Second chance? These kids aren't even getting a first chance

Back when I was a reporter for the Trib, covering the city schools, district officials took me on a tour of South Vo-Tech to demonstrate that the building was dilapidated. The plan then was to build a brand-new vocational high school.

But that didn't happen, and they closed South Vo-Tech anyway. Regardless of what kind of vocational programs may exist in the other high schools, city school students deserve a dedicated vocational high school, and it's a crime that they don't have one. Kudos to Mark Rauterkus for keeping on top of this.

Wanted: blue collars

State and local leaders should take note of Bill Steigerwald's Q &A with Joel Kotkin. I've occassionally had my differences with Kotkin, but he's right on the money in much of what he says about the state of the American manufacturing industry. Here are some relevant quotes and my thoughts:

I have to tell you, almost every place I go in this country, particularly where the economy is growing, if you ask business people what is it that would really help them, they say "skills." Machinists. Welders. It's not like there's a Ph. D. shortage, generally speaking. But there is a welder shortage, there's a plumber shortage, there's a machinist shortage. But nobody wants to talk about this. Cities that have lost their industrial base don't want to talk about it, and many cities that still have it are almost ashamed of it. In one of the great historical ironies, the places where they are not ashamed of manufacturing are places like Houston and Charleston and Charlotte. But the places with the great industrial traditions, it's almost as if they are ashamed of their lineage.

Many Pittsburghers are so ashamed of their steel-making heritage that we wring our hands over a lousy football team mascot, and the mayor brags on national television--somewhat erroneously--that steel has completely vanished from the regional economy.

Kotkin's other point, about skilled labor, hits close to home as well. When I was still at the Tribune-Review, around 2000, I wrote a story exploring Pennsylvania's dearth of skilled and technical workers. (The Trib's archives are hard to navigate, but you are welcome to dig for it.) We are flush with colleges and universities (I now work for one) but we don't have enough technical schools, and guidance counselors and teachers turn their noses up at vocational high schools. Talented students are pushed into college no matter where their interests lie. But workers with technical training can earn as much as those with bachelor's degrees, and guess what? You can't outsource plumbing or carpentry to India.

Let's continue:

But I think the reason that manufacturing -- particularly at the higher end, which is more and more what is there -- is so important is that -- going back to Jane Jacobs -- it is a classic export industry. If you are in Seattle and you are assembling planes, or if you are in Dubuque and you are assembling and building systems for building roads around the world, you are taking money from other parts of the country or the world and you're bringing that money in to your town. Most of the stuff that has been growing isn't doing that -- it's retail; it's health care, which is basically serving your own people. ...manufacturing is one part of what you have to offer...

Even somebody who's going to work in, let's say, an auto plant today, going forward is going to be more skilled because you're going to have more robots; it's going to be more computerized. So it's kind of misleading to look at manufacturing as a low-skilled industry. ...

States in the Upper Plains have basically fairly high education levels. A high school graduate in Iowa or the Dakotas is generally much more literate than a high school graduate in the Northeast or California.

So Kotkin presumably thinks that manufacturing is a necessary condition for a truly robust economy, and that a high level of basic and technical education is a necessary condition for manufacturing. Going back to my previous point, that puts us in a bind if indeed we do lack a good base of skilled labor. One of the things I was told when I did my story for the Trib was that professional labor is more likely to relocate than skilled, blue-collar labor. So if you don't have a homegrown pool of local talent, manufacturers will pass you by.

So what do we do?

I would try to find out if there are companies that are expanding. Are there companies that would like to expand? Are there companies that want to stay? Ask them what they want. We live in this dream world where we say, "Well, if we have a fancy stadium with sky boxes, that will keep businesses here." Well, what do you mean by businesses? Do you mean the gauleiters who represent multinational corporations, so they can hang out at a fancy football game? Or are we talking about somebody who's got 15 people working for him in a shop somewhere in the suburbs and would like to get to 30? What are his issues? Are they tax issues? Are they training issues? Are they regulatory issues? You've got to go ask! I don't see anyone interested in that anymore. It's all "What does some 23-year-old, footloose student want? Does he have enough jazz clubs to go to?" Or some footloose 50-year-old corporate henchman. "Does he have enough arts facilities?"

As a country, we're kind of delusional about our economies.

What Kotkin says here makes a lot of sense, but it would be easy for local and state officials to take his advice too far. We don't want to relax safety and environmental regulations just to please manufacturers, because the long-term costs could outweight the benefits. We don't want to give away subsidies and tax breaks, because they rarely give us a return on our investment.

What we do want to do is drastically re-order our priorities, and consider what we need to do--that we have failed to do thus far--to build a truly sustainable economy.

Happy Labor Day.

A Pennsylvania tragedy

Jason throws down the gauntlet, and I'll pick it up. What is happening now with the Duquesne School District--and with the children whose very futures are at stake--is downright criminal. It represents a perfect storm of problems with how Pennsylvania is governed. One is the multiplicity of local governments, many of which--in the face of declining populations and shrinking tax bases--can no longer adequately provide government services, including education. Another is the over-reliance on locally generated revenues to fund public education, which should be a right of any child, regardless of their station in life, and regardless of where they had the good or bad fortune to be born.

Yes, I'm aware that low-income districts like Duquense often get more state and federal money than many affluent districts, but they also need more. The educational deficits caused by poverty are real, they start early, and their effects are cumulative. And if wealthy districts want to spend more money on schools, they have that option--poor districts do not. That doesn't mean that poor children can't learn, or that poverty should excuse failure--but it is willfully ignorant to deny that affluent children have advantages that make their schools' job easier.

I would certainly agree that throwing more money at the problem is not the best answer. Meaningful, effective education reform is a goal that has eluded this nation for more than a generation, and I could be more forgiving if the crisis in Duquense had touched off a genuine debate over how to address the problems faced by underachieving school districts.

But as far as Duquesne is concerned, no one cares. There is no substantive discussion occurring because no one, save for their own parents, seems to give a rat's ass what happens to these kids. Certainly not the governor or state legislators, who have been too busy trying to keep open casinos and find money for hockey arenas. Not the good folks in West Mifflin, who don't want those children in their schools. Regardless of their motives, West Mifflin residents are horribly mistaken if they think the fate of Duquesne's students is not their concern. Do they really think that crime, proverty and economic stagnation respect arbitrarily drawn municipal boundaries?

Education is a right, and a social good. It is not a privilege conferred solely on the affluent, or those who live in the right zip codes. We all suffer if our neighbors' children don't get as good an education as our own. One day, the people in West Mifflin and our "leaders" in Harrisburg will understand that. But by then it will be too late.