TECHNOS

February 9, 2012

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 1995 Vol. 4 No. 1

Interview with John R. McKernan, Jr.

By Carole Novak, Editor, TECHNOS Quarterly

John “Jock” Mckernan served two terms as Governor of Maine. One of his major contributions during his tenure was the development of the Maine Youth Apprenticeship program, which was designed to revolutionize education in that state. Modeled after the European system of apprenticeship but with an American emphasis on flexibility, Maine's program was launched in 1992 [see School-to-Work—in Maine and across the Country Sidebar]. It calls for unprecedented cooperation among three essential groups: Business, Education, and Government. McKernan, a former chair of the education commission of the states, outlines the program in his 1994 book, Making the Grade: How a New Youth Apprenticeship System Can Change Our Schools and Save American Jobs. The book is written in collaboration with Jobs for America's Graduates, Inc., which McKernan serves as chair, and Jobs for the Future. TECHNOS spoke with then-Governor McKernan in November 1994, when his wife, Olympia Snowe, was running for the U.S. Senate and Angus King was running for the governorship.

* [Angus King was elected Governor of Maine in November 1994 and sworn into office on January 5, 1995.]

The most fascinating thing to me about your book, Making the Grade, is the fact that you were able to get people in education, government, and business to agree and to cooperate in order to implement the Maine Youth Apprenticeship Program. How did you manage to achieve consensus?

Well, it helps to have the governor be committed to it—it's amazing what an impact that can have. And one of the things that we've tried to do is to grow the program fast enough so that it won't require the next governor* to have to spend as much time on it as I did. It was something that I feel very strongly about, so I was willing to put in the time and be the facilitator to get the meetings scheduled and get people on board. I'm not sure that a new governor coming in is going to have either the inclination or the time to give that I did.

I just gathered people together, both to design the program and to participate in it. I had a lot of one-on-one meetings with people in education and in business. Now, obviously, since I was the governor, I didn't have too much trouble getting government to participate, but it was one of those activities that I think is absolutely essential for everyone to participate in and to be a part of. It just doesn't work unless you have three willing partners. It wasn't easy. But everybody knows it's the right thing to do. Everyone knows that the current system of preparing young people for the world of work is outdated and not helpful for businesses. The problem we have is that educators don't quite know how to change it, and businesses don't know what they really ought to be doing about it.

Did you build in any tax incentives for the employers who participate in your program?

We haven't. We talked about it and concluded that it wasn't necessary to get the program started. We originally had planned on having a tax credit for 20 percent of the $5,000 the businesses had to pay to sponsor each of the apprentices. But ultimately, given the budget constraints we had, we decided that it was not going to have a major impact on participation by employers and, therefore, we could probably spend our money better somewhere else. We may get to a point where a tax incentive would make sense.

Is it a voluntary program among the districts and schools?

Yes. This is a totally voluntary program. What we have done is to create a Center for Youth Apprenticeship at Southern Maine Technical College. We have an advisory board—and our Commissioner of Education as well as our Chancellor and the head of our Technical College System sit on that—so we have a number of people who are involved in education who are out helping us sell the programs. There are about 150 high schools in our state, and 35 of them are participating this year. Frankly, we may have trouble getting more than 90 ultimately, because some of them are so small and in such rural areas that I'm not sure there would be enough jobs in those areas to warrant much participation from them. So we're probably halfway to what would be the most realistic total size of the program. And we have only about 57 businesses that are participating, which is probably five percent of what we need to make this program be the size we want. But we're seeing exponential growth each year, and that's what I think will happen once the program really gets into each of the areas. We're only beginning our second year in most of the areas of our state. The first year was just in the greater Portland area, which is the largest city. Last year we went into all five areas of the major population centers, where 80 to 90 percent of our population is.

Do you think this program could be transplanted to other states—such as New York or California or Texas or Florida—places where we've got not only large urban areas but also large immigrant populations?

