Dead-Last Choice

It doesn’t help that James Ledbettter, writing for the August 6 issue of The New Yorker magazine, in an article titled “What’s So Great About Manufacturing,” said “today’s factory workers are far better off than those who toiled in the nineteenth-century’s dark Satanic mills, but their jobs often epitomize what Karl Marx identified as the alienation of the laborer from his or her labor. As a hiring enterprise, a signshop must focus on indulging some and perhaps lessening many of the (possibly exaggerated) perceptions that accompany today’s young students in their education-to-work transformations. However, to attract young people, a shop may also need to bring its business practices into line with at least some of the work-related values desired by youthful workers, as revealed in recent Deloitte surveys. Deloitte, a global-business consulting firm, said only 37% of its [mostly college-educated] respondents indicated they would encourage their child to enter the manufacturing field. Deloitte also reported the Generation Y (Millennial) group, ages 19 to 33, as saying manufacturing work would be their dead-last choice. The Pew Research center says more than one-in-three American workers today are Millennials, and, this year, they surpassed Generation X to become the largest share of the American workforce. Deloitte said 59% of millennial-aged men expect to become the number-one leader in their place of employment. Signshops and education The present emphasis on education — Common Core and STEM – is shaping business hiring practices, because outlying, but extremely effective, policy organizations are affecting not only the learning methods of America’s students, but their career aspirations and their parents’ dreams. Common Core, for example, strives to equalize and improve education nationwide, to make every high-school graduate a college graduate. STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics — as a parallel educational effort, hopes to bring high-tech workers into the technology workforce. It has become today’s zeitgeist for politicians and their policy makers, but their involvement is only the tip of education’s big-dollar iceberg. For the record, our federal government allocated $141 billion to education-spending accounts in 2014, which is approximately 4% of the entire federal budget. This figure doesn’t include the injection of state taxes or contributions into school systems. U.S.-education history is complex. At least six national education programs presently overlap themselves and local school policies. Each program’s disciples are many, and partisan. For example, in 2009, President Obama added the “Race to the Top” initiative as his neutralizing alternative to the in-place and increasingly controversial Common Core and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies. A year later, the president added his “Change the Equation,” (CTEq) initiative. (An “initiative,” in political terms, is a multi-layered and customizable proposal that, once entered into a policy-forming process, allows the politically-based “initiator” to bypass a legislature.) A White House press release described CTEq as “…a CEO-led effort to dramatically improve STEM education, as part of the President’s 2009 Educate to Innovate campaign.” It received a $240 million “boost” this year. So far, the prime, U.S.-government-sponsored programs arrange thusly: 2001 No Child Left Behind 2009 Race to the Top 2009 Educate to Innovate 2010 Common Core 2010 Change the Equation 2012 STEM Consider the listed years as estimates, because each program evolved from another and may have been bylined by various policy and initiative authors. Note also that not all educators and parents are on board with the programs. Is this a problem? Most opposing concerns are directed at Common Core, which has STEM conduits and is influenced by high-dollar corporate sponsors. In addition, some voters don’t like the federal government and corporations dictating state educational policies. However, the programs have supporters. For example, the June 2 edition of Thefederalist.com presented Virginia patent attorney G.W. Thielman’s essay (“The Liberal Arts Are Dead; Long Live STEM”) that said, “While some complain that science revises its knowledge base episodically, its consensus-driven models yield empirically tested results that opponents cannot arbitrarily dismiss merely by clever erudition or emotional tirade.” Thielman also said liberals have killed the liberal arts, and students should get a science or math degree instead. His comments provide a glimpse of the many sentiments that accompany educational changes. Interestingly, Thielman overlooked that liberal-arts studies comprise humanities, language, math, science, economics and social arts. Educators Robert J. Garmston and Bruce M. Wellman, in their book “The Adaptive School,” analyze collaborative working and its relationship to students’ developmental differences. They said many middle- and high-school learners stumble when they encounter curricula that involve abstraction or symbology, which is the substance of many liberal-arts classes and, interestingly, at the very core of STEM. Inspired