I like old cars and I hate to see an irreplaceable ‘59 Chevy destroyed.  It does illustrate what may seem counter-intuitive to some, though.  Crumple zones make cars safe.  Good, solid, stiff metal simply transfers the impact to the passenger compartment.

As you may have learned in high school physics, the time of a collision is very import to the force of the impact.  Intelligent engineering makes cars much safer with crumple zones and airbags which ’slow down’ the negative acceleration. Crumple zones are explained here. The money quote from that article is this:

Cutting the deceleration in half cuts the force in half. Therefore, changing the deceleration time from .2 seconds to .8 seconds will result in a 75 percent reduction in total force.

I have been hectoring my kids about this for years. There is a good physics discussion here.  If you read and truly understand the equation, you will never ride a motorcycle again.

Watching this video from the NBC evening news will help you understand the post that follows.

Yesterday, we had the privilege to visit the founder and board of the IGNITE program in Fredericksburg, Texas. The high school rocketry program, founded by teacher Brett Williams in the mid-nineties, has spread across the state and is moving across the borders.  TSTC is looking for ways to partner with the IGNITE/SystemsGo program as it grows.

The learning is entirely project-based.  Students work in teams to design working  hybrid rockets that meet the specifications for each part of the curriculum.  It has been very successful.  To quote Mr. Williams:

This is a whole new way of teaching. We really are working on not just educating our students, but developing them for the workforce. Coming out of this high school program, these students will understand design and development, testing, analysis, and program management - all things the industry needs in the workforce of tomorrow.

Here are some pictures from our trip (warning - low quality iPhone snaps ahead):

Brett Williams (right) in his classroom discussing rocket science with TSTC System Chancellor Dr. Bill Segura.

Another view of the Fredericksburg High School “rocket room.” TSTC Waco President Elton Stuckly is pictured facing the camera next to Dr. Segura. You can see from here that the room is part of an old auditorium which has been divided into rooms.

Redbird 10, designed by high school students,  which will be launched at White Sands.  They are hoping for 100,000 feet.

Redbird 10 fin detail. The legs behind give you an idea of scale.  This a big metal bird.

The nosecone, designed and built by the students, will likely carry a university research payload.

Access to valve area where the N2O (nitrous oxide) oxidizer will be released to facilitate the burning of the otherwise inert solid fuel.  This system is much safer than a standard solid fuel rocket in which the fuel and oxidizer are permanently mixed together.

Failure IS an option!  These are the remains of a rocket that crashed at White Sands, possibly due to a failure in the system which releases the oxidizer.  The students have been doing a failure analysis.

All of the technologies required to build a rocket are vital to the United States as a world power.  Here we see an increasingly rare sight - a real machine shop in a high school.  A consortium of local machine shops also help the students with their projects.

Some thoughts about the program:

• It works.  The students involved are going on to study engineering and engineering technologies in college
• There was a lot of inspiration and determination to do the impossible on the part of Brett Williams
• The Fredericksburg Independent School District and the entire community had great courage and confidence to make this possible
• It can be, and is being replicated

As Mark Long of TSTC Publishing said while we were there, “It would have been a good idea anywhere, but it happened here first for a reason.”  Kudos to those visionaries who were willing to put hard work behind their visions.  Lives are being changed because of it.

*STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Are students who don’t thrive in a traditional education track academic failures or valuable experiential learners?  That is the question answered by this video about the Institute of Technical Education in Singapore.  (For some reason, the introduction plays twice, but the video is still excellent).

Please note the following:

• Importance of technical education to maintain infrastructure
• Reducing technical education stigma
• Providing university-class facilities for technical education students
• Making certain that no skill is wasted

The introduction says that ITE is an innovation, but they are doing what we do in U.S. technical education - links to industry, focus on faculty industry experience, hands-on learning, etc.  In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they came here to study technical education.  What they have done differently is to  invest the money to make technical education a priorty.  First-class facilities and student services make the students feel more valued and valuable.

Our focus on 4-year degrees is hurting our competitiveness, not helping.

Charles Murray knows something about controversey. The coauthor of The Bell Curve stirred up quite a tempest in the media and in the scientific community with that book’s conclusions about intelligence. Although some of those conclusions have withstood scrutiny by an American Psychological Association task force, others were probably a reach.

