by Robin Kramer, managing director of The Smidt Foundation.
It began with questions from Eric Smidt, the entrepreneurial CEO and owner of Harbor Freight Tools: “Why is there so little funding for public high school skilled trades programs? Who’s supporting the amazing teachers we need to develop the next generation of skilled tradespeople? How can we make sure that students who express their intelligence with their hands aren’t left behind when so many good skilled trades jobs are left unfilled? How might we help?”
To answer those questions, in 2014 we commissioned research and began conversations with skilled trades teachers, principals of vocational schools, state and district CTE administrators, along with a variety of education, employer, union and civic leaders.
How to propel excellence? We heard: high school skilled trades teachers are the talent multiplier! But they don’t get enough respect, useful professional development, funding or support.
What if we could figure out how to find and honor these amazing teachers, connect them to one another, learn from and with them, and help amplify this vital education sector to achieve greater support, reach, quality, community respect and sustainability?
So many questions. We drew upon the knowledge of an inventive team from the Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University (now at Bendable Labs) to address those “what ifs.” With their focus on developing talented leaders, the team had previously created a prize for exceptional nonprofit leadership. As a pilot, we modeled the 2017 Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence after that national project, creating a very rigorous application to be judged by three different and independent judge panels who we recruited, and we created and refined a rubric for that evaluation; we imagined outreach to promote the prize and figured out how to do all this digitally.
The skilled trades teachers we met along the way are entrepreneurial, humble, tough and incredibly dedicated to their students and craft. We also found them too often isolated. So, we imagined it would be a good idea to bring together the teacher winners in a summer gathering we named (on the back of an envelope) “Let’s Build It,” so this would not be a “one and done” thing. The prize included cash awards for the school program and, where permitted, also directly for the winning teacher, just like the MacArthur Genius Grants. The guess was that 200 teachers would apply that first year. A total of 700 swamped that expectation.
It started with 12 awardees—most of them pictured above.
Now more than 180 extraordinary U.S. public high school skilled trades teachers have been awarded the Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence, with 25 more to be awarded later this year. More than $10 million has been awarded to date. Teachers talk shop, grow expertise, take home great ideas, and are both nourished and challenged by the annual summer Let’s Build It sessions. These fine educators have engaged an estimated 23,000 students and 85 community-serving projects have been created, modeled and grown. The prize and its growing ripple effect has leveraged greater investment in and respect for these educators, their students, and the workforce our country needs.
