Good Jobs Are Out There – It’s the Schools that Are Failing

By Karin McQuillan

It’s the public schools that are failing, more than the job market. Last summer set an all-time record of 5.9 million unfilled jobs. Manufacturing job openings were at the highest level in years, with 300,000 new jobs becoming available each month. 

A Wall Street Journal interview with the CEO of United Technologies, Greg Hayes -- who famously caved to Trump and kept the Indiana Carrier plant in the U.S. -- has some surprising information about jobs and American workers. His company has jobs for machinists, with only a high-school degree required, that pay $100K a year. The jobs are going begging. Applicants cannot read or do math.

    “I’ve got thousands of job openings.”

    Do you really?

    “Thousands,” he replies. “A lot of this is because we’ve got growth in business on the aerospace side, but we’ll be adding thousands of jobs in the next three years, and right now I cannot hire mechanics who know how to put together jet engines. But it’s not just jet engines. We also make fan blades, other products, very sophisticated things. These are the high-value manufacturing jobs that America can actually support.”

    A Pratt machinist earns $34 to $38 an hour, which with overtime works out to more than $100,000 a year -- “pretty good money,” Mr. Hayes says. The positions can be filled by high-school graduates with “basic competencies in math and English” sufficient to, say, read a blueprint.

Why don’t our students have basic competence in math and English? The decline of American education is a long-term problem with many causes, but the dumbing down of our schools was put on overdrive by Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Gates. We’ve had five years of the bizarre diktats of progressive Common Core education that decided numbers were too difficult for “at risk” (poor black and Hispanic) students, so no child in America should be taught normal arithmetic.

The result is what you would expect -- the lowest math scores in 25 years of testing.

Read the rest:
Articles: Good Jobs Are Out There – It’s the Schools that Are Failing