SI Online
Posted: October 27, 2009
A New Partnership for Technical Education
Just seven days after taking office last January, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn announced he was terminating the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), starting in 2010.
Dorn did not ask the State Legislature for permission. No blue ribbon task force or stakeholder group was convened to mull it over. Dorn simply called a press conference, made the announcement and, with that, our prolonged debate about the WASL was abruptly brought to a close.
Some legislators grumbled. A few business leaders expressed concern. Some questioned the practicality of the move and the surprising speed of it.
But Dorn expressed surprise that anyone would be surprised.He said the WASL will be replaced with a new test that will be shorter, less time-consuming, more helpful to individual students - and maybe even less expensive.
"Some people say that I’m moving too quickly," he said. "To be honest with you, we should have moved four or five years ago to what I’m taking about."
Welcome to a Washington State civics lesson that might be called Superintendent of Public Instruction 101.
Washington is one of only 14 states in the union where voters elect superintendents of public instruction. In three dozen others, superintendents are appointed by governors or state boards of education, and the appointive process is strongly supported by many in the education profession because it helps to assure the superintendent is on the same page, policy wise, as the rest of state leadership.
But give the elective approach its due.
What if state leadership is on the wrong page?
In that case, there’s nothing like an election to change directions, and that’s just what voters did in electing Dorn to replace Terry Bergeson, a strong WASL advocate who had held the superintendent’s job for 12 years.
Randy Dorn is now public education page turner in chief, and he possesses considerable leeway in determining the ways we might begin to turn. He faces major challenges, too. But make no mistake; state leadership in public education is now trying to move in a far different direction than it was under Terry Bergeson.
Dorn is a strong advocate for career and technical education. He believes schools need to do a better job in their use of work-related topics like business, welding, and robotics because it's a better approach to teaching applied math and science skills that are difficult for many to learn in purely academic settings.
For some of these reasons, Dorn says he is postponing implementation of proposed high school graduation requirements for advanced math and science. First, he says, schools need to develop better approaches for teaching these subjects.
Some of Dorn’s moves drew a strong reaction from a prestigious group of statewide business and corporate leaders. Of Dorn’s decision to delay graduation requirements, their spokesman said:"
It sends a very disturbing message about our state’s understanding of the world we currently live in. It will put our students at a huge disadvantage relative to students from other states and countries as they compete for family-wage jobs."
It is hard to remember such a blunt statement made in public by "corporate" Washington about anyone holding elected office in our state, let alone the state’s head educator.
But, this brings us back to the page turning.
Bergeson’s emphasis on academics and the WASL was in line with the views of those who see advanced education as the essential building block for global economic competitiveness.
Yet her 12-year tenure also coincided with a period when many parts of the public school system appeared to lose sight of how many different kinds of building blocks are required to support the Washington state economy, one that competes extremely well in the global economy, thank you very much.
The tight focus on the WASL and related higher academic priorities also seemed to obscure the central roll that schools should play in helping students educate themselves about their access to life’s opportunities.
The limits of that leadership vision were made clear in a 2006 guest editorial for the Seattle Times written by four Seattle area civic leaders with impeccable corporate connections and community credentials.
They urged us to give up on manufacturing as a source of accessible, well-paid work that can help lift people up from poverty, arguing that in the new global economy manufacturing is inexorably a "race to the bottom." They urged us to look instead to "logistics" as the new source of opportunity for the untrained and the poor
.Now, there’s nothing wrong with "logistics." If you can drive a truck or operate a forklift, you can almost always find work in most parts of the state.
But the authors of the piece were apparently oblivious to the fact that their manifesto appeared at a time of remarkable growth for a large number of industrial sectors in Washington; including manufacturing. Sectors that continue to provide highly paid, upwardly mobile career paths for people who can master relatively straightforward entry-level skills and grow to learn more complex ones.
This industrial boom and the related demand for skilled and professional workers went largely unreported by the news media during the Bergeson years and largely unnoticed by the regional intelligentsia. But documentation is readily available through state business tax and employment records. Or simply talk with some of the thousands of Washington businesses, large and small, that were part of it
According to state records, Washington’s overall state economy enjoyed 35% revenue growth for private sector businesses and 12% job growth during the five years from 2004 through 2008. Many industrial sectors grew faster on both counts.
For instance, aircraft manufacturing rebounded during the survey period with 58% revenue growth and 31% job growth, while manufacturing as a whole reported 40% revenue growth and 14% job growth.
Within manufacturing, truck maker PACCAR, one of the oldest companies in the State of Washington, enjoyed banner production years, and in 2006 received a Presidential Medal of Merit for its many international innovations in truck design and production.
Ship and boat building jobs grew by 30%, fueled by increased demand for Washington-made ocean-going aluminum work boats and high end luxury yachts.
Even the metal trades, a sector dismissed as a relic of the old economy by just about every "smart" person in education or government grew nearly twice as fast as the overall economy, with 66% revenue growth and 26% job growth.
Construction grew even faster, with 59% revenue growth and nearly 40% job growth.
