One thing that’s hard to grasp at times, is how truly gigantic the US is, in terms of cities, towns, and space, and that no one really “has a handle” on all that is happening in the various locales, and “local scenes”. One of PSA 7 core elements says all DLE can benefit, the more closely they can connect with local cultures.
James Fallows, who has been writing for the Atlantic since almost before word processors came along, likes to explore the local side of our reality, and then write about it. For some years now, he’s been flying around the country in his single engine plane, and dropping in on local scenes and reporting on them. He has the advantage of a huge following of loyal readers who submit to him their “best place for him to go next”.
The current March issue of the Atlantic magazine features a sort of compendium of what he’s learned traveling the US. As we would expect, one of the interesting arenas for “things going on” is education. Fallows article talks about a lot more than “just education” but perhaps worth a read for at least those parts.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/James-Fallows-Journeys-Across-America-The-Atlantic.pdf”]
How does a small town that loses its main industry recover and move forward?
From a distance, the San Bernardino story is of wall-to-wall failure. From the inside, the story includes rapidly progressing civic and individual reinvention. One illustration is a prosperous Air Force veteran turned aerospace engineer named Mike Gallo. Five years ago, he decided to run for the board in charge of the city’s chronically troubled, low-scoring schools.
Why? “These kids deserve a better chance, and we can help them get it,” he told me. It sounds formulaic, but teachers, students, and politicians said that Gallo’s hard-charging, Teddy Roosevelt–style energy and effort had helped the schools begin a turnaround. He is now the board’s president.
Another illustration is his colleague Bill Clarke, who worked as a trainer and manager for General Dynamics and then had a career teaching manufacturing skills in local public schools. Five years ago, when he retired, he and Gallo set up a nonprofit technical school for unskilled locals, and intensified training programs in the public schools, whose students are mainly from poor households.
In these programs, the students learn to use and repair the machinery that defines the advanced-manufacturing age: 3-D printers, robots, and enormous CNC (computer numerically controlled) machine-tool systems.
“We’re training them on real machines, with real national-level certification, for good real-world jobs that really exist,” Clarke told me in the machine shop at his nonprofit school, beneath a banner saying we are making america great in manufacturing again.
Since 2010, he said, more than 400 students had passed through the school “right into the high-tech manufacturing world.” This was going on in the same city that was blanketed by reporters from around the world for several weeks. They did a thorough job on one particular story in San Bernardino, but more was happening.