Trading Pencils for Hammers: These Kids Are Learning Math and Getting Jobs Right Out of High School

If the Geometry in Construction curriculum had existed years ago, Jeff Schaefer would never have quit teaching.
Now, he’s back in the classroom — sort of. Every other day, Schaefer trades a textbook for a hammer and dry-erase markers for nails.
“I’m a big do-it-yourselfer, so this was right up my alley,” said Schaefer, a math teacher at Hendrickson High School in Pflugerville, Texas.
Hendrickson High School is one of more than 500 schools in the United States that currently offers a curriculum called Geometry in Construction, designed by the company Contextual Learning Concepts.
Students learn math by building a tiny home with tools and materials. The first year the school funds the project, and after that, the program is self-sustained by selling the homes.
In a typical classroom, students might be given a page of shapes and be asked to calculate the area of each shape. But in Geometry in Construction, math is applied to a real project in a real-life setting. For example, students might be given a blueprint with compound shapes, where they have to calculate the total square footage of carpet. Classes incorporate a variety of fields — electrical, carpeting, design, plumbing, siding, roofing. The construction of the house drives the order in which they learn each field.
“Kids get really hungry for being able to answer that age-old question in math of ‘When am I ever going to need to know how to use this?’” Burke said. Geometry in Construction provides an answer.
Geometry in Construction was first offered in 2006 by Scott Burke, an industrial technology teacher, and Tom Moore, a math teacher, at Loveland High School in Loveland, Colorado. A cohort of 80 students built a 640-square-foot home, which now sits in the mountains outside of Woodland Park, Colorado.
Since then, the curriculum has gained momentum. Currently, there isn’t a comprehensive study that shows whether the students have higher test scores compared to their peers in a regular class. But a small internal study within a few Colorado high schools showed these students had higher than average math scores.
Schaefer said he’s seeing similar results at Hendrickson High School.
In the typical classroom setting, he sees about 50 percent homework completion. “It’s like pulling teeth,” he said. But the way Geometry in Construction is taught, homework isn’t really optional. If students don’t turn in homework, they don’t get to work on the house. Homework completion, he estimates, has risen to 85 percent.
But success can be measured in more ways than just completion of homework or higher test scores. According to Schaefer, Geometry in Construction is also reaching students who sometimes have a hard time learning in a classroom environment.
“Some of them who really struggle at the pen and paper side of it, once we get to the real world, they’re incredible,” he said.
Geometry in Construction is also exposing students to trade skills — a sector with a dearth of workers in the U.S.
Seventy percent of construction companies are struggling to find qualified workers. And skilled trades, which includes welders, carpenters, electricians, mechanics and plumbers, have been the hardest to fill since 2010. And the jobs pay well. There are over 30 million jobs that pay an average of $55,000 a year and don’t require a bachelor’s degree.
Burke said the gap in trade jobs is a result of a push for college. It’s been ingrained in students to go to college after finishing high school.
Burke’s biggest challenge is showing parents that their students can be successful with or without a college degree.
“For some reason, we’ve almost demonized doing any kind of work with your hands,” said Burke. “As a teacher, one of the things we talk a lot about in training is that you can’t just be an educator of kids in this. You really have to be an educator of an entire community around what are the realities of the construction industry.”
Since launching the program at Loveland, 18 of Burke’s students went on to pursue careers in construction. Former students are now electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, framers and carpenters.
Geometry in Construction is meant to be self-sustaining, so the houses are sold to fund the next year’s program. But other schools have found partnerships with organizations, like Habitat for Humanity, to help fund and donate houses.
For example, at Glenbrook South High School, students built a home for LaTonya Stamps through Habitat for Humanity. At Hersey High School, students built homes for veterans struggling with homelessness.
Each teacher goes through a four-day training, which costs $1,695 per person. There, the teachers gain access to the math and construction curriculum, lesson plans and homework assignments. They also connect with a network of people teaching the same class. Burke says the price of this training is competitive to the cost of other curriculums where textbooks and licensing can skyrocket costs.
Since launching Geometry in Construction, Contextual Learning Concepts has also formed Amped on Algebra.
At Loveland, algebra had a 65 percent first-time fail rate.
In Amped on Algebra, instead of building a house, students build a business by selling T-shirts.
Algebra is one of the most commonly failed classes in high schools across the country. Some school districts experience a 74 percent fail rate.
“The thing is that Algebra 1, geometry, and even a little bit of Algebra 2 really are gatekeeper kinds of classes going into many different careers and into higher education,” Burke said.
And so Burke and Moore modeled their class similar to Geometry in Construction. And it worked, said Burke.
“The fact that these ninth grade kids understand a business model… is huge.”
Burke sees the hands-on model finding a home in every class. There’s potential for this to extend outside of math and into science, arts and English, he said.
“You see a different level of work ethic when you have a kid who is truly loving what they’re doing,” Schaefer said.
More: Fixing America’s Schools

A Second Chance at the American Dream

“There are only three ways to create wealth: You either make it, you mine it or you grow it,” says Robert Trouskie, director of field services for the Workforce Development Institute, a New York nonprofit focused on growing and retaining well-paying jobs in the state. “The one that’s really lagged behind in the last two or three decades has been the making of things, but I think the pendulum is starting to [swing].”
Indeed, the U.S. saw about 5 million manufacturing jobs disappear between 2000 and 2014. But despite the loss, 400,000 positions still sit unfilled across the country. Most are for jobs that require special training — a need WDI has been addressing since 2003 by working with other organizations and unions to connect willing workers to available positions.
One such worker is Todd Holmquist, a recent graduate of WDI’s Accelerated Machinist Partnership, which combines classroom education with hands-on training in factories. After the aircraft plant where he worked closed in 2013, Holmquist’s income plummeted from about $80,000 a year to $20,000. He enrolled in the program just a week before his wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Watch the video above to see how WDI helped turned Holmquist’s life, and employment prospects, around.