transformations On a certain scale, some education transformations appear to come from dreams. For example, New York Times writers Kate Taylor and Claire Cain Miller, in a September 15, story headlined “De Blasio to Announce 10-Year Deadline to Offer Computer Science to All Students” said Mayor de Blasio would soon announce that the city’s public schools would be required to offer computer science to all students. The writers said meeting this presently unfunded concept would present challenges, because there is no New York State teacher certification in computer science, and few computer-science teachers are graduating from college. (Most teaching jobs require a Master’s degree – a similar STEM degree would surely pay more.) The city estimates it will need nearly 5,000 teachers and spend close to $81 million to accomplish the mayor’s syllabus. He plans to raise half the amount from private sources, the writers said. Is De Blasio an educator? He has a degree in urban studies, and a Master in International Affairs. Like De Blasio’s New York City agenda, many programs rise from different seeds, but most traceable are the Common Core standards that, in 2008, began circulating as a “initiative” to policy institutions and educational-research centers. News stories say the concept was originated by former Arizona Governor and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who, then, was the 2006-07 chair of the National Governors Assn. Her initiative, the Common Core seed, was forwarded to the NGA s Educational Policy Div.; it focused on improving math and science education, as well as preparing students to join the national workforce. Once modified, financed and enhanced, the Common Core plan was adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. Ms. Napolitano has a degree in political science and a JD in law. Corporate influence In a June 7, 2014 Washington Post article titled “How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution,” writer Lyndsey Layton said The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards, but, Layton said, “With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.” Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1974. The Walton Family Foundation, since 1992, has invested more than $1.3 billion in K-12 education; it supports independently-owned charter schools and has also funded school-district reforms. Marc Sternberg, the Foundation’s K-12 Education Program Director, earned a joint MBA and Masters in Education from Harvard University. In April, 2014, The New York Times said the Walton Family Foundation has given grants to one in every four charter start-ups in the country, for a total of $335 million. The Times also said, “Critics say that Walton backs schools and measures that take public dollars — and, some say, the most motivated families — away from the existing public schools, effectively creating a two-tier educational system that could hurt the students most in need.” Charter schools are non-profit corporations and, unlike public schools, they are not subject to public scrutiny, even though many state governments have directed portions of their educational budgets to charter schools. Critics claim a better plan is to improve public schools. They say charter school boards and administrators, even though they must comply with some state laws, can hide their salaries, actions and policies behind corporate bylaws and, further, that once a charter school is established, average citizens – voters — cannot influence a non-profit’s corporate policies or other actions. Further, non-profit corporations can have marketing budgets that allow them to sway public opinion and gain even stronger influence. Also, many charter schools have failed, and numerous accusations of fraud have been reported by news agencies. The Gates and Walton foundations are not alone in distributing monies for educational transformation. The CTEq and various STEM programs receive high-dollar support from such firms as Walmart, Cisco, Alcoa, BP, Chevron, 3M, AutoDesk, GM, Honeywell, Intel, Xerox, DuPont, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak, Exxon Mobile, Northrup Grumman and more. The U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration says there is no standard definition for what constitutes a STEM job; they also said non-graduate STEM workers could earn $25 per hour and graduate workers might average $40 per hour. You could ask how they determine salaries if they don’t have a job description. You could also ask if private-source funds should influence our children’s education. Other reading: www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/~/media/827DBC76533942679A15EF7067A704CD.ashxhttp://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/15/the-new-york-times-the-walton-family-has-bankrolled-charters-across-the-nation/ http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/15/the-new-york-times-the-walton-family-has-bankrolled-charters-across-the-nation/ http://www.esa.doc.gov/sites/default/files/stemfinalyjuly14_1.pdf http://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/charter-schools-vs-traditional-public-schools-which-one-is-under-performing