I taught at an urban high school. Our school had an awesome carpentry program. Other schools in the district had similar trades programs.
George W. Bush destroyed them all with his idiotic “No Child Left Behind” law. NCLB tested for academic knowledge but not for trades knowledge. And woe to the district that had poor NCLB scores.
So as a matter of self-preservation, many districts dropped their trades programs and shoved the trades students into classes they neither needed nor wanted (into advanced algebra, for example).
I’m retired now. I’m told that the trades programs are slowly coming back. That’s good news. But we shouldn’t forget how W’s stupidity wrecked the field for a good 15 years.
Community colleges. There are about a hundred of them here in Ca. Trump takes office in January and demands non-stop trade school programs with no summers off. Give them until September to set them up. Openly call for the turning away of useless degree programs where 18 year-olds park their behinds for 4-6 years on someone else’s dime. Then there’s the retirement plans to offset SSI that won’t be there.
That was Bush’s got his big “reach across the aisle” with Teddy Kennedy. More like a reach around.