Building a New Workforce in a World of Help Wanted

Jared Bravo thought he knew a few things about building a house. After all, he had helped his dad refinish their basement when he was a teenager and then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in architecture. But in reality, he knew very little.
Bravo, 25, works for Habitat for Humanity New York City in Queens, N.Y. As the construction site manager, he oversees the gut renovation of old city-owned housing units that are being turned into affordable housing for low-income families. He’s had to learn everything about building on the job.
“The more I’ve been onsite, the more I realized I didn’t actually do much to help fix my dad’s basement,” he jokes.
Though Bravo hadn’t intended to go into construction, the opportunity to learn a trade skill was something that, to him, proved valuable.
That understanding is lost on many young Americans, as a so-called “skills gap” looms over the construction and manufacturing industries that could hamper output over the next decade. After the 2008 housing bust, almost 22 percent of the construction force left for other jobs, leaving 900,000 positions open. Today, the outlook remains bleak. Seventy-seven percent of builders report framing crew shortages and 76 percent say that there aren’t enough carpenters, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
The lack of builders is particularly acute after this year’s hurricane season decimated 25 percent of the Florida Keys and destroyed an estimated 30,000 homes in Houston; Puerto Rico is still reeling from Hurricane Irma’s destruction.
There simply aren’t enough people to help rebuild.

Habitat for Humanity is one of several organizations helping to bridge the labor skills gap while providing employment opportunities to people from low-income neighborhoods.

An October 2017 poll conducted by the staffing firm Adecco shows that close to 90 percent of American executives believe apprenticeship programs, which tend to enjoy wide bipartisan support, can close this gap. In 2016, President Obama allocated $265 million in grants for apprenticeship programs through 2019. More recently, President Trump funneled an additional $100 million into those efforts — a move that will likely experience funding struggles as a result of the president’s cuts to educational programs and a 21 percent decrease in funding to the Labor Department.
Nonprofits and local governments also run apprenticeship programs that achieve the same goal for less within the “new-collar” job sector (a term coined by the New York Times), while trade schools are also affordable options.
The worker shortage is already causing construction delays. In the Big Apple, for example, Habitat for Humanity New York City acts as a general contractor building affordable housing units. It’s had to stretch deadlines because skilled carpenters and other tradespeople weren’t available.
But it hasn’t been all bad news for Habitat — or other groups, like YouthBuild — that work to create a pipeline of workers.
“The upside is that we’re returning and providing roads for people in the community to become laborers or construction workers that may not have realized this was an option,” says Karen Haycox, CEO of Habitat for Humanity New York City.
Robert Taylor, executive director for New York’s East Harlem chapter of YouthBuild, echoes these sentiments. “Not every person who comes into our program is going to be equipped to take on tech jobs that require a four-year college education, especially if you’re already reading at the fourth- or sixth-grade level … If you’re someone coming from somewhere where you’re not finishing high school, construction jobs are great to be placed into with spillover benefits,” he says.
More than half of businesses blame schools for not providing pathways to middle-class labor jobs. But Albuquerque, N.M., mayor Richard J. Berry views the problem differently: Schools are failing to teach kids about trade jobs, and businesses aren’t jumping in with opportunities to learn.
“The industry on one side said, ‘We need a better-trained workforce’ but didn’t know how to put that through an educational framework, so we told them to create the curriculum and we’ll put it into practice,” Berry tells NationSwell after speaking at the 2017 NationSwell Summit on Solutions this past November.
Through the five-year long partnership Running Start for Careers, high school students receive dual credit for classes in plumbing, electrical wiring, carpentry and other technical trades. The result? A 36 percent increase in the graduation rate among students who are traditionally lower income, according to Berry.
“We had kids asking, ‘Why am I in school?’” Berry says. “You can sit them down and explain to students all day in a classroom why they need geometry, but it doesn’t click until you get them to work with Joe the Carpenter who’s building roof trusses and explains why A-squared plus B-squared has to equal C-squared, or the roof will fall down. Then, they’ll become interested and see that there are actual roads to the middle class without having to be burdened with student debt.
Bravo, the site manager with Habitat for Humanity New York City, says that the interest to learn new skills exists, it just needs to be piqued.
“When you’re working with high school and college kids, you might spark an interest in something they didn’t realize they had,” he says. “You just have to show them a different angle of what they think they know.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Jared Bravo works for AmeriCorps. NationSwell apologizes for the error.