Opinion: Rural kids need more than trade school training to lift themselves out of hopeless circumstances

Working-class rural kids need more than trade school training to help pull themselves out of unhealthy living situations, including abject poverty, writes Jessica Grose in her opinion for The New York Times.

Grose cites the new book by Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, as a source for insight and solutions on how the U.S. education system could help more rural youth recover from trauma and set their lives on a different track.

"Macy, a former newspaper reporter and the author of 'Dopesick,' the 2018 best seller about how the opioid crisis ravaged Appalachia, returned to her hometown, Urbana, Ohio, for the new book," Grose explains. "She is trying to figure out how a working-class girl like her got to college and the middle class from Urbana 40 years ago, while that journey is much more arduous for today’s rural working class."

"How do young people, especially those without supportive parents, make a future for themselves? . . . While learning a trade is excellent advice for many students, it is not the cure-all for inequality that our commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, hopes it might be when he says he wants Harvard to build vocational schools,'" Grose explains.

Grose points out that "learning a trade" isn't easy and that trade work requires "the same kinds of executive functioning, people skills and intelligence that a college education requires, just applied differently."

Giving working-class youth the help they need through rural schools is one of the best solutions, according to Macy. "Rural schools need better access to wraparound services, providing students with necessities like food, but also health care in the form of school nurses and counselors on site," Grose adds.

But providing those types of services in rural areas is a tall order. Grose writes, "Most school systems run on economies of scale and a per-student funding model; it poses a great challenge to provide wraparound services to districts with fewer students who have a lot of needs and who are also spread out."

"My dark prediction is that kids with more stable families and better developed life skills will occupy the trade jobs that used to be a reliable route to the middle class," Grose asserts. "We need to support working-class kids before the 21st century abandons them completely."