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9486 in the collection
Child-Labor Proposal Eyes Private Model
Billee Bussard, editor http://www.SummerMatters.com, Comment:
Child labor laws are being changed to accommodate a Chicago-based private school program in which kids go to work part of the week to pay for their private school tuition. It is, no doubt, the Business Roundtable model
for public schools, and Bill Gates is funding the pilot program.
Now there is a proposal before Congress to change child labor laws so that public schools can do the same thing. This is an incremental step to reversing ALL child labor laws and protections.
Incrementally, high school kids age 14 to 18 will be REQUIRED to pay for their own education through forced labor. Changing the labor laws is a necessary step. Once that happens, the flood gates will open to allow 17 million
low-wage workers ages 14 to 18 to be placed in grunt jobs that industry now finds too costly to fill or keep filled. And once again, a flood of low-wage workers equivalent to the illegals in the United States, will be entering the job
market with the end result of further suppressing wages nationwide.
What a bonanza for the fast food industry which can't find low-wage workers fast enough.
And what a way to get the complacent, compliant workforce you need to do these low-wage jobs. You don't work, you don't graduate.
Recall that this concept came from a poor South American country, where the only way kids could get ANY kind of education was to pay their own tuition to a private Catholic school by working part of their school day.
Bill Gates wants to model American schools after a third world country.
Amazing! What does that really tell you about his values when he wants our nation to devolve from a free public education system to one the children will have to pay for themselves with child labor?
Once these provisions to skirt child labor laws pass through Congress, you will see an incremental implementation all across the country where the school calendar will be incrementally adjusted to a year-round calendar to assure industry has child laborers at its disposal year-round.
The article argues that this is a way for kids to pay for college. But how much money will be left over if the kids are paying for their own tuition.
The article below says tuition is just $2,414 but an article written in 2003 says costs had jumped in just a year and a half from $1,500 to $8,450. These kids SHARE the equivalent of one 40-hour a week job--maybe with three or four
other kids. Their wages pay only 74 percent of the tuition. So they don't get the whole $25,000 a company pays for one 40-hour week. If they want to go to college, they will have to work a second job to save for it. (See below a
segment in Chapter 8 of the book I have been working on with the documentation.)
So much for time to study. So much for this being a way to improve education.
This is a slippery slope that will undo everything we have done to fight to preserve the traditional school calendar. It will reverse child labor laws, it will place vulnerable children in situations where they will be exploited, abused and compromised. If they say anything about an employer making advances, they lose their job and don't graduate.
Where are the red flags? Where is the outrage? We all need to write our lawmakers NOW!
The public hearings on this proposal ends July 16. I urge all of you to write your lawmakers and urge your friends and colleagues to do likewise.
Students at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School pay for their own tuition, back
then just $1,500 a year and less than half of other Chicago Catholic High
Schools at the time, from the money they earn working one day of their school week
at a variety of Chicago businesses that contract with the school for student
labor. In 1996, Education Week reported that businesses paid the school
$18,000 a year for an equivalent full-time student laborer, a job that was split
among five students who showed up for a 9-to-5 workday on alternating days
while taking classes at the school four days. Among the companies
participating in 1996 were Chicago Magnificent Mile employers such as Arthur Anderson,
the Bozell World Wide advertising agency, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and
Refco, a private firm that provides services on the floor of the Board of
Trade. The various job duties for these students included running telephone
orders to the “pits†on the frantic floor of the Chicago Board of Trade._[1]_
(mip://04297308/default.html#_ftn1) By 2003, there were 90 companies paying
the school $25,000 a year for the service of four students to share a job,
and the share of tuition costs for a student and his family had jumped to
$8,450 a year. Each student earned $6, 250, or about 74 percent of tuition
costs._[2]_ (mip://04297308/default.html#_ftn2)
____________________________________
_[1]_ (mip://04297308/default.html#_ftnref1) Archer, Jenn ((December 11,
1996). "A Working Experiment: Roman Catholic school tires out jobs-for-tuition
program in Chicago neighborhood," Education Week, pp 24-28
_[2]_ (mip://04297308/default.html#_ftnref2) Matheny, Ruth A (Nov/Dec.
2003) "Corporate Internship," Today's Catholic Teacher, retrieved Sept. 7 at:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3924/is_200311/ai_n9306707.
Child-Labor Proposal Eyes Private Model
By Scott J. Cech
Proposed child-labor-rule changes-—the most ambitious in 30 years—would carve out a permanent exemption to U.S. Department of Labor regulations for the work-study program run by a national network of Roman Catholic high schools.
The program is a requirement of the Chicago-based Cristo Rey Network, which now has 12 high schools around the country targeting low-income, mostly minority students in grades 9-12 with their sights set on college.
Under the Cristo Rey-style model that the department has proposed, students in any qualifying public or private school could work up to eight hours a day during some school days—more than double the time now permitted for 14- and 15-year-olds.
