Shop Teacher Shortage Puts Schools in a Vise

Ten years ago the wood shop at Artesia High School was closed when the teacher retired. Three years ago the Cerritos High School wood shop also closed when the teacher retired. The metal shop at Gahr High closed two years ago when the teacher there retired.

“When the wood shop teacher at Gahr leaves, we may not have it anymore,” said Jack Profitt, supervisor of vocational education of the ABC Unified School District where the three high schools are located.

“We are not getting teachers in the pipeline with majors in industrial arts,” Profitt said. The ABC district is not alone. Shop classes--the wood, drafting, print, metal and other industrial arts courses that served as a rite of passage for generations of men--are fast disappearing from the curricula of junior and senior high schools.

Warren High School in the Downey Unified School District can be used as of a sort of a barometer on how the industrial arts curriculum has changed in the Southeast area.

Fifteen years ago, there were three different drafting classes offered at the school, separate metal and wood classes, an electronics class and a graphic arts class. There was a teacher for each class. Today there is only one teacher who teaches three periods of wood shop and two periods of drafting at the 1,900-student school.

At Downey High School in the same district, graphic arts and machine shop were dropped more than four years ago.

Five years ago, all four of the Downey district’s middle and junior high schools offered both metal and wood shop classes; today only wood shop is offered at each school.

Other districts have similar stories. According to a state Board of Education report, California has lost one-third of its secondary-school shop courses since 1978.

The decline in shop classes can also be seen nationwide, as can the shortage of shop teachers. Public schools in Dade County, Fla., which has the nation’s fourth-largest school district, are so desperate for teachers that this year recruiters traveled to New York looking for applicants. Tiny Carmel Central School District in southwest New York is offering bonuses to industrial arts teachers who join the district before September.

A “critical shortage” of industrial arts teachers exists in Georgia, Alabama, the Southwest and parts of the West Coast, according to John G. Nee, secretary of the National Assn. of Industrial and Technical Teacher Educators. In the North and Northeast, Nee added, secondary schools are shutting down their shop programs at an alarming rate.

There is a variety of reasons for the decline of shop courses. The average age of the nation’s 48,000 shop teachers is 55, with many nearing retirement, according to the Journal of Industrial Education. And only a few graduates of the nation’s schools are trained to teach shop, according to the trade journal.

The national education reform movement of the 1980s added a host of academic courses to graduation requirements, leaving little room for students to take electives.

Finally, shop courses have gained the reputation of being the dumping ground for students who are not academically oriented. And, in a technologically complicated world, some educators and parents consider wood and metal shops relics of a bygone era.

Industrial education classes were introduced to U.S. secondary schools in the 1880s amid a flurry of controversy. Two rival camps wanted the curriculum added to secondary schools, but for different reasons.

One group wanted “manual training,” courses in which the basics of trades would be taught as a way to round out the education of college-bound students.

The other camp advocated “vocational education” as a way to ensure that every student left high school with a marketable skill.

Neither faction won. Instead, most secondary schools adopted a compromise. In junior high, boys were required to take introductory shop classes so they would have some basic trade skills. The more advanced high school classes were for those who wanted to graduate with employable skills.

Need for Skills Exist

Nearly a century later, in the early 1970s, shop classes became controversial once again as adolescent feminists demanded equal access to the male bastions. Fearing lawsuits, school districts quickly acquiesced. It is now common to see girls in shop classes.

“There is still a need for the skills taught in industrial arts courses, especially for our academically oriented students. Any person who owns a home should be able to repair a molding, fix an electrical plug or refinish a piece of furniture,” said Terence Garner, assistant superintendent of personnel for Dade County Public Schools.

But California educators point to the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, the tax-cutting initiative, as the beginning of the decline in industrial arts classes. When school funding dwindled, the first cuts many school boards made were the electives. Shop classes were among the first to go.

Leonard Q. Wickson, who has taught drafting, metal and wood shop for 25 years at Los Nietos Junior High School, says the budget cutting has hurt.

