognition that teaching is a bundle of rarefied sets of skills, like the artistry supporting doctoring or lawyering, not attainable by just anyone who shows up at the classroom door with teaching credential in hand.

These dynamics are things you cannot count, in an age where administrators at every level (and the public too) want to count, believe we can count everything. It appears simple to directly correlate student achievement scores with teacher performance, and fine test scores are good. But that's not all there is. Within education, we have progressed into an age of numerology, where the Numbers have been elevated into icons of holy worship, and expend all effort to continue evangelizing the Good News of The Numbers. When we have conversations amongst ourselves about student individual and corporate educational progress, we rarely use anything other than the numerical nomenclature to describe student success or lack. "The debate about whether an argument is valid almost always comes down to whether its statistical methodologies are valid… Who can disagree with the numbers? 'You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.' 'Not everything that can be counted counts,' Einstein wrote for the bumper sticker, 'and not everything that counts can be counted.' " 6

Educational Meaning in relation to Teacher Tenure

The bigger picture gets lost when we focus on the minutia at the expense of why we personally commit our pink bodies to do what we do, and the meaning of it all. Teachers having been around awhile know how little the Numbers can represent actual learning, and see past the chimera that others hold up to the stakeholders as representing achievement. The human, individual, idiosyncratic nature of teaching and learning is what they are in it for, and tend to ditch methods that script an outcome by merely stirring in the proper ingredients in the proper measure within the proper time frame.

This sounds icky, but teachers are in the business for the relationships: they are personally invested in seeing to it that young people are equipped to live independent lives outside the school fenceline, and put their capacity to serve into the mix of the iron educational structures and the many times fragile human content sitting within. Were it not for these expert people with their dose of compassion, students would be crushed by the merciless nature of the school environment. 7 It's sometimes that one teacher who believes in you, notices your struggles, gives you additional help, who gets you to believe in yourself that makes a personal difference when all around are hard surfaces on which only the appearance of your numbers-based achievement is open for examination.

Union Rules aside, Teacher Tenure, for better or worse, permits the long-lived expert teacher to have a say in our rush to the latest educational fad. The Accountability Sheriffs have valid claims, but need to temper themselves by inviting the experience of others who have themselves been in the profession long, and can balance out the immediacy quotient of the newbies and think tankers who have little experience with how the world actually works, not how they believe the world should work.

Solving the problems of bad teachers: 8

What do you do with, what do you do for those that have lost the heart to teach? Have lost the incentive and will to excellence? Have been so misused by the administrative system and the students, poisoned by the corrosive atmosphere that they're punching the clock, counting the years and months and days before they can take the pension and be quit of it all?

* Others have written extensively on the topic: It must be acknowledged that the structure of the public school environment is inherently corrosive to the people immersed in it. If "…schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents…" what of the people who stay in the system for decades? 9 There's no one tasty fix for this; each human being is a bundle of motivations and desires, and each needs and deserves the compassionate accommodation we tend to reserve for the kids and their struggles.

* This sounds like typical Teacher's Union boilerplate, but having fewer students in the classroom would be a big help. More teachers to spread out the students and calm the atmosphere a bit goes a long way to lessen the teacher's stress level and help keep the classroom organized so that actual learning can take place, we can actually do the differentiation we claim to be doing. Fewer students mean the teacher can have a life outside the work environment in an era when it's a given that the Professional Day does not end at the last bell.

* Administrators, listen to your teachers. You do not exist without them. You lose credibility when your latest scheme has little to offer those more experienced than you. You look like a buffoon when they bail out of your school in high percentages. Practice your meeting norm called "listen to hear, not to speak." Merely setting your hard-charging agenda aside for a bit to actually be present in the conversation, and work together with the teacher to help solve the actual difficulties will up your compassion quotient in the teachers' minds. Acquiring the so-called Bedside Manner of the surgeon will keep your staff in place, avoiding the embarrassment of high-percentage turnover so prevalent in schools with stone-deaf admin.

* Teachers are a highly educated lot, but the culture takes advantage of their compassionate, devoted nature and does not compensate adequately for the time and effort put into acquiring expert skill in the management of volatile atmospheres (telling me that thirty-five thirteen and fourteen-year-olds in a sixteen by twenty-foot room is not a volatile atmosphere means you are lacking in cognitive functionality). If in industry, the job description requires an individual with a BA/BS, perhaps a Masters degree, additional credentials required for the position, compensate teachers on the basis of that equivalence. They can then pay off their education loans faster and worry less about how to make the next rent payment, investing that emotional store back into the classroom. (A side note on the future of teaching: Why would a young person want to jump through the hoops, pay the cover charges to get a university degree, then the teaching credential, and then stay in the profession when the trash-truck driver in the local municipality is making more salary? Or an equivalently-educated professional in the city or county building and safety department is making half again as much as the classroom teacher?) 10

* Tenure makes it safer for teachers bold enough to have and express contrarian views on what we're calling Best Practices, who dare to continue with what they've found by empirical methods to be effective. They know the best practices to use in the classroom because the methods are useful and efficacious for actual learning.

