February 2005 Edition of the Skills for Tomorrow Activities and Updates Listserv

February is national Groundhog Job Shadow month. Some labor and other organizations across the USA are hosting students during this month to give them the opportunity to learn, first hand, about the world of work. This is a wonderful opportunity for the labor movement and our education project partners to teach young people about good jobs, excellent benefits, and the role of unions in the economy.

It’s not too late to contact the national Groundhog Job Shadow Day organization to request a visit from some eager youth. Organizations and companies may select any day of the month to participate making it convenient for all to get on board!

If you have anything related to share, we would love to hear from you. To submit information on your organization, or career development curriculum, please email Linn Nguyen at lnguyen@teamster.org or Sharlene Mentor at smentor@teamster.org

Education Department Staff
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)
http://www.ibtstw.org

~~~~> Teamsters Help “Young People for the American Way” Kick-off Their Fellowship Program in Washington, D.C.

On Sunday, January 16, two staff members from Teamsters Education Department participated in the Young People for the American Way Fellowship Program at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The IBT was the only union represented among a host of special interest organizations such as Rock the Vote and ACORN.

The program consisted of a three-and-a-half day summit on January 14-17, 2005. Students showed interest in organizing workers and students as they explore ways to make a difference in our world and communities to gain a collective voice surrounding their issues.

The Young People for the American Way Fellowship Program is a year-long program for 120 freshmen, sophomores and juniors from colleges and universities around the United States. Fellows learn skills and strategies to become more effective leaders. Following the January summit, fellows will have the opportunity to organize an action campaign around an issue they select as important or critical.

After completing the year-long fellowship, fellows become alumni of the Young People For The American Way project, acting as mentors to future fellows in the 2006 Fellowship Class. In addition, several fellows will be selected to serve on the project’s Steering Committee to help shape future summits, on-campus trainings and on-line activities. People For the American Way Foundation will also work with fellows to help them identify potential internship and job opportunities in the progressive community.

~~~~> Teamsters Education Department Involved in Collective Bargaining Education Grant Project

The Teamsters Education Department partners with the AFL-CIO Community Services Agency of the Metropolitan Washington Council in a collective bargaining education grant project. In early 2004, the council received a grant from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) to promote the “Workplace Issues and Collective Bargaining in the Classroom” curriculum–including six lesson plans related to labor-management conflict resolution cases–developed by Los Angeles, California teachers Lynda Tubach and Patty Litwin.

The grant project’s principal goals are, “to raise student understanding of the meaning of work in our society, from both an historical and contemporary perspective, and to directly assist high school teachers of social studies, economics, U.S. government, and U.S. history by providing innovative curriculum materials for use in their classrooms.”

The project is overseen by the Collective Bargaining Education Committee (CBEC), a labor-management committee, consisting of members of the Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO’s Future Force Program, and representatives from various labor unions and employers in the area. This committee meets bi-monthly to plan, promote and implement project activities in the District of Columbia, Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and the City of Alexandria school districts.

To date, two successful “train-the-trainer” seminars have been held to teach teachers and labor-management leaders how to use these lesson-plans in classrooms and to train others to teach students through the use of Workplace Issues and Collective Bargaining in the Classroom curriculum materials. This curriculum is designed to help social studies teachers incorporate labor education into their education units. Other planned activities of the project include the participation of area high school students in collective bargaining simulations after receiving coaching from labor educators and leaders.

The Teamsters Education Department supports this project very much. The Department produced Duel of the Titans: Case Study of the 1997 Teamsters’ UPS Strike as an addition to the six-lesson curriculum referenced above.

2005 Spring Internship and Job Fair at George Mason University (GMU). University Career Services will host a two-day campus-wide event for organizations that have internships, co-op, full-time, part-time career related and/or summer job openings. This high visibility event attracts more than 1,500 students each year.

This event is open to young adults, ages 14-21, in grades 9-12 and/or in youth programs. It is sponsored by the Community Services Agency and the Washington Metro Council, AFL-CIO, and funded by the District of Columbia Employment Services.

Young people will have the opportunity to learn about available career opportunities from area union members and unionized companies. They will visit, displays of union-made products, witness demonstration skills, and participate in hands-on activities.

For more information about this event, please contact Jackie Barnes at (202) 857-0480 or email jbarnes@dclabor.org.

American Dream Poll - Teens Define American Dream as "Being Happy." Most Believe the American Dream is Achievable with Education

According to a new poll from the Job Shadow Coalition and Harris Interactive, nearly half of teens surveyed (47%) defined the American Dream as "Simply Being Happy, No Matter What You Do," far outpacing "Being Rich and/or Famous," which was identified by one-in-five teens (20%). The poll of 644 teens was conducted in December 2004 and has a margin of error of +/- 4%.