There's no question but that these programs would be just as useful in those areas. Tulsa has a program, for instance, that they've started, and they're doing some pilot programs in Milwaukee and outside of Philadelphia and in some parts of New York as well. It can be done anywhere. The real issue here is, how do we make sure that youngsters coming out of our schools have the skills they need for the jobs that are going to exist? And the only way that we can do that is to get businesses in a local area—it could be a community, it could be a county, it could be a state—together with educators so that they understand each other better. That can happen anywhere in America. In fact, it's perhaps easier in urban areas because you don't have some of the travel considerations that you have in rural areas.

The important thing, though, that we're trying to stress is that the history of education in this country has really centered around either the best students or the worst students. And the reason is that the kids in the middle were always able to get a decent job when they got out of school, even if they didn't have much formal education. And that's what has changed in our society. We have become so technology driven, and the competition from outside America is so great, that we are now requiring more and more skills in our work force—and it's that great middle, which has sort of been ignored as they move through the education system because they didn't cause problems and they weren't going to go to four-year colleges, so as long as they made it through and got the basics, they could do fine with the kind of jobs that we had in our country. That has changed, therefore schools have to change. I think the only way they can do that is if businesses get involved in helping them establish what criteria they need in order to be able to hire kids coming out of the schools during the last pan of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. That's going to be important, no matter what part of the country you come from.

One thing that has struck me over the last eight years that I've been Governor is the role technology plays in all the changes in our society. I am convinced that we have to make sure youngsters get the kind of education that is going to allow them to participate in this new information age by having at least a basic understanding of technology. What we have tried to do in our state is to enhance the use of technology throughout the early grades. And what we hope to do with the apprenticeship program is to ensure that through the involvement of businesses in the education system—starting in the eleventh grade—youngsters are going to have the opportunity sooner than they otherwise would to learn those kinds of skills that are oftentimes technology-based that will give them a real leg up as they get out into the work force.

Has the state of Maine set aside funding for technology implementation in the schools?

We have technology grants that we have given out to our schools and have set aside money specifically for that. We also have developed an interactive television system within our university system that is one of the tops in the country. Because of the rural nature of Maine, we are doing a lot of interactive work and bringing university courses to over 40 high schools in our state so that people can get graduate degrees and additional courses through the use of that medium. We lost, unfortunately, an interactive TV bond issue for our high schools—we want to wire up all of our high schools so we can start to make better use of technology to bring courses that perhaps some of the smaller schools couldn't afford to get. We're going to go back into the next session of the legislature with a revamped version of that so we can continue to move forward. But I am just convinced that if you look at the gap that has grown between the haves and the have-nots, you will see that probably half of the wage differential between those who are educated and those who aren't is based on their ability to use a computer. Therefore. what we have to do is find a way to get kids more access to more technology, and I think the apprenticeship program does that by getting them the opportunity to work in actual offices where the technology is far more current than you could ever have it in our educational institutions.

How will the federal seed money from the School-to-Work Opportunities Act be used in Maine?

Well, I was a little frustrated, frankly, with the way the grant program came out. I don't want to be an ingrate—they did give us two million dollars a year for five years—but we had hoped to get nine million dollars a year for five years. We had hoped they would look at the merits of the program and not use a formula approach that would cut people back almost based on population—which is basically what happened. It was frustrating for us because we thought we had a real systemic approach in which we were going to use the standards that we had begun to set for a certificate in our apprenticeship program as the standard. And then have everything funneling toward that standard—whether was tech prep, cooperative education, vocational education, or apprenticeship—and the only difference would be how a student would get to that certificate. It might require a longer period of time it someone took one course as opposed to another—but everything was going toward what had been commonly agreed upon by businesses and educators for each of the occupational clusters as standards that were necessary for people to be certifiable as employable in particular areas. We thought that was a wonderful way to foster the kind of reform we need in our educational system and not have a lot of separate programs out there going in different directions.