In his recent book, Real Education, Murray takes on the education industry using intelligence testing as a basis once again. Murray posits “four simple truths” that we should take into account if we are going to “bring America’s schools back to reality.” Those truths according to Murray are:

1. Ability Varies
2. Half of the children are below average
3. Too many people are going to college
4. America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted

I have seen evidence of these truths and would only offer a different emphasis than the book.

First of all, ability varies in many ways, not just in basic I.Q. Although Murray discusses eight different kinds of intelligence, he doesn’t do enough to indicate the very high value of mechanical and other abilities not related to the appreciation of King Lear. As I have written before, the infrastructure of modern life may have been invented by scientists and engineers, but it is built and maintained by skilled technicians. Those technicians may not know the finer points of Athenian democracy, but they understand Ohm’s law, circuits, gearing, and many other important industrial principles better than most of our political class (and I’m not sure our political class understands the finer points of Athenian democracy, either).

Secondly, while it is incontrovertibly true that half of our children are below average, how we educate them is also vital to the future of the country. Right now, we are often wasting this resource by not offering them an opportunity to learn a trade in high school or in post-secondary education.  As Murray says:

Despite the current obscurity of vocational education, most school systems around the country still maintain substantial programs and facilities. The label for them is no longer vocational education, but CTE (career and technical education)… Moreover, the empirical evidence in favor of CTE is not in dispute. CTE works. Giving high-school students the option of taking technical courses increases the likelihood they will graduate from high school. High-school students who pursue the vocational track do better in the job market, in terms of both employment rates and wages, than those who stay in the academic track but don’t belong there.

Murray points out that those high school CTE resources available are “radically underused.” He attributes this to the “misbegotten, pernicious, wrong-headed idea that not going to college means you’re a failure.” I would agree with that assessment and add that there are plenty of post-secondary opportunities for students who won’t be attending Harvard or Yale. Those opportunities also increase a student’s expertise and earning ability in his or her chosen field.

That would lead me into the third point - college needs to be defined more broadly than the bachelor’s degree. Murray ends up there, but through most of the book he refers mainly to the BA. Part of the misunderstanding that “deforms the behavior of all the actors in America’s high schools - principals, teachers, guidance counselors, students, and parents” is the idea that college only means a BA. Technical and community college programs in medical, IT, industrial, and engineering technology fields offer a lot of opportunity for students to excel in a relatively short period of time. They generally don’t receive the respect they deserve, even though they have trained many of our nurses and pilots to whom we entrust our lives. Since those individuals have been certified in their fields, we never ask them about whether they attended a prestigious university. While it is certainly true that too many people are trying for a BA, there are not too many people attending college if you don’t mean “university” when you say “college.”

In all, Murray has made a very valuable contribution to the discussion of education in our country. He includes an interesting and timely section on using certification to undermine the BA and identifies the rewards that can be found by attaining the right technical skills for the marketplace. He concludes that the Army’s old slogan of “Be all that you can be” should be the slogan of education. I agree that seeing to it that all students reach full potential is paramount - not just the elite, but the rest as well. The path will not always be the one that Murray identifies. Many of the best engineers started out in high school and college CTE courses. Perhaps that route will be recognized by the educational community one day.

UPDATE:  Since I am by nature anti-elitist and I was troubled by the focus on “the elites” in Murray’s book, allow me to offer my blog post on Elitism and Education as a balance.

Channel 25 out of Waco did a great story on our collaboration with Waco Independent School District on technical dual credit. My boss, President Elton Stuckly is interviewed and so is Donna McKethan from WISD.

You will also see students who are taking an integrated Math class that teaches math with technology. I blogged about that here.

Baylor Abandons SAT Payments (Inside Higher Ed) - So a magazine sets up a college rating system. It becomes wildly popular and more important than it should be. Whatever you do, don’t game this “system.” It would be “dishonest.” I read this one because it was about our local university, but it could have happened anywhere.

Are Universities Above the Law? (The Weekly Standard) - Three recent cases that illustrate the difficulties faced by higher education institutions in the legal system. The big universities are now very rich. It will make them a target for more legal action in the future. In these cases, Dartmouth, Duke, and Princeton may deserve what they are getting, though.