Overall, nearly three-in-four teens (71%) believe the American Dream is achievable today, with boys (75%) being slightly more optimistic than girls (68%). One-in-ten (10%) do not believe the American Dream is still achievable and nearly one-in-five (19%) are unsure. Nearly three-in-four (70%) believe higher education is essential to achieving the American Dream, while about one-in-six (16%) believe education "doesn't matter."

The earthquake and resulting tsunami that wracked coastlines along the Indian Ocean and killed an estimated 150,000 people or more prompted generosity and classroom lessons in U.S. schools last week.

As schools reopened after the holiday break, students and teachers were talking about the Dec. 26 temblor that struck western Indonesia and the devastating effects. Flags were flying at half-staff to honor the dead, relief money was being raised, and science and social studies classes were seeking to understand the natural disaster and its long-term implications for human welfare.

Teachers on Christmas vacation had ample time before classes resumed to reflect on how to address the catastrophe—and to gauge the appropriate presentation for students of different ages.

“The teaching profession has gained new experience in that balancing act since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Peggy Altoff, the social studies facilitator for the 30,000-student Colorado Springs, Colorado district.

Ms. Altoff, who is also the vice president of the Silver Spring, Maryland-based National Council for Social Studies, said she reminds her teachers that there is no single best response to an event of such magnitude.

To be sure, teachers have taken various tacks in different districts, schools, grades, and classrooms. Many geography and social studies teachers devoted classes all last week to the destruction that hit across South Asia as far as the east coast of Africa.

Gerald F. Wheeler, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, in Arlington, Virginia, said his organization had received 300 e-mails just three hours after it sent its members a query about how they were incorporating the tsunami disaster into lesson plans.

“Teachers have essentially moved their curriculum around to make lessons centered around this,” Mr. Wheeler said. He added that teachers have used resources such as the Web—and even bathtubs—to help students better understand tsunamis, huge sea waves caused by major under-ocean disturbances such as earthquakes.

Mary E. Warren, a science teacher at the 1,200-student Hannah Beardsley Middle School in Crystal Lake, Illinois, said the disaster, from the perspective of her subject, brought together such topics as energy transfer, plate tectonics, and the way in which waves travel. “It was a perfect opportunity to bring science they have learned into events that were happening in the world,” she said.

She had her students spend a day reading articles she had collected from newspapers and the Internet. The next day, they created a timeline on a world map showing how the disaster unfolded. Now they are writing one-page essays on different aspects of the tsunami.

“Many have been going home and watching CNN because there are so many stories that can give them an idea of what their focus can be,” she said.

Last month, before the disaster, 12th graders in Marisa Cicconi’s class at the 1,500-student Plum Borough Senior High School in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, completed research papers on earthquakes and how they can cause tsunamis. When they returned to school, they were full of questions—and Ms. Cicconi was ready with videotapes from the television news.

But even as she engaged in an opportunity for such teaching, Ms. Cicconi said, she and her students were keeping in mind the overwhelming human tragedy and natural destruction along the Indian Ocean.

In social studies, Ms. Altoff said, the best way to teach about the disaster is to link it to something the students are already learning or already know. For example, she said, how the natural catastrophe might affect existing conflicts in Sri Lanka and on the Indonesian island of Sumatra would be an important area of discussion.

She said it is more appropriate for high school teachers to cover the subject in greater detail than their elementary counterparts. Ms. Altoff warned that smaller children could be easily overwhelmed by disaster coverage.

Such was the dilemma Carla McDermott Walls faced when she entered her 1st grade classroom at Titus Elementary School in Warrington, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning of last week. A coordinator for a program that incorporates global themes in all subjects in the 19,000-student Central Bucks County school district, she knew that she should address the issue, but didn’t want to frighten her 24 students.

But when she pulled down the world map to talk about an unrelated topic, the pupils immediately bombarded her with questions about the tsunami.

The class then resolved to collect money for the victims, with one child even pledging his earnings from the tooth fairy. The collection jar in the classroom is now filling with change and bills, which her students were planning to count as part of a math lesson.

Fund raising took on a different kind of intensity in schools with large populations of children from the affected countries, such as India and Sri Lanka. For instance, John P. Stevens High School in Edison, N.J., where nearly half the 2,150 students are of Indian origin, mobilized immediately after school reopened Jan. 3 to aid fund-raising efforts, said Principal Fred J. Riccio. The school’s student council and honor society have teamed up to raise money and collect health-kit items. The school is also donating the money from the sale of its school-spirit bracelets—green rubber wristbands—to tsunami relief, Mr. Riccio said.

