Work skills winning new respect

About the time reporters were swarming the high schoolers who had battled over history and science questions in Southern California’s recent Academic Decathlon, other students, including Salvador Vergara, squared off using drafting pencils, welding torches and curling irons.

That so few of us knew this SkillsUSA competition was raging at Cal State L.A. offers insight into the way Americans think about success. The way Vergara, 28, gazes at his award-winning electrical wiring diagram says plenty about a hot educational debate of the moment: What’s the best way to prepare all students for what’s looking to be a pretty tough century?

Society used to pigeonhole kids along a rude continuum from egghead to bonehead. It was expected that those presumed to be on the smarter side would wind up using their brains in white-collar careers. The supposedly dumber ones would use their hands to wring more meager salaries from blue-collar jobs. Counselors assigned honors physics and metal shop accordingly.

A few decades back, people began to bridle at the way counselors shoved students onto “tracks” that kept them spiraling around the same socioeconomic circles that had trapped their parents. Vocational education got hammered in the backlash.

Then dropout rates skyrocketed. Business types began to panic that better trained and educated workers in India and China would stomp the profits out of American industry. The idea of “multiple intelligences” gained traction. Now, careeroriented teaching is back in vogue.

Last week, I nosed around the Los Angeles Unified School District’s East Los Angeles Educational Center and wrestled with those bonehead-vs.-egghead categorizations.

In the school’s office, 11th-graders from Garfield, Lincoln and Roosevelt high schools stood yakking in pink-and-white aprons before heading across the street to County-USC Medical Center to volunteer as candy stripers. Would this lead to careers as cardiologists or as patient intake clerks, I wondered. Does it matter?

In and amid beige stucco prefabs, aspiring X-ray technicians studied skeletons and diagrams of kidneys. Students grouted brick walls and set tiles. Enthusiastic young car guys spray-painted Fords and Toyotas.

The SkillsUSA competition is open to these students of all ages as well as teens taking shop classes at traditional campuses and those enrolled in specialized career-oriented programs at the “small learning communities” that the district is seeding through its high schools.

The students compete in dozens of categories, including plumbing, cosmetology, architectural drafting, Web page design, motorcycle service technology and several types of welding. They are judged on criteria that include everything from resume presentation to timed tasks that judges assign at the competition site.

Vergara wowed the judges with an elegant electrical schematic linking bells, switches and motors.

Regular high school had been a pain for him. He struggled academically. “I couldn’t find anything to, how do you say it?” he grasps at the air with his hands “... anything to connect with.”

After getting kicked out of one school, he graduated from Jordan High, then went to work for a beer distributor.

“It paid pretty well,” he says, “but I wanted to be challenged and pushed.”

Copper wires, amps and ohms connected him with mathematical equations that had once seemed abstract to the point of irrelevance.

“I’m a visual person, hands-on,” he said. “Working with tools, that’s me.”

As it happens, UCLA this month released a survey of scholarly studies, the basic conclusion of which is that there’s promise in simultaneously teaching academics and skills, preparing students for college and careers.

The buzz phrase for this is “multiple pathways.”

In the lickety-split new work world, being skilled at learning and adapting to new tasks will be more important than specific knowledge or expertise, researchers say. That may force us to rethink whom we call boneheads.

In his 2004 book “The Mind at Work,” UCLA professor Mike Rose reassesses the intellectual difficulty of tasks done by welders, carpenters, electricians and others.

Rose’s mother had been a waitress at Norm’s and other coffee shops. As a child, Rose had marveled at her skills. He observed how she and other waitresses efficiently moved from table to table and back to the kitchen while watching for empty glasses and flapping checks and observing the social intelligence required to read customers’, cooks’ and managers’ complex cues.

Rose warns against reformers’ penchant for dismissing “old economy” work as “below the neck” while cheerleading for universally training “above-the-neck” workers for a new economy.

“What an insulting metaphor that is,” he said.

Yep. And obsolete. By working with his hands, Vergara not only will master fairly high-level math, but he will emerge from his training a journeyman electrician, ready to earn as much as $100,000 a year. He plans to spend part of that income on a college education in psychology.

Who can doubt that electricity’s sometimes painful lessons will give him a better understanding of the brain’s delicate circuitry than if his sole grounding came from lectures and books? And nimble adaptability, the researchers say, is among the most important skills for 21st century success.

Vergara seems to get that. In voicing his sole regret about his education, he makes the “multiple pathways” crowd’s case.

“I wish,” he says, waving a hand at classroom walls covered with digital control panels hooked up to flashing lights, alarms, buzzers and all sorts of motors, “I’d known about this in high school.”

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To discuss this column or answer the question “Should schools prepare students for college and careers?” visit latimes.com/schoolme. Bob Sipchen can be reached at bob.sipchen@latimes.com.