With all of the talk about system's analysis and
critical thinking, I am experiencing a disconnect between HMOs and systems like
the Sylvan Learning System.
1. With a limited amount of capital for such things
as health and education, how can you afford to pay stockholders out of that
limited supply of money?
2. The complaint about HMOs and Government medical
services is based upon not being able to find your own doctor who you may or may
not know enough to choose on your own. I'm a part of the Veteran's
Administration (basically socialized) Medical plan. It has the long
lines that are complained about in England and in Canada, however, thus far,
after a period of withdrawal from my addiction to a private system that depends
upon my being sick in order to make money, I have been able to make the switch
to a maintainence plan of medicine where I basically am responsible for my
health while the Doctor's are my advisors. They provide advice
and maintain my medicine, give serious regular tests, and monitor the drugs that
I take for the typical over stressed sixty year old living in
NYCity. I was raised to think of Allopathic Medicine as the be
all and end all of health care as well as having a psychological tranfirence
onto the Doctor as a Father or Mother figure depending upon the
gender. That definitely is not the case at the
VA. Basically they are experts who depend upon the computer
record system and MY maintaining control over my own health in order to
keep me healthy. They don't get paid for my being sick, in
fact they would prefir that I be well. This is sort of like
the old Honda Auto system of repair maintainence that kept my Accord running for
nearly ten years with little but the cost of planned
obsolence. Of course Honda was, a private/public venture
with the Japanese government helping out at keeping the system running through
government protections. Since they have been totally private, they
have become as sloppy as the Ford auto care. Which is a
part of my point.
Brian, Keith, Arthur, Harry, Steve, etc.etc. etc.
how is it that these government/private structures work so well (I realize
that there are a lot of complaints but the data does not support them and
complaints are what anyone going off an addiction does constantly)
and yet when they become completely privatized the money for the WORK
disappears into the speculative pocket and the WORK gets better for a short time
and then declines?
I would suggest that this is an issue of what
exactly the industry happens to be. e.g. when Donald Trump personally
supervised the building of the skating rink in Central Park, he got it done in
half the time at half the expense, unless you consider the cost of his expertise
and personal power. The President of the US who makes
considerably less than Trump could also have gotten the same job done and
if he had used the military, especially the reserves, it would have cost
even less, if you get my point.
If you don't get my point then consider this, for
military pay, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army Chorus was
the best male chorus in the world. The average cost of
training for military personnel at the time was $50,000 per.
At today's prices it is six times that. However, in the Army Chorus,
we paid for our own training so the cost to the Army was
zip. We passed an audition drawn from young men eligible
for the draft and even our pianist was the great International Accompanist
Martin Katz. To my left sat the now International
Opera star Richard Stillwell and to my right sat the Kennedy Center winner the
late William Parker and that was just the Baritone section.
The other sections also contained opera stars now from all over the
planet. Walter Skees was the finest popular musician in America
at the time and only Washington, D.C. heard him because he was a life time
soloist for the White House Jazz Ensemble. I have never heard
a better and more magnificent pop baritone than the late Wally
Skees. The musicians in the U.S. Army Band and Chorus were
drawn from the most expensive and finest schools that America has.
In Fort George G. Meade Maryland there was a touring band and chorus with a
more populist bent that was filled as well with the musicians who upon finishing
their enlistments, moved into the best jobs and ensembles in
America. Once when Skees decided to try it outside, he was
immediately snapped up as the principle act for Radio City Music
Hall. After a month of the inhuman scedule and in
spite of the high pay outside, he reinlisted and came home where he stayed
until retirement making great music for the Diplomats who met at the White
House.
How much was our pay? How much did the
Government pay for us? Mine was a Staff Sargeants e-6 salary of
$7000 a year with an extra $1,500 per year for housing. You
couldn't live on it but you could do a second job and perform for a living with
wonderful musicians and in wonderful venues. I conducted six
choirs in a Church and had a Voice Studio. The Army always
came first but we were able to fit choirs and voice lessons in around such
things as opening the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, singing at Carnegie Hall
and the Hollywood Bowl, welcoming the Astronauts home from the Moon and
serenading General Eisenhower on his deathbed as well as all of the regular
stuff. The country got us for $8500 a
year! You tell me where Trump could do anywhere
near that well considering the level of expertise required for the job and the
consistant perfection of performance requirement. Trump's Bands cost
many, many times that for his organizations! We would walk into a
rehearsal 30 minutes before boarding the bus for a
performance. Run through the new music required,
memorize it on the spot, pass it in and go out and sing it
perfectly. So what does all this mean? It means
that private industry can't handle real lifelong expertise. It is
too expensive. Not in Health care, not in the Army
Chorus and not in education either. If flying and the military
was not about life and death issues we wouldn't be able to afford all of these
Engineers either.
