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.

Popular Mechanics notices the skilled trades shortage:

Only 16 percent of the 1000-plus high schoolers Ridgid interviewed said they had taken or were planning on taking a vocational class in the skilled trades. But once they actually took such a class, the respondents became twice as likely to consider pursuing the trade as a career.

Read the whole thing.

This time it is Robotics, Rocketry, Research at the Rapoport Academy Early College High School.  TSTC is involved in helping with these projects.  More secondary and post-secondary cooperation in CTE!  Read all about it on the Texas High School Project website HERE.

There is a great article in the Austin American-Statesman about training for green jobs. A conference at the capitol included a visit from Texas State Technical College wind and solar experts (including TSTC Waco’s own Sidney Bolfing). Also highlighted was Austin Community Colleges solar panel assembly program. Here is an exceprt:

Last summer, with only $700 to his name and his dream of a sustainable farming ministry looking increasingly unlikely, 34-year-old Austinite Aron Brackeen cast around for his next job. He had long been interested in alternative energy, and soon after a phone call to an admissions officer at Texas State Technical College, he struck out for West Texas.

By November he found himself atop a towering wind turbine as part of a “climb test” designed to make sure the students had the intestinal fortitude for high-up work.

“I was willing to follow the wind,” said Brackeen, who expects to graduate in April 2010 and hopes to land a job on a Texas wind farm.

Read the whole thing.

An article in the Corsicana Daily Sun about CTE at Corsicana High School mentions secondary and post-secondary connections twice (Corsicana is about 55 miles from TSTC Waco).  The building trades teacher said “his program has 38 young men working on their carpentry level I certification, which is very much like a college transcript, and are being taught the same curriculum as students in Waco at TSTC”

The new automotive teacher was most recently teaching in the award-wining Toyota program at TSTC Waco.  We hated to seem him go, but we are glad that his high school students will get the benefit of his experience and dedication.  Our best wishes go out to Michael Schmidt in his new postion at Corsicana High School.

If the tide in technical education is going to continue to turn, high schools and colleges need to persevere in finding ways to partner.  As we work on more articulation, dual credit, and innovative programs our students and our economy will be the winners.

The Texas Comptroller’s Office has released a report called Texas Works 2008: Training and Education for All Texans which has really gotten it right.  Among the important facts in the executive summary:

• Slightly less than 20% of Texas jobs required a Bachelor’s degree in 2007
• 43.65% of the jobs paying better than average salaries do not require a Bachelor’s degree
• More than 343,000 jobs in Texas in 2007 that paid above average were for Associate’s degrees (mostly Associate of Applied Science degrees - technical degrees)
• There were nearly 80,000 jobs that paid above average that could be had with a certificate
• Dwindling enrollment in vocational training is hurting the economy
• We are producing TOO MANY four-year degrees (in the wrong things)

I think that the following graphic really says it all (click to enlarge):

The recommendations made are as follows:

1. Make more parents and students aware of all postsecondary educational options, including career and technical education (CTE), and the availability of financial assistance.
2. As part of this effort, use data on educational and employment outcomes to quantify the economic benefits of CTE, and publicize these results to help make current and prospective students aware of its value and promise.
3. Ensure that state academic requirements, such as those represented by the new “four-by-four” policy and new GPA calculation standards, do not prevent or discourage students from enrolling in career and technology courses.
4. Establish a $25 million Jobs and Education for Texans (JET) fund to provide support for postsecondary CTE courses, including startup funding for new programs.
5. Link any incentive funding for postsecondary technical education to measures that help ensure the state receives a positive return on its investment.

All I can say is HOLY COW  and CUE THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS!!!!!

One of our pilot training instructors, Carson Pearce, was interviewed about the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River.  He did an excellent job of explaining the situation.  The first part of the video reviews the tape of the conversation between the tower and pilot.  The interview begins after that.

Some people think so… and I think it has all of the signs of susceptibility to a crash.

When the economy enters a downturn, people finally start actually listening to the truth about job skills.  This led to a double digit percentage increase across all TSTC campuses this Spring.  It also leads to news reports that were hard to find in better times.

This is a great piece done in the TSTC Waco welding and mechanical engineering tech labs.

Who knew that pay was linked to marketable skills?  Everyone that knows anything about economics should know it.  Charles Platt has an article in the New York Post about going “undercover” at Wal-Mart.  He discovers that it isn’t the worker’s dungeon that the unions declare it to be, and makes an interesting point about the pay:

I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.

This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

Read the whole thing.