What Shortage of Scientists and Engineers? (The New York Times) - John Tierney argues that there is no shortage, just a shortage of American-born ones. Very interesting - but I don’t have enough information to evaluate the arguments. I do know that scientist immigration is no reason to feel sanguine about the state of math and science education in the U.S. I also know that we are very short of technicians in areas critical to economic growth, and we are not importing many of those.

Over at the Mpowered blog, there is a post about a proposal to require California students to take algebra in the 8th grade.  The post does a good job of showing the illogical underpinnings of the argument, so I don’t think that I need to address it.  I will say that my experience with my own kids indicates that good teachers make a difference and early algebra does not. (I linked to the category since I couldn’t find a permalink.  The article title is ‘Algebra earlier policy not proven anywhere.’)

‘Early Algebra’ is another example of ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.’  The Texas 4×4 (four years of math, english, science, and social studies) is in danger of the same accusation as it now stands.  Although the Texas 4×4  for high school students is a good idea, it rests on a shaky foundation.  The facts are plain - students who have passed Algebra 2 with decent grades don’t actually perform at the advertised level.  Students who are unprepared for Precalculus and Calculus will do poorly in those subjects, too.  Since four years of math are required, the teachers and principals will have the choice of continuing to pass under-prepared students, or failing them, causing them miss graduation.  History tells us what will happen.

I support four years of math in high school with the following provisos:

1. A meaningful technology or business math course must be an alternative for those not headed to Calculus
2. Failure MUST be an option
3. Provisions will have to be made for ‘credit recovery’ when students fail
4. Passing a dual-credit College Algebra course should meet the 4th year requirement*

I believe that these ideas are needed to make the 4×4 effective.

*I realize that this may seem strange, but college-readiness is the point and basic math college-readiness and passing College Algebra are close to the same.  I consider this to be focusing on the desired result rather than the process of getting there.  Also, it has always been an issue for me that a full college academic course requiring more work than a full year high school course only counts .5 high school credits.

The San Diego Union-Tribune notes a new effort to reintegrate academics and CTE.  The idea is to make academics relevant and make it clear to CTE students that they can go to college.  This seems like a no-brainer to me, but some people believe that a wall must separate the two.

Here is the good stuff:

“I think there’s really this false dichotomy between saying ‘college-ready’ and ‘career ready,’” said Kathleen Porter, director of Career, Technical and Adult Education for the Poway Unified School District. “Having real-world connections in academic classes is every bit as important as having real-world classes reinforce academic skills.”

At Poway High, Advanced Placement physics students supplement their lectures on electrical circuits by visiting the school’s auto shop to see the circuits at work. And as a result of consulting with the physics teacher, auto shop teacher Ken Faverty said he teaches his students more about multiple circuits to reinforce classroom concepts they will face on state science tests.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I have blogged about California’s CTE and the Governator before.  I am glad to see things moving in the right direction.

With apologies to Gloria Gaynor, here is the video linked by the commenter from The Joy of Technical Education (3) below.

Really funny!

Chris Doessler over at one of the ACTE blogs posts about an Associated Press poll on education.  He points out interesting and even contradictory answers.  I think these result from uncritical acceptance of the media narrative.  Read it and see what you think.

TSTC Waco, with help from a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) grant*, is hosting a Summer Bridge program for Waco ISD rising 11th and 12th graders.  The students are raising their placement test scores, eating well, having fun, and getting their hands on some cool technology.  They are also receiving some survey class college credit.

These students will be academically prepared for college.  The video indicates that they will be enthusiastic about continuing past high school, as well.  I can’t think of a better way for them to spend a summer.

*The grant did not cover the cost.  TSTC and WISD had to help.

Excellent essay at The Atlantic.

The common ambivalence about balancing college and career education is well-identified:

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work…

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal.

Read the whole thing.

Again from a friend at Texas Workforce Commission, this report about the lack of real change in schools. Highlights … I mean lowlights include:

• Time: Nationally, the amount of time spent in elementary school on core subjects has increased by only approximately 36 minutes per week-less than 10 minutes per day.
• Teaching: About 8 percent of public school districts offer pay incentives for excellence in teaching. That figure has remained virtually unchanged since 1984.
• Standards & expectations: 12th grade test scores in reading and science have dropped, while average high school GPAs have grown dramatically. Students are earning higher grades in “tougher” subjects, yet actual learning is either stagnant or declining. For instance, in math, almost half (two out of five) high school seniors lack skills commonly taught in the 7th or 8th grades that are needed to learn trades that do not require a college degree.