American students from an international school in Phuket, Thailand, help with a cleanup effort along Patong Beach in southern Thailand this month. In the United States, schools are helping to raise money for disaster relief.

In California’s Fremont school district, Warwick High School—where one-fifth of the 860 students are of Indian origin—is sending out fliers asking students and their families to make donations to the Red Cross.

“We read recently that 60 cents is enough to feed a child for a day in that part of the world,” said Christopher E. Hertz, the school’s principal. “So we tell children that they can donate a dollar at least. We want to make this an opportunity for our children to show compassion to other children in the world.”

Jana S. Eaton, a teacher at the 1,200-student Unionville High School in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, reported a similar level of engagement among her 10th and 12th graders.

Her classroom’s fund-raising drive has now enlisted the entire 3,600-student Unionville-Chadds Ford district. Her students have been researching charities online in order to find the most reputable and effective organizations to receive the funds.

Well-known relief agencies, such as the American Red Cross, Save the Children, and Care USA, are accepting money raised by schools. Save the Children offers a school fund-raising kit on its Web site, http://www.savethechildren.org.

Ms. Eaton, meanwhile, has been an especially valuable resource not only to her students, but also to her fellow teachers and community members. She spent six weeks on the eastern coast of India, near the area hit by the tsunami, last summer on a Fulbright fellowship.

“People want to know why so many people were living there, why some areas have been so hard to get to, and why the devastation has been so bad,” she said.

Fewer than six out of 10 students finish college within six years, and higher education institutions could do much more to improve such completion rates, according to a report released last week.

The report from the Education Trust, a Washington-based policy group, compares institutions with similar resources and student populations. It concludes that while several factors such as the academic preparation of the students, the availability of financial aid, and the amount of spending on instruction and student advising, play crucial roles in graduation rates, universities also need to identify and put in place practices that have made a difference in other, similar institutions.

Kati Haycock, the executive director of the Education Trust, said that when her group considered whether colleges that are roughly similar and serve roughly the same kind of students had similar graduation rates, “the answer was absolutely not.”

“Some do a lot better; some have twice the graduation rates as others; some stand out for their success in working with African-American or Latino students,” she said during a conference call.

The study grouped “similar” institutions based on estimated median SAT scores for the most recent freshman class, admissions selectivity, enrollment, financial resources, and the percentage of students from low-income families, among other factors, and found that some consistently outperformed their peers.

The groupings included categories such as “elite private institutions” and “public master’s-granting institutions.” Each institution’s rate was based on how many members of its entering class of 1997 finished within six years.

The Education Trust also unveiled an interactive Web site, www.collegeresults.org, that allows users to compare graduation rates at a certain university or college to those of similar institutions. The database, which includes 1,400 private and public four-year U.S. colleges, allows users to study graduation rates broken down by students’ race, ethnicity, and gender. Information used for the database comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s Graduation Rate Survey released last year.

The Jan. 18 report cites as an example Alcorn State University in Mississippi, a historically black institution that has a six-year graduation rate of 47.9 percent, an average of 14.6 percentage points higher than for similar institutions.

Malvin Williams, the vice president for academic affairs at Alcorn State, said that his institution had improved its graduation rate by increasing its focus on freshmen. The university is in one of the state’s poorest areas, and 97 percent of its students receive financial aid, he said.

After realizing 20 years ago that Alcorn State was retaining fewer than 50 percent of its freshmen, Mr. Williams said, the university put together a research team that studied how other colleges retained and promoted students. The result was the creation of the College for Excellence, a concentrated two-year program that freshmen and sophomores at Alcorn State must complete before being admitted to a major program. Each student is given a program adviser who offers social and academic support, in addition to a faculty adviser.

The course enrollment for most freshman and sophomore classes at the university was reduced to fewer than 25 students, Mr. Williams said.

Alcorn State now retains around 75 percent of its freshmen through the sophomore year. And all the changes came at a cost of about $200,000 per year. “It was one of the best decisions we ever made,” Mr. Williams said.

The Education Trust report cites glaring disparities in the graduation rates for black, Latino, and Native American students compared with their white and Asian peers.

“These are the most academically prepared minority students our education system produces, and yet when they go to college, they are not likely to get their degree on time,” the report says.

Overall, it says, of the more than 1 million first-time degree-seeking students who start at four-year colleges each year, hundreds of thousands do not earn the degrees “they want, work for, pay for, and truly need.”

Arellana Cordero, who entered the University of New Mexico as a freshman in 1993, was one such student who wandered away from her path to a degree.

Ms. Cordero, who was class president and an honor student in high school, appeared marked for success at college. But after five years at the university, she said, she began to feel her educational career had gone astray, and she doubted if she would ever get a degree. Then she got married, started a construction business with her husband, and quit the university just 15 credits shy of a degree.

