Among the many high schools I worked with across the country - and in Canada - were some in the San Joaquin Valley - attended by the children of field workers.
During harvest, it was normal for kids to disappear from the classrooms to help bring in more money in the fields. The schools appeared to accept this as a the way of life.
I'm reminded of the time I interviewed a young sharecropper for an hour on radio. It was a good program. He told me of his early experiences. He confided with a fellow worker that he had a lot of dirt in the basket. He might be turned back when it was weighed.
She was a buxom woman. She said, "Don't worry kid. Just come along behind me."
As they approached the weigher, she undid several buttons on her blouse. As they went through the weighing, the weigher didn't even look in the kid's basket. He was too busy ogling.
This could be said to illustrate two aspects of our social life. How the workers steal from their masters - they have to be watched all the time. Also, how female workers use sex to swindle the supervisory staff.
Or, maybe it's just a fun story.
Harry
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Ray wrote:
Told you so. A year ago I pointed out that private companies are not capable of sustaining the kind of continuous presence necessary for things like Education, Health Care, Social Security etc. There are those on this list who like to demean public education but their answers are bankrupt. It would be helpful if there were some seriously skilled explorations of such issues with a balance of public and private but instead we seem to be locked into the old duality that haunts America with the Left and Right Wing nuts.
Meanwhile Whittle's suggestion about children working in the office is not a bad idea. It already happens in public schools and in "work study" in colleges. What Whittle doesn't seem to be capable of doing is selling his program in an educational manner. He is locked instead into the value of a dollar rather than the value of personal experience by students. Because of the poverty on the Quapaw reservation students were both hired and paid to do such jobs in order to get food in their mouths and nice clothes on their backs. Eventually all students whether paid or not, spent time in vo-tech programs that taught us a lot more than our colleagues off the reserve learned in their upper class schools.
Now if Whittle could have clothed it in a more common sensical package he might not have stepped into the hornets nest he obviously stirred up. Obviously he was listening to "nonsensical economists" and not to practical educators who were not afraid of the issues of economic class.
As for school books, that is always a problem for schools no matter whether public or private. This junk is just media hype and Whittle couldn't handle it. He took advantage while things were good but he and Benno Smith are obviously of the wrong class to make the right pitch in such hard times. It's hard to help others when you can't find the way out of your own problems. Remember how the Butler and his family survived in the "Upstairs of the Downstairs" while the wealthy son committed suicide.
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:ec086636@;eisa.com>Ed Weick
To: <mailto:futurework@;scribe.uwaterloo.ca>futurework
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 2:13 PM
Subject: Low end private schools
We all know that high end private schools provide schools provide a very good education to the children of the wealthy. It may not work quite the same way for children of the poor.
Ed
Ed Weick
577 Melbourne Ave.
Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7
Canada
Phone (613) 728 4630
Fax (613) 728 9382
----------
For-profit U.S. schools sell off their textbooks
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A1, Globe and Mail
Students already have to worry about exams, essay deadlines and staying awake through math class. In Philadelphia, they have a new worry: What if your school becomes a victim of the stock market meltdown?
Facing an educational crisis last year, the city handed 20 of its worst-off high schools, in some of the most abject slums in the country, to a private, for-profit company called Edison Schools Inc. Now, those institutions appear to be going the way of Enron, Tyco and WorldCom.
Edison, a high-flying firm that was the first school-management company traded on a stock exchange, promised to provide computers, books and new curriculums, and to raise test scores. In exchange, the school board would give the company $881 (U.S.) a student.
Then came the crash. Over the summer, Edison's shares slid from the year's high of $21.68 to less than a dollar on the Nasdaq Stock Market. (The company traded yesterday at about 50 cents.)
In the classroom, this has had some bizarre effects.
Days before classes were to begin in September, trucks arrived to take away most of the textbooks, computers, lab supplies and musical instruments the company had provided -- Edison had to sell them off for cash. Many students were left with decades-old books and no equipment.
A few weeks later, some of the company's executives moved into offices inside the schools so Edison could avoid paying the $8,750 monthly rent on its Philadelphia headquarters. They stayed only a few days, until the school board ordered them out.
As a final humiliation, Chris Whittle, the company's charismatic chief executive and founder, recently told a meeting of school principals that he'd thought up an ingenious solution to the company's financial woes: Take advantage of the free supply of child labour, and force each student to work an hour a day, presumably without pay, in the school offices.
"We could have less adult staff," Mr. Whittle reportedly said at a summit for employees and principals in Colorado Springs. "I think it's an important concept for education and economics." In a school with 600 students, he said, this unpaid work would be the equivalent of "75 adults" on salary.
Although Mr. Whittle said he could have the child-labour plan in place by 2004, school board officials were quick to say they would have nothing to do with the proposal.
Mr. Whittle's past ventures included buying Esquire magazine in the 1970s and introducing Channel One, a commercial-sponsored educational television system, into public schools in the 1980s.
But now he appears to have fallen on hard times, and has put up for sale his 4½-hectare estate in New York's Hamptons. The home, which was listed for $46-million, has eight bedrooms, a gym, an elevator, a pool, tennis and basketball courts, and guest house.
Edison operates 150 schools in 23 states, but Philadelphia is its largest and most visible challenge. Last year, the school board picked the 45 worst-managed schools and announced that it would privatize them. At first, Edison was to take control of them all; later, in the face of political protests, 25 of the schools were put into the hands of non-profit school companies.
Edison officials were unable to implement some of their more innovative educational policies, including longer school days and years, because of Philadelphia's unions and low budgets.
School board officials in Philadelphia are now debating their options. "We want to make sure they have the financial resources to sustain [the schools] through the school year," said Paul Vallas, the board's chief executive.
Mr. Vallas has taken a tough disciplinary stand with the company, withholding a $5-million payment to Edison this fall because the company was seven weeks late delivering its financial statements.
Edison executives say the company is sound, and that its schools will begin showing educational improvements.
"We are not going bankrupt. There is no threat of bankruptcy. It is simply, flatly not true," Edison president Chris Cert told Michigan school board officials last week.
Mr. Whittle has predicted a profit of $20-million this year and announced Monday he intends to buy back 5.4 million of his company's shares, or 10 per cent.
He also said that 84 per cent of his schools have seen "increased student performance," against 8 per cent registering declines. Test-score results for the Philadelphia schools are not yet available.
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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