Edited by author 10-31-2002 10:11 AM
Why do you need to be efficient when you're a monopoly?

Btw, people complain about low pay for teachers. Well, take a high paying private sector job like computer programmers and ask yourself how well they would be paid if there were only one employer for their services.

Edited by author 10-31-2002 03:03 AM
This is definitely further proof that privatization is not a magic bullet. What just amazes me is that anyone manages to be less efficient than the average school district - based on the ones I attended I thought it would have required an incredible amount of effort to do worse. Alas, Edison appears to have risen to that challenge.

Yes, the teachers unions have a large chunk of the blame but the biggest problem seems to be ordinary, garden-variety overhead - the parking lot by the local district administration building is always full of expensive cars while actual teachers are buying office supplies out of pocket unless they had the foresight to marry someone in a field with sane payscales. I'm trying to find the reference but I remember reading recently that under 30% of California's education budget actually reaches a classroom.

After that we get to the hard social problems nobody likes to do anything about like cultural pressure against learning or the way everyone jumps for quick fixes (Problem: K-12 failed to prepare kids for college. Solution: make the tests easier and lower the entrance requirements!)

Tom, you just don't know what you're talking about. You've been reading a lot of conservative literature haven't you?

May I suggest that before you think you know anything about this very difficult subject, you spend a week in an actual urban public school? Talk to the kids, the parents, the teachers, the administrators. Look at the buildings, at the books. Talk to the nurse. Then come back here and tell us that the NEA and liberal politics are to blame for all the miseries of urban education.

In fact, come visit MY classroom. It's urban, it's public. I dare you. Just email Cory and he'll give you my email address and we'll set up an appointment. But not this week. We just had a fire and we're still cleaning up.

Wow, excluded middles, straw man, patronization -- you've studied at the Usenet school of rhetoric, haven't you?

"Underfunded public education isn't solved by turning our kids over to greedy, IPO-struck corporations that turn them to forced labor, sell off their fixtures and schoolbooks, and define their primary mission as "increasing shareholder value" instead of "providing a decent education.""

Sorry, Cory, but leftoid it is. Your words above make the diagnosis definitive. You're suffering from advanced lockmind. You must have stepped on a rusty NEA campaign button. What silly solopsism, thinking that since you went to public schools (as did I) and your parents are teachers (as was my mom) everything must be cool with the schools in Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Camden, Chicago etc etc. Oh except they are UNDERFUNDED. Aside from that their dedication to "providing a decent education" is unquestioned. Christ.

I don't doubt that you care about these kids, Cory, but I know that you don't have the first clue what these schools are really like and how they got that way. Which means you might as well not care since you'll keep excusing their
endless failure and turning your anger towards any reform that shakes up the status quo in the slightest.

Rationalize away my friend but you seem smart enough to me to maybe free your mind some distant day. How you'll forgive yourself for shilling for these bastards I can't guess though.

(No doubt you are equally incensed by the idea of giving the parents the money and the freedom to pick the schools for their kids. But it's all about "providing a decent education" right? Guess the parents are "greedy, IPO-struck corporations" too and giving poor people the ultimate power--which would be the cash--would be a threat to...uh, exactly what? And who? Think these questions over and begin your journey from leftoid to leftist.)

Edited by author 10-30-2002 09:36 PM
FWIW, I don't see Edison's cost-saving antics here as an indictment of all privatization, just bad management from a company in trouble. Forcing kids to do administrative jobs is bad policy no matter which sector does it.

It's amazing to me that anyone can even run a school on only $881 per student. I can't see how you could even pay your staff on that. They must be getting more money from the state, correct? How can you reasonably expect anyone to succeed educating your children on that budget?

Update: According to yesno's Reason article, Edison received "a rent-free building, $4,200 per student from the state, plus federal and state grants for low-performing, low-income, and non–English-speaking students." In June, the school board ruled that Edison would be charged rent on the building ($350,000/yr) and that it would lose an undisclosed amount of desegregation funding.

I'm a leftist, not a leftoid. And I'm the product of public education. Both my parents taught in the public school system for more than 50 years together. My kid brother teaches public school.

Underfunded public education isn't solved by turning our kids over to greedy, IPO-struck corporations that turn them to forced labor, sell off their fixtures and schoolbooks, and define their primary mission as "increasing shareholder value" instead of "providing a decent education."

"Ah, the efficiencies of the private sector."

For your cluelessness you are sentenced 13 years enjoying the efficiencies of the public sector, which is to say the Philadelphia Public School system, k-12. That would be the system where 1 in 5 kids is absent on any given day in the half of the city schools in the worst neighborhoods. Schools that don't even give the more ambitious kids the guiet and safety that might enable them to educate themselves, since the teaching staffs long ago gave up even the pretense of doing so. Schools where kids run track in their own jeans since nobody knows where the money to buy sports equipment went. Man, how can leftoids live with themselves defending this day to day assault on kids trapped in the public schools. In the name of what? The teachers unions? The Democratic Party? But I repeat myself.

The problem is that the entity that the money comes from (goverment) is not the entity that receives the final product (student). Crap like this pops up everywhere that your boss is not the one you actually do the work for.

I get the feeling that the intended message here is that the problem is privatization. Well, I went to a private school for a while when I was a kid and it didn't have these problems.

I think trouble with these Edison projects is that it's still an education monopoly whether the state runs it or hires a company(like Edison) to run it. It's not a market. A market is the meeting of many sellers with many buyers.

If we had a market for education there would be a diversity of schools and crummy ones could go out of business without the entire state school system failing in the process.

Here's a reference to the L.A. Times article, http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/abstra...+some+educators+say.

"In addition to class credits, student aides receive needed lessons in the work ethic and breaks from the academic grind. Problems occasionally pop up, with some student workers tampering with transcripts, trading confidential information or nabbing office supplies. Still, the tradition has continued for decades--embraced, winked at or just tolerated. The free labor eases drudgery for adult staffers and saves schools lots ..."

It costs money for the whole article, but the thrust can be gleaned from this abstract - that these school jobs save schools time and money, at the expense of the students. Same thing Edison is being accused of. And these are public schools in the Los Angeles area.

http://www.reason.com/0202/fe.jj.threatened.shtml

This article shows some of the absurd hurdles put in front of Edison in another city. Though Edison is a for profit organization, they are not operating in a market.

I don't know what school you went to, cypher, but the "office" jobs in mine were glorified study halls. Students collected attendance sheets or brought passes to kids who needed them. They didn't file personal records or have access to sensitive school data like teacher's salaries, which -- ahem -- is the way it's supposed to be. I shudder to think what I might have done with that sort of information when I was a junior high delinquent. This sort of thing is simply inappropriate, and is pretty obviously the dying gasp of a desperate corporation that doesn't have a sound business model. Thank god the school board seems to have enough sense to see this, too.

Most schools already use unpaid student labor in the office. And some schools make it mandatory. There was an article about this a few months ago in the Los Angeles Times, critics saying that it didn't really help the kids' education, but the schools saying they needed it to make ends meet. Walk into any high school office in the country and you'll see that this practice isn't unique to Edison.

Forcing kids to do office work sounds like a great idea to me.

I'd have them do janitorial and landscaping work, too.

They'd get assigned these jobs everytime they say something like: "This stuff is bullshit! I'm not going to need this stuff after I graduate!"