December 17, 2023

During the second week of this month, New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams announced “An Action Plan for Young Adult Career Success.”  According to the press release, this “action plan” provides more than $600 million for NYC’s young people to, “ultimately, enter the workforce.”  This is not merely job training, job placement, or job-related education, but it includes such intangibles as “discover[ing] their passion, receiving hands on [?] experience,” and — here’s the key word — “ultimately” entering the workforce.  According to the press release, the Action Plan is directed to help young people who are out of work and out of school.

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When reading all the glowing quotations from heads of various programs and agencies, this writer was struck by the vagueness of the announcement combined with many (too many!) glowing adjectives (meaning platitudes) about the potential for this new jobs commitment.  These glowing words contrasted with the incredible lack of specifics about the programs, about the “pre-apprenticeship” opportunities that will be offered, about the jobs that participants will be qualified for once they connect with and are developed by the programs offered, and about the time frame for initiating the programs and completing the programs.  Over a period of how many years will the $600 million be spent?

The mayoral statement anticipates “serving up to 250,000 young people.”  If we divide 250,000 into $600 million, it comes to $2,400 per young person.  This means that the financial support per participant is actually very low, and probably not enough to sustain for a very long time a person in NYC who is out of school and out of work.

As already noted, this program or combination of programs is not only job training and job placement.  Nor is it a great government employment project like the Civilian Conservation Corps or the National Youth Administration, which were created during Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Rather, reading between the lines, it is an attempt to bridge the gap between the unmotivated and unemployable and the actual world of work.  For example, the announcement by the mayor’s office includes reference to $10 million “to develop a high-quality tech talent pipeline.”  One must wonder at this language that mystifies rather than clarifies the nature of the types of employment implied by a “tech talent pipeline.” 

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In the 1990s, I was employed as a teacher in a high school in the New York City schools.  One gifted computer teacher who was unable to get funding to begin a computer lab came into the high school with his cousin on nights and weekends to do the wiring to create such a lab.  Although he was given a hard time by the principal, who was on the brink of giving the new lab over to somebody else, the creative teacher was ultimately allowed to teach classes in computers.  The high school was one of the roughest, most ill behaved high schools in New York City, with 18 unarmed security guards (who had peace officer status and thus were able to carry handcuffs) and two full-time police assigned to the school.  Students had to pass their book bags through metal detectors, and random students were examined for weapons individually by security guards with metal-detecting wands.  Not only did the principal give that gifted teacher a hard time, but the rebellious students who were in his classes tried to sabotage the lab by putting super glue in the keyboards and in the mice used to navigate the screens.  When I gently suggested to a certain young lady student that she move her cursor a little to the left, she shouted “f— you,” turned over her chair, and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind her. 

To the best of my knowledge, behavior like this was never resolved in my decades in the NYC high schools.  In fact, one of the graduating seniors told me as she was about to graduate that she and her friends were high during most of their time in high school, including the time in my class which was her way of partially apologizing for her bad behavior two and a half years previously.  Are pre-apprenticeship programs going to overcome issues like these?

Thus, if we put terms like “tech talent pipeline” together with another term in Mayor Adams’s announcement — namely, support for “pre-apprenticeship programs” — we confront another bubble of unacceptable vagueness.  I was somewhat familiar with the term “apprenticeship” because this was the position wherewith one prepares himself for specific employment, whether as a plumber, bricklayer, or computer tech specialist.  There may be a classroom component to apprenticeships, but typically they are hands-on, involving a myriad of practical solutions to some complex practical problems that involve installing, fixing, modifying, evaluating, or replacing some mechanical, electrical, or physical object.

Under apprenticeships, the goal is for the apprentices to learn how to do a specific occupation.  But since pre-apprentices do not qualify to be apprentices, the assumption must be that if they are not ready to learn how to do something, then they must go through a preliminary training that will enable them or ready them to learn how to learn.  Are we edging toward future pre-pre-apprenticeship programs?  

One can see that this thought process can easily be a slippery slope.  Apprenticeship has become an increasingly legitimized category in recent years.  In 2020, there were more than 636,000 apprentices in the U.S., which represented a 70% increase since 2011 in the number of  those who completed a Registered Apprenticeship Program (RAP).  To be a Registered Apprentice, one must be 18 years of age or older and have received a high school diploma or a GED.  Thus, in NYC, support for pre-apprenticeship would go to those who had not completed high school or a GED and thus could, in theory, be under 18.  They would qualify to “learn how to learn how to” participate in such employment as carpenter, construction worker, machinist, corrections officer, etc.

We cannot close our analysis without considering the historical and philosophical context of this ambiguity.  This approach to giving jobs and directions to people’s lives through apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships and beefed up social outreach is actually a continuation of the progressive educational model established by John Dewey in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where education was to prepare people to take their place within an interdependent industrial society.  Education was to be the instrument of social integration and adjustment, not intellectual abilities and moral values, at its core.  This socialist ideal was consistent with the ideal of molding people to meet the needs of society.  (Remember Karl Marx’s saying: “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”)  John Dewey wrote, “The school is to be a reflection of the larger society outside its walls, in which life can be learned by living.”