By 2010, San Bernardino Valley College had decided to phase out the machine shop Clarke and been running, and he was ready to retire from his teaching role there as he had earlier retired from the Fontana public schools. By that time he had become friends with Mike Gallo, the aerospace entrepreneur whose Kelly Space & Technology is the city’s leading tech firm. “Mike said, ‘Why don’t you bring your equipment over to my place and teach here?’” Clarke told me. “I said, I don’t want to teach any more. And then he said, ‘Well, what if we started your own school?’”

The result (skipping past some other details) is Technical Employment Training Inc. (TET), a non-profit, 501(c)(3) trade school for adults that now operates in a building at the former Norton Air Force Base, now San Bernardino International Airport. Gallo is its CEO; Clarke is its president; and its ambition is to train the city’s now-unemployed adults for middle-wage jobs available in the area’s hospitals, warehouses, factories, and construction sites.

The non-profit aspect of TET is important. When I spoke with Gallo this spring, he inveighed against some for-profit trade schools as representing the worst in the student-debt syndrome. (They deserved more blame, he said, because they loaded debt onto mainly disadvantaged students, without carefully matching them to available jobs.) And Gallo and Clarke both emphasized the four-part strategy on which their TET approach was based:

• A “comprehensive, immersive training environment,” in which students work in a machine shop six hours a day, five days a week, for six months.

• Nationally recognized credentials and certificates at the end of the program, so that their training is officially recognized and is transportable.

• A realistic, on-the-job training environment, in which students produce real products on real machinery and thus can go to employers with real-world experience.

• Placement connections with local employers, of whom the region’s fastest-growing at the moment are in health-care and logistics. (San Bernardino, as I’ll explain in one more installment, figures that its main comparative advantage is as a warehouse site for the huge Southern California economy.)

I realize that most multi-point plans sound platitudinous. But TET’s approach resembles strategies we’ve seen work elsewhere: for instance, the one at East Mississippi Community College. Nearly 400 local people have completed the full program program at TET, Clarke said: “And we have put most of our graduates back to work in the high-tech manufacturing world. There are thousands of these high-tech jobs out there. We cannot train people fast enough for them.”

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