But the two million dollars we received was helpful because that is going to allow us to fully implement the apprenticeship program over the next five years, which I think is an important foundation on which to build the other programs. I think the School-to-Work Opportunities grant program is very important because it forces states to look at what they might be able to do in this area and it dangles the federal dollars out there, which makes addressing the issues more attractive.

What about the Carl Perkins and Adult Education and National Literacy moneys? Are these conflicting with school-to-work programs?

I don't think they are. One of the big problems that I have with much of what we're doing, whether it's in adult ed or voc ed or cooperative education or tech prep, is that everybody has set up what they think is a nice end result to their own programs. But the state and the industry or the occupational clusters involved haven t really been a part of determining what skills they want kids to have. Therefore, we're operating on the last half century's information on things that were established when the program first came into being, and we don't really have a systematic way of updating what the result should be coming out of these programs.

I told the story in my book about when we first started our apprenticeship program. We wanted to have three or four forward-looking occupations, so we decided to use health care. We decided to turn a lab technology program at one of our technical colleges into more of a work-based learning opportunity and make it more of an apprenticeship approach—because kids really liked the program and there was always a waiting list for it. So we made that decision, got the human resources directors together from the three hospitals in Portland, and they all told us that they didn't think that was a good program because they wouldn't have any jobs for those kids when they finished. Of course, that brought up the question of why we were teaching the lab tech course at our college. The answer was because nobody had bothered to tell the college that it wasn't really what the hospitals needed. Those kinds of things are found throughout our educational process. I hope that we can start to bring together businesses and educators to draft the standards for certification. Then there will be the kind of dialog that will drive the curriculum because of the standards that the educators and the business community have adopted for each of the occupational clusters or industries.

The other thing that struck me as I read your book is the cooperation that you received from the technical college system in Maine. There's a bit of a problem in some states convincing the colleges that some of the technical credits young people earn during high school or even at a two year college should be accepted at four year institutions.

Well, we have a little bit of a problem with that, too, especially in the two-year to four-year situation. But we have a very good chancellor of our university system who believes strongly that a four-year education is not in everybody's best interest. I didn't appoint him, by the way, but he agrees with my view that what we need to do is make sure we offer a lot of options so that people get to play to their strengths. It may be a one-year certificate for some people, it may be a two-year or a four-year degree. But what we need to do is have those options available and make sure they are interrelated pathways so you can get credit for the path that you've taken, if you decide you want to move onto another one. That is really the underpinnings on which our program is based.

It became clear to me when we were in Europe that there are really two things that made the European systems of apprenticeship work: One, the education was relevant, so the kids were interested in it; and two, it had such a tradition that the apprenticeship route was viewed in one's community as a worthy route to take and one for which people received respect, so there was a reward as well among one's peers for having done it. It struck me that you couldn't do that in America without having a college component to it, because we had just spent 50 years telling everyone in this country that if they wanted to be a success, they'd better go to college. How are you going to come back and say, ‘Hey, we were wrong. You don't have to go to college’? That was when we realized that apprenticeship had to be integrated into our post-secondary system. And it seemed that the most obvious choice was the technical college because many of the courses we're teaching, they also taught at the technical college system.

We could, in fact, give credit for work-based learning as well as academic learning. What has to happen, especially in secondary vocational courses is to get more involvement between the university and community college sectors with the high schools. The high schools must give kids the kind of learning experience that would warrant their getting any credit for what they learned. Part of the problem is that many of the vocational courses in our high schools and our vocational schools aren't worthy of very much credit in a post-secondary institution. There has to be a greater interrelationship, so the courses are ones that have already been discussed with the institutions of higher education and they're taught in a way that would allow them to give credit. Then we have to hope that the post-secondary institutions are enlightened enough to realize that this is the wave of the future and they ought to be figuring out what it would take for kids to get credit for applied curriculum or work-based learning.

This whole idea of an applied curriculum not quite being worthy is something that we at AIT run into all the time because we produce those materials. We've found it difficult to have them endorsed by some teachers groups or by the NCAA or by some universities. Do you have any thoughts about that?