As the proposal is now worded, “academically oriented” 14- and 15-year-olds could work for up to 18 hours in some weeks. Students in department-approved programs would still have to attend classes for at least the minimum number of hours required by their states.
“It does not jeopardize their health or education,” said Arthur M. Kerschner Jr., the department’s child-labor and special-employment team leader, referring to the plan. “In fact, we think it helps their education.”
Cristo Rey students pay some of their tuition—$2,414 per year, on average—by working up to eight hours a day on some school days at one of the network-screened banks or law firms that contract with the schools. The teenagers rotate in teams of four to collectively fill one 40-hour-per-week job slot, and the network’s school calendar stretches over 10 months to accommodate all the hours.
As the Labor Department’s proposed rule changes note, the 2,800-student Cristo Rey Network has an impressive track record. According to the network, 92 percent of the class of 2006 graduated, and 99 percent of graduates were accepted at a college.
“We have found [the work-study program] motivates young people to go on to college,” said Jeff Thielman, Cristo Rey’s vice president for development and new initiatives. “They go to work and see lawyers and other professional people and they say, ‘That could be me if I play my cards right.’ ”
But not everyone thinks it’s a fair deal. “Even if 100 percent graduate, it wouldn’t ameliorate my concerns,” said Jeffrey F. Newman, the president and executive director of the National Child Labor Committee, a New York City-based nonprofit organization chartered by Congress in 1907 to protect children’s education and safety.
Mr. Newman wants to avoid any return to the kind of large-scale employment of poor children prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“It is of considerable concern to me as a child-labor-exploitation expert that certain groups would be separated out from other groups because of their academic rigor, even as we recognize the need for financial help as college costs balloon,” Mr. Newman added. “That’s a very dangerous precedent to set.”
Under the Radar
Existing federal regulations allow young teenagers to get a school-supervised taste of the working world through a long-standing program that offers states waivers of regular child-labor rules.
But the Work Experience and Career Exploration Program, which has been in place since 1969, is aimed at students with blue-collar goals who are at risk of dropping out, according to Mr. Kerschner. And even under its allowances, 14- and 15-year-olds can work only three hours per day on school days.
The National School Boards Association hasn’t taken a position on the proposed rule changes, but Lisa E. Soronen, a senior staff attorney for the Alexandria, Va.-based group, sees some promise in the idea. “If you want to save for college,” she said, “you can’t get there doing that three hours a day.”
Ironically, and apparently inadvertently, Cristo Rey operated its work-study program in violation of those Labor Department limits for about a decade. According to school and government officials, the fast-growing nonprofit network came to the department’s attention in 2003, when someone pointed out that one of its schools was sending its students to work for whole school days.
Around the same time, Cristo Rey officials came to the department, asking what they could do to comply with the law.
Rather than have the Labor Department’s enforcement branch crack down on a work-study program that seemed to be helping students, Mr. Kerschner recalled, “we said, ‘Let’s put [the program] in the regs so other schools can take advantage of it.’ ”
Pilot Agreement
The Cristo Rey Network last year signed an unusual pilot agreement with the department that allows its work-study program to operate outside of the usual rules until next year. That’s when the rule changes, if approved by U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao and the White House Office of Management and Budget, would take effect. The proposal’s 90-day public-comment period ends July 16.
The network, which started with one school in Chicago in 1996 and incorporated as a nonprofit network in 2003, has expanded rapidly with significant help from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. To date, the Seattle-based philanthropy has awarded the network nearly $16 million—most of it specifically for increasing the number of Cristo Rey schools. (Gates also helps fund an annual Education Week report on issues related to high school graduation and college and workforce readiness.)
The Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation, a Newton, Mass.-based philanthropy with a history of grants to Catholic schools, has also been a major funder, awarding Cristo Rey schools $12 million since 2000.
The network now operates schools in Cambridge, Mass.; Chicago; Cleveland; Denver; Kansas City, Mo.; Lawrence, Mass.; Los Angeles; New York City; Portland, Ore.; Sacramento, Calif.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Waukegan, Ill.
It plans to open seven more schools this August, and hopes three more will be ready by 2008.
It’s unclear how many other schools might take advantage of a Cristo Rey-style work-study program. The Labor Department proposal doesn’t spell out what would qualify students as “academically oriented,” except requiring that they be “enrolled in a college-preparatory program.” Schools would have to get their programs approved by eligible students’ parents, their school, and the department under the new rules, however, and assign a teacher-coordinator to supervise the students.
“I don’t see that there’s going to be a big demand for this,” Mr. Kerschner said.
Mr. Thielman, the Cristo Rey official, doubts that the work-study model could be completely replicated in public schools, where students aren’t under pressure to make school tuition payments.
“Their ability to go to school does not depend on how they do their job,” he said. “It would be trickier in the public sector. Not impossible, but trickier.”
— Scott J. Cech, commentary by Billee Bussard
Education Week
2007-06-06
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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