Years later, Ms. Cordero said, she decided to go back to school, but faced difficulties in explaining her position to university officials. She finally found help from the university’s Graduation Project, a program started in 1996 to track down students who had quit college.

Ms. Cordero, who earned a business degree in 2004, said going back for it was not a “necessary priority for furthering my career, but I personally needed to complete it.”

The University of New Mexico project has so far tracked down nearly 1,800 students, of whom 1,100 have earned degrees. The program is cited by the Education Trust in another report released last week to show that colleges that work to improve their graduation rates have had success.

“Graduation rate-gains are very possible, when institutions decide to pursue them,” that report says.

Even as the jobs picture slowly improves – the unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent in January – career seekers should still focus in on its brightest parts. Many fields are likely to grow, even if employment markets stagnate.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes projections of where job opportunities will be found in the future, in order to help people entering the work force or planning a career change.

One factor creating opportunities is the aging of America. As baby boomers, 77 million strong, approach retirement age, they've started to consume a host of services and products that are different from what they used at a younger age.

Even though boomers may remain active far longer than the generations that preceded them, they'll still have to cope with a variety of health and wellness issues. Many of the fastest growing employment opportunities are in health care.

Nurses, physical therapists, and physician's assistants jobs are all increasing steadily, sometimes spectacularly.

The Labor Department projects that more than 600,000 nursing jobs will open up over the 10 years that end in 2012, a 27 percent increase over 2002. Physician's assistants jobs will grow by nearly 50 percent and physical and occupational therapists by more than 35 percent.

Registered nurses earn about $52,000 on average, and supervisory personnel make even more. PAs average more than $63,000 and physical therapists more than $61,000. Occupational therapists make about $53,000.

Home care workers will also see a big increase in jobs, up more than 40 percent by 2012.

As boomers strive to maintain their healthy glow – and their teeth – fitness trainers (up 44.5 percent) and dental hygienists (43.1 percent) will be in demand.

Other good opportunities will occur in emergency services. Ambulance drivers (up 26.7 percent) and hazardous materials removal workers (43.1 percent) will benefit.

Tech workers will still be in demand, although the field won't be quite as hot as during the 1990s. But the country will need more than 420,000 new computer support workers and another 307,000 software engineers, the BLS estimates.

As boomers fade, many will be leaving their long-held, public-sector jobs. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the average age of federal workers has reached nearly 46 years of age, up more than three-and-a-half years compared with 1990.

At both the Energy and the Education Departments, the average age is near 50 and it's over that half-century mark at HUD. Considering that federal employees can retire at 55 after 30 years on the job, it means many positions will open up.

"You have a great number of people at the federal government who will reach retirement age over the next several years," says Kevin Simpson, executive vice president of the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to revitalizing federal government service.

With 1.8 million workers, the federal government is the country's biggest employer, and it will have to have to go on a big hiring binge, adding nearly 150,000 jobs over the next two years alone.

Jobseekers may be put off by the idea of working for the government. It is perceived as bureaucratic, stodgy, and low paying, a poor choice for an ambitious go-getter.

At the same time, people also realize that government work is steady (you don't have to worry about your company going bankrupt), has excellent benefits, and normal work hours, which enable employees to maintain a good balance with their private life. In addition, the government also offers educational incentives and liberal leave time.

The government "does an exemplary job of hiring and promoting women and minorities," as Simpson puts it, making it an especially attractive employer for them.

Although entrepreneurial types would almost certainly find government jobs stifling, the perception that they pay poorly fails to hold up under scrutiny.

You won't become a dot.com millionaire but, according to figures compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the average federal employee earns a salary comparable or better than his counterpart in private industry – in almost every job category.

The comparison doesn't take into account differences in length of time on the job. But it does at least indicate that the government tries to stay competitive.

"Polling tells us that this generation is very interested in doing public service, but they're more likely to look to the non-profit sector to scratch that itch," Simpson says. Putting the word out that you can do okay working with the feds is the message his organization is trying to air.

Get Connected: Web Site Links

~~~~> Child Labor Public Education Project

The Child Labor Public Education Project of the University of Iowa Labor Center and Center for Human Rights provides educational workshops and materials on a range of issues regarding child labor in the U.S. and other countries.

For more information, visit http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/.

End of Issue

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Send your questions or comments to: info@ibtstw.org ©2005 The International Brotherhood of Teamsters / Minnesota Teamsters Service Bureau

Send your questions or comments to: info@ibtstw.org
©2005 The International Brotherhood of Teamsters / Minnesota Teamsters Service Bureau