Shop class is grounded, high school aviation classes are taking flight

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Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation.


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There has been a growing understanding that our education system hasn’t done enough to provide students the skills they need for the workforce. The pandemic worsened the situation: Almost every industry faced a shortage of qualified workers. Now, some high schools around the country are tackling the issue head-on by blurring the lines between education and workforce systems and establishing training programs designed to create a pathway into well-paying jobs.

Two new initiatives launched by school districts in and around Pittsburgh, which aim to create viable pathways for students into the aviation and aeronautics industry, offer examples.

“For too long, our education and systems of employment, of workforce, have been too misaligned,” said Joel Vargas, vice president of education practice at Jobs for the Future. He said similar programs focusing on aviation pathways, some in partnership with local colleges and universities, have been launched in several states, such as Colorado, California and Alabama.

After a slew of retirements, the aviation industry faces worker shortages in virtually every specialty — from airline pilots and drone pilots to mechanics and aeronautical engineers. By 2026, the industry will need to add an estimated 24,000 airline pilots and by 2027 it might be short as many as 40,000 mechanics. The market for drone pilots  is expected to grow by 51.1 percent over the next four years.

“Our school community has a lot of socioeconomic challenges and one of the things that we were interested in is showing our students that there is a pathway to get some of these high-paying aviation-type jobs,” said Tim Rishel, a math teacher at South Allegheny School District in Pennsylvania.

“The design is very thoughtful about the ability of young people to be able to graduate and get a good job out of high school, if they want to do that, but also keep going in their education.”

Joel Vargas, vice president of education practice at Jobs for the Future

This fall, he’ll be teaching a new four-year aviation careers program at South Allegheny High School to introduce students to these jobs. The program will be a full-period elective class that will teach students the technical aspects of how aviation equipment is built and works and expose them to jobs in the field.

The class is being launched with the help of education nonprofit Remake Learning. In 2021, the organization started a “moonshot grants” fund for school districts in western Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia in an effort to help expand or create programs to improve schools and communities. Rishel said the grant helped the district invest in flight simulators and equipment for its course, to provide students with the hands-on experience they need.

The nearby Baldwin-Whitehall School District launched a similar program, focused on increasing the pipeline of women in the aviation and aeronautics fields, funded through a Remake Learning moonshot grant. Earlier this summer, the district started the “Fly Like a Girl” drone academy, in partnership with five districts across the region.

Janeen Peretin, director of communication, innovation and advancement for the Baldwin-Whitehall district, said that there is untapped opportunity for females interested in STEM careers within the drone and aviation fields. She said the district decided to focus its program on female students after learning that less than 8 percent of drone pilots are women.

The plan is to give students the knowledge and hands-on experience with drones needed to pass a crucial Federal Aviation Administration certification exam required to fly drones professionally. “They can actually become licensed drone pilots by the end of our program,” she said.

That license will prepare them for jobs in numerous fields in the Pittsburgh area and beyond, she said, including the movie industry, agriculture, public safety and real estate. “There really isn’t a field that you can think of where there isn’t some application for the use of drones,” Peretin said.

Related: The path to a career could start in middle school

During the summer academy, students spend part of the day in the classroom, on coursework that teaches them about regulations, flight operations, how weather conditions affect aircraft, emergency procedures, and more. In the afternoon they gain hands-on experience piloting drones. The district also plans to arrange visits to companies in Pittsburgh that use specialized drones. At the end of the course, students will complete a test and a simulation, such as a search and rescue operation.

While the South Allegheny course doesn’t start until the fall, Rishel said there’s already been a lot of interest among students.

Students will begin the program as ninth graders, with an introduction to the aeronautics and aviation field, focusing on the basics of piloting, aerospace engineering, and unmanned aircraft systems. Rishel said students will also learn engineering practices and explore ways to address real-world challenges in the industry.

The curriculum will become more advanced as the students build on their knowledge through the years, he said. They will graduate with enough preparation to take certification exams or apply for specialized jobs, such as airline mechanic. Rishel, a private pilot himself, also said he plans to help interested students apply for funding to train in an airplane with a certified flight instructor.

“Our school community has a lot of socioeconomic challenges and one of the things that we were interested in is showing our students that there is a pathway to get some of these high-paying aviation-type jobs.”

Tim Rishel, a math teacher at South Allegheny School District in Pennsylvania

Programs like these often generate concern that students are too young to be trained narrowly, for specific fields. That’s a legitimate risk, JFF’s Vargas said. Different sectors of the economy grow and contract all the time, he noted, making it hard to predict whether a particular pathway is necessarily going to result in a good job.

But Vargas said there are several reasons school districts’ bet on aviation pathways is likely a good one: Aviation is a big, diverse industry, with many different types of job opportunities; students in these programs will graduate with some credentials and certification, ideally enough to get their foot in the labor market or to further their education in the field.

And whether or not students end up pursuing a career in aviation or aeronautics, these programs help develop skills that young people can apply in other fields, Vargas said. “The STEM skills that young people are learning are always going to be generally applicable to our emerging and growing economy,” he said.

Done well, pathways like this one not only emphasize technical skills, but also teach students to think critically, make quick decisions based on the ability to understand and use data in real-time, and communicate and work in teams, he said.

“It is hands-on learning but it incorporates technical and academic,” Vargas said of the Pittsburgh-area programs. “The design is very thoughtful about the ability of young people to be able to graduate and get a good job out of high school, if they want to do that, but also keep going in their education.”

This story about aviation programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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