There is a lot to read in the report. I still believe that dual credit can help with a lot of these problems. Even with more dual credit, our educational system is stuck in the past.

Via a friend at the Texas Workforce Commission comes this note on a “tipping point” analysis done at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. The study found that compared to students who earned less than 10 credits, those who reached the “tipping point” of at least two semesters of credits and a credential had a considerable average annual earnings advantage: $7,000 for students who started in ESL, $8,500 for those who started in ABE or GED, and $2,700 and $1,700 for those who entered with at most a GED or high school diploma.

The brief synopsis that I have read does not seem to differentiate between technical and academic. I will continue to look.

At the link, a model is provided for doing a similar study at your college.

I enjoyed reading some interesting thoughts on another binary division of humanity from Sylvia over at Generation Yes. I particularly like the following quote:

It’s a shame that this beauty is often lost in the K-12 curriculum. But that’s a problem with curriculum, not a problem with people’s brains.

Read the whole thing.

A friend sent me a link to a very interesting article from Inside Higher Ed. Charles Miller is taking on the oft-repeated canard that a bachelor’s degree is worth a million dollars to a graduate over a lifetime. It seems that if you do the math right, it is worth considerably less. The problem I have with the math is that it does not separate the differences that occur because all degrees do not provide highly marketable skills.

The College Board has responded to Mr. Miller by conceding the nonexistence of the mythical million but claiming that a public university graduate “breaks even” at 33 years of age while it takes a private college graduate until age 40. Considering the high pay that an AAS degree can bring (see here) and the economic futility of some four-year degrees (see here), I wonder what the break-even point is for a technical school major. Stay tuned - I am sure that we will here more about this.

In the mean time - check out the comments on the Inside Higher Ed article. Also, I would recommend that reading Marty Nemko on the same subject.

UPDATE: By the way, my ‘friend’ is the TSTC System Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Advancement, Michael Bettersworth. If you are interested in forecasts about where technology is headed in the future, please checkout his Emerging Technologies page on the TSTC website here.

If you are interested in buying a forecast, try the TSTC Publishing site which links to their web store.

It is old news and I’ve blogged it before, but many still don’t know. If you haven’t taken the time to look at the final report on contextual math learning from the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education, you should. The report, “Building Academic Skills in Context: Testing the Value of Enhanced Math Learning in CTE”, was completed in 2005. From the abstract:

An experimental study tested a model for enhancing mathematics instruction in five high school career and technical education (CTE) programs (agriculture, auto technology, business/ marketing, health, and information technology)… The experimental teachers worked with math teachers in communities of practice to develop CTE instructional activities that integrated more mathematics into the occupational curriculum. After 1 year of the math-enhanced CTE lessons averaging 10% of class time, students in the experimental classrooms performed significantly better on 2 tests of math ability–the TerraNova and ACCUPLACER^®–without any negative impact on measures of occupational/technical knowledge.

The Waco ISD effort to teach contextualized math that I blogged about earlier is a little different. They are putting context into a CTE-based math class instead of putting more math into an existing CTE class. The concept should still work, though. I can hardly wait to see the results.

Contextualizing math (RELEVANCE) is the key to improving math skills in this country. Many teachers still confuse methodology and rigor. They believe rigor involves making it hard to learn. Rigor is about what the student learns, not how the teacher teaches. The bias in the academic world is that students must value knowledge because it is intellectually beautiful, not because it is useful. Teachers tend to think that way*, but most students do not.

*All human beings have this tendency. I can’t imagine why some people go glassy-eyed just because I go on for hours about the algebraic beauty of relational databases.

Massachusetts education officials are looking to use kinder, gentler language to describe schools that are not making the grade. I am not going to offer my opinion of standardized testing at this time. I will say that whatever word you use to describe failure eventually becomes a pejorative. Think of “special” as in “special education.”

This video shows how NIU is using a video game to teach numerical methods to Mechanical Engineering students:

I’ll bet grades and ability to apply numerical methods are way up!