I think a youth apprenticeship system will make a big difference in a lot of what's called ‘nontraditional’ coursework because the fact that the courses are designed to receive credit from both our technical colleges and our university means that they are going to be at a high enough level that there shouldn't be any question. That, I think, is what has to happen all across the country. We have to do this, starting out state by state, and then hopefully we'll be able to get the NCAA, for instance, to decide what their criteria are going to be when they see these state standards.

I can assure you that there isn't any state university—probably almost any college—in this country where the kids who go through our youth apprenticeship program couldn't do the work. We screen kids carefully, and they learn a lot more than most of their peers in high school during their coursework. They become much more serious students. And they are the kind of kids who will benefit from a college education. So that, I think, can happen. But that is a far cry from many of what we have historically seen as the vocational courses. That's, I think, the problem we're now having—and it's why certification is so important.

Ultimately, what we all hope is that various associations—whether it's the NCAA or whether it's the Metal Products Association or whether it's the American Bankers Association—will ultimately design the standards that are acceptable to the members of their associations. Then there will be a number of different ways that the courses will be taught, depending on what it is that a youngster happens to have the most interest in. We want to establish what both the academic level of proficiency has to be and what the industry or occupational level of proficiency has to be in order to receive certificates. Then, we want to give people a lot of pathways so we might have a program that would say, ‘At the end of your 13th year, you could get both your academic as well as your applied certificate in a particular field, in our apprenticeship program.’

It sounds as though you're trying to build some flexibility into your program, which is something that the European models have been criticized for not having.

Absolutely. In fact, those models, in my view, wouldn't work in this country because of that. First of all, they track kids at a very young age—which is something that I don't think we should do—and secondly, it's a lot harder than it needs to be to move from one program to the next.

It seems to be so. Was there any kind of negative reaction from the citizens of Maine when you went to Europe?

Well, since I had a foundation pay for it, they weren't unhappy in the least! The good thing about apprenticeship is that people have a universally positive visceral response to the concept. It's fascinating. People know that we aren't doing enough for kids who aren't going on to four-year colleges. If they have a child in that category, they're darn sure, and even if they don't, they realize that we've neglected those kids. So it really is an easy intellectual sell. It is not as easy to get people to participate, especially businesses, and that is what I see as the great threat to enhancing education—small and medium-sized businesses who don't have the expertise and aren't really sure why it affects them, and if so, what they should do about it. That's why what we're trying to do is get some of our larger businesses to help us in the first few years so we can design workbooks, if you will, for the meisters, or mentors, who will work with the apprentices. Even if you're an insurance agency of seven people, you could have one of those people be in charge of an apprentice. We would have a booklet that would tell you what you were supposed to do each of the 30 weeks that the youngster's with you in each of the three years. It would be spelled out for the businesses.

Was that a problem for them?

Sure. And they should sometimes say, ‘We don't know anybody who knows how to do any of this stuff. We're not teachers.’ And they probably don't have any real training programs for their new employees, either. What this, we hope, can do is to say, ‘Look, we have not only group programs for the meisters who are participating all across the state but also a how-to notebook in your particular field and your particular apprenticeship, so you can stay a week ahead of the kids.’ With the price being only $5,000 to sponsor an apprentice, most of these apprenticeships aren't rocket science—so companies might lose money the first year that they participate, but by the second year, the youngster is generally pulling his or her own weight, and by the third year they're probably making money while the student is there. As a three-year investment, even if you don't hire the young person, you still have not lost any money over the three-year period. In fact, you've made a big difference in that youngster's life, you have increased the pool of qualified employees for employers in the state, and have probably on the whole, made some money for your company.

After only three years, do you have any documentation as to the effects of the apprenticeship program?