Private industry is having a nervous breakdown at
present because they have no serious socialist or communist competition in the
world. It is lazy and as bound to profit for its own sake as
they claim the unions to be. It is not the "product"
stupid. It is the "profit" stupid and if you want your children and
your health to be out of your hands then put them in the cheap, authoritarian,
hyperbolic hands of private industry and pay a third person the money for those
textbooks or MRI machines that could train your children and save your spouse's
life.
Remember that the money is limited and that you
have NO say in private medicine because, unless you are in the medical
profession yourself, you don't know what is happening when you are forced to go
into your Doctor and give him the incentive to keep you sick since that is the
way you pay him. You also have NO say in private
education since you will have a third level of bureaucracy between you and your
kid's teachers and administrators. We have that kind of
nightmare here in NYCity in the Public Schools, where the schools are too big
and a managerial anachronism. That is due to competition
between upstate legislators who have an incentive not to fund City
schools.
Competition is not the be all and end all either in
private or public institutions. People who are
experts have an incentive built in. An incentive to exercise
those expert muscles they have worked so hard to acquire. No
one wants to believe that they have thrown ten years of their life away to a
dream of being an engineer or a Doctor, a Teacher or a Concert
Pianist. In education and the arts we will almost do it
for nothing and often do it for very little. That is because
we have a real sense of the worth of what we do and we worked harder than most
to achieve it. The same is true for Scientists and University
teachers. NYCity's public schools
are anachronistic but don't blame government for a bad system
anymore than you excuse private enterprise for one. Get
out and vote and change the system or pay someone else to do the same through
your political parties. They say you vote with your
dollars in private medicine and private schools but in order for that to work
you have to have enough money to do so and you have to be smart enough to be a
good consumer. Often it is not the education but the network
and culture of the families of the children in private schools that makes
the future so bright. Private schools are notorious for paying
teachers poorly. They operate on a business model.
The ideal expert in today's business, does a job for six years and then
changes. Six years isn't even the training period for a Doctor
and a Teacher takes many years to learn that skill as well.
Now it must sound like I work for the government or
a big public institution since I said all of the above. Nope,
I've been working, for most of my life, Artistic and Educational work in
the Private Sector. There are good things that we
do. We clean up mistakes really well and we are very good at
team motivation for specific projects. It frankly isn't cost
effective to REALLY train a voice student in the old Bel Canto Operatic Methods
that built the greatest singers of the past. That takes a
lesson every day for many years and no school in America can afford such and no
student can either unless their parents are independantly
wealthy.
I have given scholarships for that type of study to
special talents over the last 21 years in New York. They serve
as advertisement for my success the same as you would pay for advertising on the
TV to show your product. But that is very expensive and is NOT
profitable. It can only work in a non-profit
modality. Expertise simply does not SELL in "for profit"
situations. T.G. Rogers the CEO for Cypress Semi-Conductors
constantly testifys before Congress that private business IS up to doing it and
he claimed that we didn't need Sematech in order to build those chipfab labs in
the eighties. Maybe we didn't but the point was
that America was going to have their warplanes dropping out of the sky since
Japan had bought the patent and we had no alternative, so Supply-sider Ronald
Reagan, supported the government/business partnership to build the lab and our
planes are still flying. The point was not the Ideal Theory of
the Market, but what actually happened. Private Business
might have done the job alone but they DIDN'T! In fact, no where in
the world has a Chipfab Lab been built without government
funding!
I'm glad that my daughter has gotten a good public
school education because I would really hate for her to be a part of this "Brave
New Privatized World" that is going to last for a time and then crash and
destroy the really good things that we do out here in the private
sector.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
----- Original Message -----
From: Brian McAndrews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Christoph Reuss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 4:59
PM
Subject: Re: UK: corporate takeover of
education
> EMO's like HMO's are the future as privatization of all public
> institutions marches on. Check out the growth of Sylvan in the USA.
>
> About Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc.
>
> Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SLVN), (www.sylvan.net) is the leading
> provider of education services to families and schools worldwide. The Sylvan
> Learning Centers and Sylvan Education Solutions businesses provide
> personalized instruction services to K-12 students through direct consumer
> relationships and under contract to school systems.
>
> Sylvan provides courses to adult students throughout the world in the areas
> of teacher training, accredited university offerings, and English language,
> through the Online Higher Education, Sylvan International Universities and
> Wall Street Institute businesses. Sylvan Ventures, Sylvan's research and
> investment vehicle, focuses on bringing emerging technology solutions to the
> education and training marketplace.
>
> CONTACT: Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc.
> Steve Drake, 410/843 6295
>
>
>