* The corrosive environment thing for many cannot be overstated. Teachers get in the business for the most part because they want to make a difference in the world, and act on their creativity to see their will enacted on best practices to get results. But stuff gets in the way:

--Students unprepared by parents (or the lack of) to be in school.

--Structures inherent in the system that make for madness: students driven over the edge by corrosive peer relationships that cannot be escaped, bleeding into the classroom atmosphere.

--Bosses and peers with corrosive attitudes.

--The burden of overwork eating a greater portion of non-school hours.

-The constant change in the workplace environment due to curricular mandates, the promotion of multiculturist themes while removing previous essential topics.

--The constant change in cultural forces affecting the classroom: The digital footprint, social norms in regard to appearances that add additional distraction factors, limited disciplinary ability, intentions to narrow types of education and the elimination of hands-on learning, attempting to accommodate a vast array of student skill in a single classroom setting.

In the non-education workplace, the above are part and parcel to manage the structure of getting along with people to make a profit for the enterprise. If you don't like the business, feel like it's poisoning your attitude, get down the road to another that better appreciates your skill and temperament. Teaching and learning within the public school atmosphere has no such safety valve. You can get out of teaching and move to management, but the corrosive atmosphere follows. You can get out and start a charter to promote your own vision, becoming a hero to parents, though find yourself at odds with the occupants of the standardised public system and its supporters.

***

Those with the belief that what they are doing is the best thing they could be doing with their short time here must have minimal protection from abuse; until something changes the nature of humanity to make all the world a lovely and pretty play-place, Tenure will need to stay.

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1 "It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone."

Taylor, Fredrick, Principles of Scientific Management p. 83 http://books.google.com/books?id=HoJMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q=it%20is%20only%20through%20enforced&f=false

2 Miller, Will, Want Reform? Principals Matter, Too, The New York Times 4/17/15,

3 The Pendulum Effect in education, widely noted, where what goes around comes back around, and stupid educational programs get a new marketing veneer and sold back to the culture.

4 A teacher in California with fifteen or so years in the system has probably earned a Masters degree in something related to education, and is deeply into the end of the column-step compensation scale, earning two-thirds more than the newbie. My school district pay scale, fairly average in proportion between new and veteran teachers: http://torranceteachers.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Tchrs_RSP-14-15.pdf

5 Clark, Cheryl, Tenure lessons, LA Times, 4/18/15, A15

6 Marche, Stephen, The act of writing in the age of numbers, LA Times, 4/l23/15, p. A23

7 Senior, Jennifer, Why You Truly Never Leave High School; New science on its corrosive, traumatizing effects, NYMAG.com, 1/20/13, http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/index2.html

8 Or good teachers in bad schools; many cannot tell the difference.

9 Senior, NYMAG.com

10 Jamison, Peter, and Saillant, Catherine, High-priced work, LA Times, 4/26/15, A1

Makers and Making

     Some new words circulating in schools and parts of the intelligentsia are the terms "maker movement," and descriptions of places for the thing: "maker spaces." 1 Much is swirling within the Netizen community on the trend. Essentially, they're places to Make stuff with expert people to give direction in the skills of Making.

     This segment of society has realized the wonder and joy in making, contrasting the active voice against the passive voice of merely consuming; it incorporates the entire sensory network into the physical expression of real things sprouted whole from one's imagination. Getting one's hands involved with crafting from actual materials, producing a product as an extension of an idea from the world of creative fancy amazes; something imagery-based protruding into the real world of objects manipulated by hands with tools.

     The old model of consumerism in the new era of sustainability has lost its polish-- we sit atop the pyramid of junk we've acquired and realize the empty space unfilled by the affluent lifestyle. We look at the education we press upon our children and find little hope that it will produce a thing equivalent to what we've attained. We long for connection to something real, things of quality we can hold in our hands that will remind us of permanence when we ourselves are not.

