The drive to Carson High School carries you past the fix-it shops, taco joints, weedy lots, and family-run panaderias and carnicerías that line the avenues in this part of blue-collar Los Angeles County. High cyclone fencing divides the 30-acre campus of rectangular cream-and-blue buildings into small warrens of activity as many of the school’s 2800 students stream outdoors for the lunch hour.

Robert Roach, Carson’s auto-shop teacher, has invited me to speak to his careers class about the thrilling world of car magazines. I bring a laptop with a PowerPoint presentation, a few back issues, and a bit of eye candy: a new, $93,000 BMW 650i coupe.

Roach’s classroom is basically a large garage filled with disemboweled engines and disassembled cars, mostly from the 1970s and ’80s. Desks and blackboards are situated to one side for the 40 or so students who pack each of his five classes. Some of the machinery and tools date to the 1960s. Wall diagrams explain the workings of breaker-point ignition distributors and pushrod valvetrains. There isn’t one modern computer scan tool in sight.

Interest in my talk waxes and wanes through the hour, but everybody perks up when I’m asked if we’re ever pulled over by the cops. After a few suitably embellished stories, we herd out to gawp at the BMW. Then the bell rings, and everybody scatters.

2012 BMW 650i coupe

After 16 years as a special-ed teacher, Roach took over Carson’s automotive technical-arts program in 2010, becoming one of the few high-school teachers in the 919,930-student Los Angeles Unified School District who gives kids who are into cars at least one class to look forward to. Out of the 94 high schools in the LAUSD, only 13 still have auto shops.

Bill Yarnall, who taught Carson’s auto shop for 35 years before handing it off to Roach, remembers when every L.A. high school had one. Indeed, when Yarnall started teaching in the mid-’70s, Carson also had a wood shop, an electronics shop, a print shop, an upholstery shop, two metalworking shops, and courses in technical drafting. Yarnall had about 20 students per class, controlled a $2000 annual budget, and received new equipment every two or three years. The high-school shops weeded out the less keen and routed the remainder to the trade schools and the more advanced junior-college shops, which fed them to good jobs in industry.

Yarnall watched the system crumble. California school budgets were decimated by voter-approved tax changes, which hit the shop classes hard. In the mid-1990s, as teachers retired, their shops were shut down. Classroom head counts soared along with L.A.’s population, and the remaining auto shops came to be viewed as just large rooms in which to dump kids, especially those who were underperforming and needing courses they could pass easily.

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