And, in spite of the fears about our international competitiveness, much of the industrial growth was driven by the success of even small Washington companies, who in the first half of the decade learned how to sell their products in the global economy. This was especially true for small companies in the metal trades cluster, comprised of machine makers and metal fabricators.
North Star Ice, located in south Seattle, makes machines that produce a unique variety of ice known as "flake ice." The flake ice production process was developed in the 1950s by Lyle Branchflower. A Ballard-based seafood entrepreneur, Branchflower needed a special ice chip to create below freezing temperatures to store the cod livers that he imported from Alaska.
Flake ice turned the trick for cod livers, but then it turned out that over the past 20 years North Star’s flake ice was also the perfect type for curing concrete in hot climates. The company enjoyed unprecedented growth due to the massive quantities of flake ice required to cure the concrete for new airports, harbors, dams, and other mega structures in the Middle East and South America.
Or consider Vaughan Chopper Pumps, based in Montesano, in southwestern Washington. The company sells a unique pump that is based on a chopping technique invented in the early 1960s by company founder Jim Vaughan, a welder. Nearly 50 years later, his granddaughter, Suzanne Vaughan, serves as marketing director for the firm. The company now sells the pumps to customers in dozens of countries around the world, far exceeding the original vision of the founders. Says Suzanne:"
Grandpa used to tell my grandmother, ‘Hazel, some day we’ll sell these machines east of the mountains.’ He meant the Cascades. Now, the only continent where we aren’t selling pumps is Antarctica."
According to state records, the industrial boom continued right up until September 2008, when the credit freeze hit and the Boeing machinists union went on a long strike.
Will industry bounce back? It did in 2001 and 2002, when most experts believed its prospects were deader than the proverbial doornail, and that was before mom-and-pop companies like North Star Ice and Vaughan Chopper Pumps proved they could easily do more than hold their own in the global economy.
In spite of all the present doom, gloom, and economic uncertainty, a good case can be made that Washington's industrial sectors will rebound again, based on our state’s long-term strategic assets, which include close proximity to growing export markets in western Canada, Alaska, and Asia. Add the presence of highly successful homegrown world-beaters in Boeing and PACCAR, and the fact that Washington serves as a major regional hub for large scale agriculture, timber, and seafood industries as well as maritime trades and construction which creates an endless need for industrial machinery and equipment.
So, maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all for Dorn to suggest the use of welding or robotics to help kids learn math, science, and technology skills.
Bergeson’s emphasis on advanced academics might have earned her high corporate praise, yet during her tenure, the average age of a Boeing production worker reached 52. The average ages aren’t much younger in our highly paid maritime and construction sectors either.
The career pipelines for many of these occupations are sparsely populated. And it's not just Boeing; our successful mom-and-pop exporters are also worried about where the next generations of Washington engineers, welders, and equipment operators are going to come from.
Whatever its strengths or short comings, the WASL did not help to prevent the growing shortage of skilled professional and technical workers, so that even in high need communities like Seattle it’s still a tough sell to persuade civic leadership that it might be wise for the public schools to help expose more students to the full range of potential career opportunities that exist in their own community.
Forty percent of its students do not graduate on time and thirty percent do not graduate at all.
Dorn grew up in Puyallup, and - except for one year spent as a principal in Idaho - he spent his entire education career within site of Mount Rainier.
He worked as a teacher in the public schools for Sumner, Buckley, and Eatonville before becoming the principal at Eatonville’s sole high school. He was also elected a state legislator. He eventually went to work for the statewide labor union that represents school custodians and other support personnel. In 2008, he decided to challenge Bergeson for the superintendent’s post.
Sumner, Buckley, and Eatonville may seem like idyllic, bucolic towns to those of us who drive through them on weekends, and in many ways are wonderful places to live and grow up. But many of the kids in those areas struggle with economic and social challenges, just as those in big cities do. Moreover, for some the boredom factor is extremely high and the local economies may not offer anything to inspire them about the career opportunities that await well-schooled, well-trained people in the 21st Century economy.
Like Bergeson, Dorn believes in high academic standards, but his extended classroom experience with kids in rural and suburban settings gave him a strong desire to implement programs that more successfully engage students in learning and encourage them to stay in school.
His staff is also presently seeking business input for new statewide curriculum frameworks to guide development of new "green tech" high school programs for manufacturing, construction, and transportation.
He faces major challenges in bringing about such changes because of cuts in state funding and in addressing the traditional focus of many education professionals and parents on four-year academic degrees.
The state superintendent’s role is also limited by the degree of local control accorded to local school districts. But, as shown just one week into his four-year term, Dorn is now turning the page - and here’s hoping it leads our schools in some new directions.
The race between Dorn and Bergeson comes with one fascinating, little known post script.
The Stranger, an alternative newspaper in Seattle, asked both Bergeson and Dorn to answer three written questions from the WASL when they appeared before the paper’s endorsement panel.
Neither could answer the questions correctly.
Dorn said his failure demonstrated why the WASL was the wrong approach. Bergeson blamed her failure on not having her proper reading glasses.
It’s hard to imagine a better argument for turning the page than the lesson taught by The Stranger.
