He That Hath a Trade

Posted throughout Dunbar Vocational High School are cards bearing a Ben Franklin motto: "He that hath a trade hath an estate." The exhortation is hardly needed at the rambling tan brick school on Chicago's squalid South Side. To its 2,300 youngsters, 99% of them Negro, Dunbar is a life raft in a sea of poverty. It is perhaps the most effective vocational school in the U.S.

Dunbar's importance lies in harsh statistics: 30% of U.S. high school students never graduate; the rate hits 50% in some blighted urban areas. As automation invades new fields, as unions make old fields tougher to enter, the unskilled dropouts are almost unemployable. Unwanted, they wallow in anger and sometimes crime. The U.S. can ill afford such "social dynamite," wrote James B. Conant recently in Shims and Suburbs. At Chicago's Dunbar,* Conant was delighted to find just about "the ideal in vocational education."

Dunbar's students get a crack at 28 skills, from welding to aviation electronics. And they get the backing of a school administration, largely Negro, that is fiercely dedicated to upgrading Negroes on the economic scale--first by the best possible training, second by fighting for job opportunities. Assistant Principal Victor D. Lewis recalls, for example, "a big decorating firm downtown that wouldn't hire a Negro, even to clean a brush. Now one of our people is a foreman there. We simply produced a good decorator and challenged them to hire him."

Too Busy for Trouble. Dunbar keeps in close touch with the job market, constantly seeks to raise its high level of basic training. The school's 37 shop teachers all have at least ten years' outside experience, stay well up on new techniques. Stressing meat-and-potatoes training that will pay off on payday, they talk up the benefits of belonging to a union (many do themselves).

To produce "employable" graduates, Dunbar insists on promptness and tidiness. The students work harder and longer (and drop out less often--the rate is only 7 1/2%) than those at many academic high schools. Discipline is well in hand. Future aircraft mechanics are too busy peering into a jet engine, or revving up a mounted piston engine, to get into much trouble. In the auto shop, young tinkerers stay out of trouble with "outside jobs." At Dunbar, a pricewise Chicagoan can get a Cadillac engine overhauled for $160, v. $350 at the factory.

Academic work is not skimped: Dunbar requires four years of English, three years of science and social studies, two years of mathematics. The problem is how to make this palatable for future beauticians and bricklayers. Dunbar has a handy solution: it puts all machinist students in the same math class, for example, so the teacher can deal not only with abstractions but also with applications of math to machine tools. Dunbar's graduates also acquire enough academic work to enter college if they wish to (10% to 15% do ). Says Principal Joseph J. Dixon: "We never want to close the door on further education."

Proud Pay Stubs. Dunbar keeps the door open for dropouts from other Chicago schools, holds afternoon classes for unemployed youngsters in everything from job hunting to repairing electric toasters and preparing for civil service exams. In the evening, it teaches new skills to 3,100 adult students. Moreover, some of Dunbar's teachers have their own outside businesses and hire graduates. "Our problem is not placement," says Dunbar's Assistant Principal Everett M. Renfroe. "It's training more people." Nor do Renfroe and his colleagues fear automation. "We don't think of it as wiping out jobs," says Renfroe, "but as creating new ones."

Dunbar's bulletin boards are full of its graduates' most satisfying diplomas: their first paycheck stubs. Last week one teacher proudly pointed to two more $176 (weekly) stubs, brought in by new bricklayers. "They get dirty after a few weeks," said the teacher. "But I always know there'll be fresh ones."

*Named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the 19th century Negro poet who wrote:

But it's easy 'nough to titter w'en de stew is smokin' hot.

But hit's mighty ha'd to giggle w'cn dey's nuffin' in da pot.

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