     That the body has the capability to produce things of permanence in the all-pervasive Age of Information is a revelation, opening a vista of alternative explanations for the world we live in. To take the thing one has made with ones' own hands and revel in the hand-eye-brain-cognitive bundle that's produced it promotes an interior satisfaction, an esteem that cannot be dispersed by the vagaries of the merely digital or informational. For the educator who has all their career devoted him or herself to intellectual pursuits, there's been the recent recognition of the value in taking ideas about things and making the actual things; what's more, students have a fascination with making things, keeping them interested in education. 2

     It's curious and fascinating to educators that so much creative energy, so much enthusiasm can be expressed in Making. The wonder contained in a finished final product springing from a visualization with seemingly no connection to the world of realia is an innovative thought for those having labored long as information workers in the skills of connectivity and communication. The gushing praise from the intelligentsia, people cosseted within words and language who don't get out much into the world of fabricators and manufacturers and doers of deeds resulting in the fashioning of things is jarring when laid against the background machinery of our current technological world.

     The irony is vast: We the educators decided some decades ago these Making Places, these Maker-made Things were unimportant, atavistic even, while focusing our efforts and money and intellectual firepower on merely information, wiping out the Maker Spaces, believing that other things, like College For All, The Information Economy staffed by Information Workers would better invest our time and resources and close the Achievement Gap and the Poverty Gap. We once had whole sections of the campus set aside for Makers. We once trained teachers in the communication of these Making skills. We once had budgets and buildings and classrooms full of Making equipment. 3 How much of this Maker gear have we unbolted from the classroom floor and parked on the school district warehouse loading dock to rust, turning the former Maker Spaces into wrestling gyms and dance studios and gourmet kitchens and Black-Box theaters? We're now dumpster diving for what we've thrown away, realizing the spaces and the gear and the skills that teach the skills are what keep kids interested in education and provide traction in the slippery world outside the public school fence line. 4

     From a cursory inspection, the biosphere and economy of education reveals missing elements that once prepared kids for the world of work, and we're trying to get back something we've begun to recognize we need. There's the sense of an incomplete world made of merely language and symbols and digital renderings, of words in space with little connectivity to the real world of the touch and the feel of objects hand-crafted. On a probably unconscious level we've realized we need this aspect of the world we've disposed of because we see the gap between rich and poor from lack of skills providing access to the world of work directly from the high school commencement stage. Believing the Makers were of the lower classes where work with the hands was one step above poverty, the places of Making were discredited and bulldozed into the mulch-pile fertilizing the new biosphere of merely digital, connectivity, cognitive, academic.

     But the NeoMaker world is occupied by the people and the children of people with means. It's an extension of the intellectual, not a place for access to something else. There's a recognition that the skills learned in these Maker Spaces could be negotiated into job skills, but the intent is not for training for the world of work. 5 It's more of an entertainment sideshow for those with means to realize with materials their Macgyver visions.

     The connection between Making and Vocation, how teaching for Vocation has been discredited, but Making from the perspective of the intelligentsia connotes honor is a jarring circumlocution. There's no difference in the spaces new and those old that did the same things. There is no distinction between skills; they were from then to now identical and indistinguishable, using the same imagination, conceptualizing, skills, craft, tools, equipment for the same outcomes. The laser cutters, the CNC routers and mills, the plastic or metal printers and digital design software are extensions of things from fifty, eighty, a hundred years ago that did the same things; we've merely evolved them into versions requiring less aptitude and skill to operate.

     Welding and metal fabrication for example: learning how to craft within the new MakerSpace an astounding artwork of various or combined metals, understanding the metallurgy of the work on a cognitive level is indistinguishable from using the skills to Make a wage in the economy. Were the young person to attempt a go at Art-Making for profit, he/she will probably continue working the coffee brewhaus day job unless they've created a connectivity branding scheme or stage-managed a break-through past the art-critic portcullis, establishing some attention-attracting image to go with the art. The young metal fabricator on the other hand starts out making twenty to thirty bucks an hour in the real economy, and with a little initiative and a couple of junior-college night classes, can parlay the skills into a career Making far more in work for him/herself or for others; more even than the entry level schoolteacher with the five-year university program on the curriculum vitae. 6 And without the college debt.

     This new Maker thing is what we used to call Shop Class, though the intelligentsia created euphemisms to avoid the proletarian term. The experts communicating and coaching the skills needed in the new Maker Spaces were once called Shop Teachers. 7

1 http://makerspace.com

2 http://hackeducation.com/2013/02/06/the-case-for-a-campus-makerspace/

3 http://www.edutopia.org/blog/stem-engagement-maker-movement-annmarie-thomas

4 http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3758299

5 http://www.757makerspace.com/what-makes-a-maker/

6 http://www.dailynews.com/social-affairs/20150328/lausd-pays-metal-workers-lawyers-police-better-than-teachers

7 http://www.scribd.com/doc/214996519/All-Thumbs-Chapter-9-The-Shop-Teacher