(Is that Steve Ballmer I hear shouting “Developers!” and screaming in the background music? - I think so. Check out this YouTube video)

I noted earlier that Jim Griffith of Valero had some fun and interesting comments on college transfer. I have one other jewel to share. Jim suggested that CTE be considered “regular education” and academics be considered support. Why? He explained that academically-trained engineering graduates he hired couldn’t measure things with a ruler and didn’t know “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.” He said that made it hard for them to design anything useful.

Like Dilbert, it is funny because it is true!

Jan Brae, Executive Director of ACTE, spoke to the attendees at Education Open Source today. I was struck her by her comments on why CTE professionals aren’t having a bigger impact on the discussion about education reform.

She said:

1. We don’t talk about CTE using data - just anecdotes

2. We don’t talk about CTE using the language that is driving reform. We should talk about -

• Academic Achievement (how do your CTE students compare?)
• Dropout or graduation rate (how do we compare?)
• Transition to post-secondary (how do we compare?) Any post-secondary should count - certificate, two-year, or four-year

She had a lot more to say, but she made it clear that people need to know that CTE is the pathway to post-secondary success in the workplace or in college.

This article sums it up!

UPDATE: Sorry.  It looks like this link no longer works.

Over at the TSTC Publishing Blog, Mark Long has a an interesting post on the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship convention in San Antonio. It includes a useful discussion starter on the relationship between technical college education and entrepreneurship education. Read the whole thing.

While you are at it - if you have any interest in the technical and other issues involved in publishing books - take a look at the rest of the posts.

I went to a couple of very interesting presentations today at the SACS COC conference here in The Big Easy. Both sessions dealt with creating general education goals (outcomes/expectations), infusing them into the system, and measuring success. I am very interested in the application of those methods to general technical education outcomes.

My informal statement of overall goals for our students at TSTC Waco is this:
“Our graduates should exhibit the behavior, attitudes, and skills of a professional technician.”

When I broke that down for our students at orientation, I included trouble-shooting, love for your field, learning behavior, communication skills, troubleshooting skills, honesty/ethics, and customer-service focus. It turns out that most of those things are really close to what liberal arts institutions call General Education Goals or Expectations.

I find this interesting because it helps provide a unified theme, consistent message, and persistent reinforcement for these behaviors, skills and attitudes throughout the technical college experience. It certainly includes academic as well as technical courses (see earlier post on “the great divide”). The second session indicated that we should be considering how our co-curricular activities help our students meet these goals as well. Yes – Student Development (or Student Affairs, or Student Life, or whatever they have thought to call it on your campus) can be involved in the educational process in more than just a supporting role.

All of this is driven by the SACS requirements and it makes sense:

3.3.1 - The institution identifies expected outcomes for its educational programs and its administrative and educational support services; assesses whether it achieves these outcomes; and provides evidence of improvement based on analysis of those results.

3.5.1 - The institution identifies college-level competencies within the general education core and provides evidence that graduates have attained those competencies.

All of this may have been obvious to everyone but me, but I’ve had a pretty educational day.

Technical education students sometimes think that academic courses are a waste of time because they don’t focus specifically on technology (job) skills. Technical teachers don’t always make it clear that academics are important. It isn’t difficult for an engineering technology teacher to see the importance of academic math, although the student often doesn’t make the connection. When it comes to composition, literature, psychology, or humanities the connection may not seem clear to the teacher, either.

I’ve always told my students about how important communications skills are to their careers. Passing a couple of composition classes tells an employer that you can communicate in writing. Well-written reports and correspondence will always be valued in business. A technician must have the ability to explain problems and solutions in clear language to customers or supervisors who don’t understand the technology.

What about literature, humanities, or psychology courses? Are they useful? Reading is the best way to improve vocabulary, spelling, and grammar. Reading literature and studying art are important because communication is more than just words. Communication takes place in a cultural context. It also takes place in a social and psychological context. Being a well-rounded individual is a plus for any worker.

Does taking academic courses help in other ways? Here are a few:

• Teaches skills important for technicians who want to advance to management
• Provides a head start for those who decide to pursue further education
• Instills confidence to communicate and navigate in the community
• Well-educated parents raise well-educated children

Let the technical and academic teachers see that they are partners. We are all in this together!