At this point, our first year's group is working on their first year at the post-secondary level. This is the third year of the program, so this is the first year that they have been at the technical colleges doing their academic work after graduating last June. So it really will be next year that we'll find out how many of them actually do well. What's interesting is that we're seeing all sorts of results, which is what we'd hoped for. Kids who decide to stay on and get their associate's degree after this year, others who are going to go to work full time for the businesses that they're now working for, and some who are going to work full time and continue their education at night to get their associate's degree. For the most part, it is working as we'd hoped. We've had some drop out—some for unavoidable personal reasons and others who've decided that they wanted to get out because all of a sudden they've been inspired to get a four-year degree, so they've gone into the college prep program—which is, in our view, a great result. So that's where we are at this point. We won't really know for another couple of years what happens to these kids after they finish the three years.

How was it that you chose this particular program as your personal crusade?

Well, it's funny. I've chaired a group called Jobs for America's Graduates, which did some of the research for my book, since 1989. It's a program that works with at-risk kids on school-to-work transition issues. It started out about 15 years ago as a program that looked at the toughest 20 percent of the senior class who were in jeopardy of dropping out or not graduating. We put in a job specialist who works at about a 1 to 40 ratio, and we have found that even intervening that late, we have a 90 percent success rate in kids either graduating or getting their GED within nine months of when they would have graduated—and 80 percent of them end up getting jobs. It really has shown that if you just give some of these toughest kids an adult role model, someone who's looking after them and nurturing them, even at that late age, you're able to have a phenomenal success rate.

But what we noticed over the last few years has been that our job specialists say it's tougher and tougher to find these kids jobs. When the program first started, we taught them to dress up and how to do a resume and how to interview, and what their obligations are when they go to work—like showing up everyday—and how to relate to adults. For a while, that was enough: it made them great employees, and we had great success. We have found more recently that it is tougher and tougher to find them jobs because even though they have all those skills, they have no substantive skills. Therefore, we really had limited the kinds of jobs they were able to get because of the way that the world of work had changed.

I then talked to a couple of CEOs in Maine and to Lou Gerstner, who was then at RJR Nabisco, and they were giving me anecdotal evidence. They said things like, ‘We can't afford to hire people who don't have skills anymore. The competition's too great. We used to be able to train them to do something that we could afford to pay them a decent wage for, but that's all changed. We just can't do that anymore. We need kids that can contribute something. And kids coming out of high school today can't.’

So, it was really the combination of those two experiences that made me realize the greatest threat to our standard of living in this country is not how we tweak the educational system for the top third of the class. The real challenge for us is how to do a better job with the middle third. Those are the kids who are really going to determine our standard of living. Those are the kids who have something to offer, if we just had a system that gave them the skills to operate. That was when I started thinking a bit about the Japanese model, which is much too structured for us, and then the European model, which I went to look at.

Something sort of clicked when I was in Europe—this was a system that we could adapt to the American system to really make a difference in the lives of a lot of kids. When you realize that only about 25 or 30 percent of the kids who go to four-year colleges ever graduate, all of a sudden, you realize that going to a four-year college is not a panacea. They'd be better off going into the Youth Apprenticeship Program than taking a year and a half of liberal arts courses at a university and dropping out. Heck, a lot of kids graduate with four-year degrees without anything that's usable.

What do they do? They go to grad school.

That's right. And that's almost what we've gotten to. The real challenge for us in these kinds of programs—and something that we struggle with—is how to communicate what's happening to parents, how to help them understand that, yes, their child needs to go to college, but it might be a different kind of college than they've been envisioning.

Maybe we've done a wonderful public relations job for our universities but now it's time to get realistic about what we want our kids to do in the future.

That's right. I had breakfast with a fellow who works for the president of a community college in Tulsa that's doing some things in youth apprenticeship. He said to me, ‘You knows this whole society is run by Harvard University anyway, and this situation is a classic example. Some Harvard professor after the war wrote that we ought to get a liberal, general education to begin with and then specialize afterward.’ And he said we've taken that to the extreme and what people ought to realize is that probably what we need to do now is get people a technical education, or a specific education, so there's something they can do in society and then let them expand beyond that. And that's sort of the approach we've taken.