“My budget is only $400 a year for everything. Seven to eight years ago it was $1,800 and we had both a metal shop and wood shop teacher. Today we have only me,” said Wickson, 54, who has a bachelor of science degree in industrial arts from North Texas State.

“Proposition 13 hurt all of the four major areas in vocational education--agriculture, home economics, business education and industrial education,” said Larry Garetto, a specialist in industrial arts education for the California Department of Education. “But, while agriculture, home economics and business education have started to make comebacks, industrial education classes are still dwindling.”

The reason is the increase in academic classes students must take to graduate. For example, in 1983 California increased its graduation requirements. Now, every student must complete three years of English, three years of social science, two years each of math and science, one year of either a foreign language or a fine art and two years of physical education.

Hard-to-Find Elective

“A high school student used to be able to take three years of industrial arts; now, primarily because of the more rigorous academic requirements from Sacramento, students find it extremely difficult to take advantage of electives,” said Jack Bosna, program administrator for career and vocational education at Long Beach Unified School District.

Bosna said that industrial education courses “have been ruptured by academic reform.” He quickly adds that while he is not “lamenting the passing of the traditional courses,” he is among those educators who say that there should be some balance between academic and vocational subjects.

Nee, of the National Assn. of Industrial and Technical Teacher Educators said that the new academic requirements like those in California “are eliminating a student’s chances for exploration of different fields and making good career decisions.”

A growing part of the education community, however, believes that the industrial arts programs have outlived their usefulness and that it is better that students--even those not bound for college--have the strongest possible academic background.

Many expect the business community to endorse vocational programs at the high school level, said Marsha Levine, education consultant with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative, Washington-based think tank.

“But a study I did for the Committee for Economic Development showed that most businesses are squarely in support of a basic core curriculum that assures an employer that the young person being hired has a solid education,” Levine said.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honing said he is aware of educators’ concern about declining traditional vocational classes, but he said that he wants it made “clear that (educational reform) isn’t a dismantling” of the program but an improvement.

Last year, Honing appointed a committee of educators to examine problems in vocational education programs. “We spent eight months studying the situation and holding hearings throughout the state before submitting recommendations,” said Norman Eisen, committee chairman and superintendent of the Whittier Union High School District.

The committee recommendations included a call for teaching students employable skills needed by business and industry in the current job market, eliminating duplication between schools and other agencies that provide occupational training, developing new funding sources and the training of new vocational education teachers.

“It might take a couple of years to get things turned around. But we are working on it. Some programs are already under way,” said Honing.

Some schools have tried to fill the teacher gap by bringing in skilled professionals from private industry. But this experiment, by most accounts, has not worked.

“The success rate of the industry person coming in is not as high as the person coming in from an (industrial arts) education school,” Gene Lew, an industrial education specialist with the Los Angeles school district, said. “The industry person doesn’t know how to administer discipline, doesn’t know how to work with younger students. Why, he doesn’t even know how to maintain a roll book.”

Curriculum designers also are trying to make the courses more analytical by bringing in more math and science concepts. To show the change in emphasis, some districts are changing the discipline’s name to “technological education.”

More shop teachers are creating courses on robotics. Student projects include building a rudimentary robot and writing the computer program that governs the robot’s movements. Academic work includes reading and writing essays on the history of robots and how industry has utilized robotics.

Different Techniques

Using computers to design some of the simple wood and metal projects familiar to a generation of shop students is another way the industrial arts profession is trying to change its curriculum.

“Students still may be making a wooden ashtray, but they will be using totally different techniques in making the ashtray,” Nee said.

Larry Tripplett, principal at Lynwood High School, said that at the direction of the state Department of Education, he is looking for ways to upgrade industrial arts courses so that academic credit can be given.

But Tripplett quickly echoed what other educators said:

“I don’t want to see industrial arts die. We must find a balance between the academics and vocational education.

“It is not true that industrial arts is for dummies. There is still a need for auto mechanics as well as Ph.Ds.”