Tenth Anniversary Celebration of the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center Honoring Martin Haberman

Martin Haberman Columnist and Board Advisor EdNews.org

Ten years ago I wouldn't have predicted that either I or MTEC would still be around. Preparing 800 teachers for MPS and providing professional development and offering masters degrees with three different institutions are all remarkable achievements.

What does the future hold? What should the future hold? I'd like to spend the few minutes I have focusing on what MTEC might do to be of greatest help to MPS (The Milwaukee Public Schools) in future?

Last month the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee issued a report that listed Milwaukee as the city having the second highest unemployment for African Americans males in America—43%. (Pittsburgh was ranked #1.)To put some perspective on this, during the Great Depression of the 1930's the unemployment rate was 20%. We responded to a 20% unemployment rate by building dams, roads, and providing electrical power to every hamlet in the country. The federal government introduced massive programs to employ workers in a wide range of public works. How are we responding to an unemployment rate in many of our major urban areas today? The rate is more than double that of the depression? This differential response leads some to contend that a "depression" is when white people are out of work.

In the U.S. the dropout rate varies based on the methods used in different studies to calculate it. At the high end some studies indicate that 7,000 students drop out every day. At the low end other studies claim the figure is "only"4,000 a day. Using the more "conservative" lower estimates of the drop out rate this means that in a year of only 185 days (a school year) we create a city the size of Chicago every three years filled with drop outs. How long can we continue creating cities the size of Chicago filled with no hopers and maintain a successful society?

In the major urban school districts app. 2/3 of youth with special needs graduate from high school but only about half of African American and less than half of Latino students graduate. A youngster with a handicapping condition is more likely to graduate from high school than an African American or Latino.

As horrendous as this problem is there's an even bigger one…the high school graduates who think they were successful but then discover after they graduate that they lack the skills to enter the world of work or to succeed in a community college without remediation.
In all of the major urban areas the largest employers are no longer private companies or industries. The largest employers are the school systems themselves. But I know of no school system that hires its own 18 year old graduates in any capacity. The jobs available to high school graduates are essentially part time jobs that require little or no training, pay the minimum wage, hold out no career line for advancement and offer no health benefits. What a "successful" high school graduate can do is enter a remedial program at a two year community or vocational college while working one or two part time jobs with no health benefits at a minimum wage. The hope is that eventually they will learn the skills needed to enter the world of work and this sometimes happens. Be age 30 many females will latch on to a low level job with partial health benefits. Is this the pattern we want to continue into the future? A pattern in which some of the dropouts are likely to get a GED and latch on to some form of permanent job by age 30 while those who played by the rules and did everything we asked of them, land a low level job by age 25? And remember that even these modest positions are currently being accessed by predominantly women.

A well respected Princeton economist, Alan Blinder, recently completed a study of 500 occupations in America. One of his predictions is that 40 million good jobs will go overseas in the future. The total American work force is about 130 million. If we lose 40 million jobs we will lose over 30% of our jobs, many of them good jobs with benefits and career lines.
A few years back a task force of community and business leaders worked on a task force with the Milwaukee Public Schools to plan a school-to-work program, K through 12. Unfortunately, the superintendent at that time didn't understand that improving reading was an integral part of our school to work curriculum and dropped the initiative after almost 40 schools had signed on to implement it. He thought the school to work initiative would interfere with the emphasis he wanted to place on reading.

What can the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center do to contribute something, anything, to helping solve this problem of connecting school to the world of work? First, I believe we need a teacher training program for all teachers, regardless of the grade or subject matter they teach, to get the professional development they need to implement a school to work curriculum. Second, MTEC already offers three masters degrees. We could use these programs to offer teachers graduate credit for learning strategies to implement a school to work curriculum. Third, we can generate both teacher buy-in and teacher know-how by providing them with summer jobs in the private sector. "You can't teach what you don't know about places you ain't never been." For several years we had grants that provided paid summer jobs for teachers so that they could be employed in various jobs to personally experience a feel for the kinds of skills they needed to teach. Fourth, there are several schools that already offer small cooperative programs with businesses. The best of these can be replicated and disseminated to other schools. Fifth, there needs to be a continuing task force composed of business leaders, educators and community people who will monitor these programs and continually develop them. Sixth, we need a feedback system that will enable recent high school graduates to keep the task force up-dated on their work and school experiences after graduation.

I am confident that if we did these six things we could help our youth more successfully
navigate the very difficult transformation from high school student to working adult. I can't imagine a more important project by which MTEC might implement its mission and its vision for serving diverse children and youth in poverty in Milwaukee.

Note: (At the conclusion of this meeting MTEC established a Haberman Fund of $100,000 to begin work on these or other suggestions he might have for improving urban education.)

Dr. Haberman’s book, Star Teachers: The Ideology and Best Practices of Effective Teachers Serving Diverse Student in Poverty represents four decades of on-going research.

Monday

June 11th, 2007

Martin Haberman

Columnist and Board Advisor EducationNews.org

Education News

Tenth Anniversary Celebration of the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center Honoring Martin Haberman

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