When I called Bill Bennett to ask him what he thought about youth apprenticeship, to see whether it was something he was interested in being a part of, one of the things he said was, ‘Oh, I think it's a great idea. Your problem is going to be that you're going to have more kids who want to do it than you're going to have slots for, because,’ he said—as only he could say—‘Why wouldn't anybody want to learn something useful before he went to Princeton?’

You know what's interesting about that? I had dinner with a banker in Munich who said that the most sought-after people in the banking industry when they come out of four-year business colleges are those who did an apprenticeship before they got a four-year degree. Because they already know the industry.

They have the practical skills.

That's right. And they already have worked in the industry for three years and understand banking and there isn't as much training involved. It's the same thing in the United States. If we have a youngster who goes through an apprenticeship program and then at age 19 enrolls in a program to get a business degree or a four-year degree or a two-year degree, that extra year of being certified and understanding an industry, I think, is going to make a huge difference in his or her employability.

What do you think is the purpose of education or learning schooling, whatever one wants to call it?

I describe it the way our Commission on the Common Core of Learning described it when we formed about a 40-person task force back in the late 1980s to look at what young people in the 21st century ought to know and be able to do, because it was something we hadn't really looked at in 50 or 60 years. Times have changed. What should we be doing about a curriculum that really hasn't changed that much?

We want to produce young people coming out of our educational system who can be productive and contributing citizens in the 21st century. And that means understanding where we've come from; it means understanding how to interact with others; it means knowing something about the world around us and having the basic skills to function in modern society. I think that is what the role of education has to be at the most basic level. And after that, people's own interests and strengths, I think, take over and will push them in one direction or another. We ought to have a system that is open enough to accommodate that.

You chose politics as opposed to going into education. Is there an example that you followed? Do you have a hero?

When I was in high school. I thought I was going to be playing basketball for the Boston Celtics, so I wasn't all that interested in politics. It wasn't until I got to college that I realized I was going to need a new career. That was probably my awakening to more of the world around me. It was during the turbulent time of the late 1960s when I was at Dartmouth College, and a lot of things were hitting a lot of us during that time. That was when I first started to get interested in politics. And what struck me—it was probably my moderate nature—was that there had to be a better way to effect change in our society without civil disobedience. It really was Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay who influenced me, since I sort of had Republican leanings anyway, as understanding a better vision of what we could do within the system to make responsible change. Lindsay became a Democrat after that, so I can strike him off my list now! But at the time, I thought he was a good example of somebody who could find a consensus—I think I'm a consensus kind of person. That was really what started to drive me toward a life of trying to make a difference and doing it within the system.

You've written that you think coordination of these programs at the national level is going to be essential very soon. If the United States were to have a youth apprenticeship czar, would John McKernan be the person?

Well. I've told [Labor] Secretary [Robert] Reich as well as Deputy Secretary Doug Ross that I'd be happy to be a part of any of these efforts to have people see the wisdom of the need to focus on school-to-work. I don t have an interest in doing it on a full-time basis, but I'd be happy to be on commissions or on ad hoc groups that are touring the country trying to have other states see the importance of it. I'm frankly not sure that the federal government ought to be doing much more than being a catalyst and a coordinator and a facilitator. I don't think we want to establish the national standards and say, ‘These are the standards.’ What we want to do is be more aggressive in working with groups in particular industries to decide what they think their standards should be.

We can get into the same problem at the national level—probably worse—that we had in Maine by trying to have the government figure out what it is kids ought to be learning and what the standards ought to be. That has to be done in the private sector.

I think if there is a role for government, it's that of proselytizing and making sure that the various business groups understand the importance of their being involved in apprenticeship. Being a part of that effort is something that I'd be happy to help with, but not on a full-time basis.

Will you be a consultant on youth apprenticeship around the country?

I'd rather see if I can find some foundation money to do some additional things at the Center for Youth Apprenticeship and continue to speak out on the need for the program so that we can increase participation from 70 kids this year to 1,000 over the next three years. And then, I think, at that point it will grow to the 5,000 that we see as probably the optimum level.

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