I've been a mentor for the FRC robotics competition team at our local high school for a number of years. This is as close as any of the schools in the area get to shop class these days. And by that I mean that the schools do not teach any of it. They simply provide a space for the team to conduct their activities and we, the mentors, take-in any kid who might want to join and teach them how to design and build competition robots as well as other areas (business, marketing, graphic design, etc.).
It has been very difficult over the years, including a time when we thought about pulling the team out of the schools and running a smaller team out of our home. The bureaucracy and ebbs and flows of support made is painful at times, almost terminal. Thankfully the team survived. Many of our team members went on to nice careers in science and engineering.
I've also had the experience of trying to start an RC model airplane club at our local schools. I was going to fully fund it myself, donate all tools and equipment and teach the course once a week. I was also going to have other engineers and acquaintances join in from time to time, including people who worked at SpaceX, designed the F117 stealth fighter, built cameras for space and the moon, designed a lunar lander, etc.
I met with the principals from five of our schools. They all said they were enthusiastic about it and wanted to do it. So, I got going with planning and got a curriculum and some demonstrations ready for the next meeting.
Long story short, they all ghosted me. And, on top of that, Los Angeles County demanded a $2 million dollar bond (or whatever it was) as a precondition. Just f-ing crazy. I walked away and never spoke to anyone at the school district about this or any other STEM ideas again. My kids are out of the system and I have zero interest in enduring that kind of torture again.
So, yeah, our system of education is broken beyond recognition at many levels. Not sure what it will take to fix it.
> Long story short, they all ghosted me. And, on top of that, Los Angeles County demanded a $2 million dollar bond (or whatever it was) as a precondition. Just f-ing crazy. I walked away and never spoke to anyone at the school district about this or any other STEM ideas again.
You just needed someone familiar with how this sort of bureaucracy works (I'm not agreeing with it, just pointing out that this is pretty standard). It really isn't hard and it is just box checking. They weren't asking you for $2-million in bonds, they were asking you to be insured or bonded for that amount of liability. I would be surprised if it cost more ~$200/year. Basically if you injure a kid when they stick their finger in an RC plane prop, they want to know that you are capable of making it right financially.
As far as principles ghosting you: yeah, they have a million issues that they are dealing with. They get a lot of people reaching out about various opportunities and programs, many of which will require more effort or time than they have available. People who do this work regularly understand that you have to be ready to show up with a turnkey program or do the admin work yourself, because admin is already under-resourced, and they don't really have time to explain to someone why they need to be insured or bonded, and why that is a pretty standard ask in today's world.
It sucks, but it is the nature of large scale organizations. Those organizations are organized around trying to meet their legal obligations to provide a basic education (based on criteria they have little input on) to every child in an area on a limited budget. They have precisely no organizational motive for an RC airplane club taught by an outsider. So when someone shows up and says that they want to teach an extracurricular course once a week, and then can't get his ducks in a row to get insurance, they rightfully deprioritise it. At then end of the day, the principal is balancing a fun extracurricular for 10-30 students against the needs of hundreds or thousands of students and dozens of staff.
Yeah, I understand all of that. I have sold product to gov/mil organizations and it is a huge time sink.
My point is that, if I meet for two hours with five principals from our local schools with a proposal all of them say they are onboard, the system should not work against you.
If I have to do a bunch of work and hire someone to navigate the bureaucracy, I am going to walk away and focus that effort elsewhere. More importantly nobody else is going to want to navigate the maze. What should have happened was that the system should have the ability to facilitate and streamline execution. What they actually do is precisely the opposite.
Decentralization will solve it. The current heavily centralized scheme has just created a system where everybody's optimizing for the lowest common denominator's test scores. Anything that doesn't improve that is heavily deprioritized, especially if it could entail any sort of liability or risk. Infantilization follows naturally.
It has been very difficult over the years, including a time when we thought about pulling the team out of the schools and running a smaller team out of our home. The bureaucracy and ebbs and flows of support made is painful at times, almost terminal. Thankfully the team survived. Many of our team members went on to nice careers in science and engineering.
I've also had the experience of trying to start an RC model airplane club at our local schools. I was going to fully fund it myself, donate all tools and equipment and teach the course once a week. I was also going to have other engineers and acquaintances join in from time to time, including people who worked at SpaceX, designed the F117 stealth fighter, built cameras for space and the moon, designed a lunar lander, etc.
I met with the principals from five of our schools. They all said they were enthusiastic about it and wanted to do it. So, I got going with planning and got a curriculum and some demonstrations ready for the next meeting.
Long story short, they all ghosted me. And, on top of that, Los Angeles County demanded a $2 million dollar bond (or whatever it was) as a precondition. Just f-ing crazy. I walked away and never spoke to anyone at the school district about this or any other STEM ideas again. My kids are out of the system and I have zero interest in enduring that kind of torture again.
So, yeah, our system of education is broken beyond recognition at many levels. Not sure what it will take to fix it.