Why Wal-Mart Schools are a Frightening Idea

by Clay Burell

categories: Charter Schools, Education and Business, Education Politics, Teacher Unions

Published May 07, 2009 @ 05:48AM PT

[The possible passing of the Employee Free Choice Act] is the demise of a civilization. This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it....As a shareholder, if I knew the CEO of the company wasn't doing anything on [EFCA]... I would sue the son of a bitch... I'm so angry at some of these CEOs, I can't even believe the stupidity that is involved here....If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to [former Sen.] Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs.
--Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of Home Depot (source)

Robert L. Borosage, Co-Director of the Campaign for America's Future, writes a column in the May 5 Huffington Post that touches slantwise on the current drive to weaken teachers' unions. In "Corruption is Dangerous to Your Health," Borosage writes about the banking lobby's successful blocking of a reform that would have allowed judges to modify mortgages in bankruptcy court, and thus save many homeowners from foreclosures:

This isn't about America being a "center-right country," the myth that pundits still peddle about the American people. This is about Congress being bought and sold, pure and simple...

[...]For example, with the swine flu alert sweeping the country, President Obama and the Centers for Disease Control urge people with flu symptoms to stay home. This is a common sense measure to limit the spread of what might be a dangerous virus.

Only one problem, as the New York Times reminds us in an editorial this morning. About 60 million Americans don't have paid sick leave. Many can be fired if they stay home. And if not fired, many simply can't afford to lose the hours.

43% of private sector American workers have no paid sick days at all. And needless to say the most vulnerable have the least protection. A 2007 EPI study showed that workers at the bottom of the wage scale, those making less than $7.38 an hour, are five times less likely to have sick days than workers at the top of the scale, those making greater than $29.47 an hour. Only 16% of low-wage workers have access to paid sick days.

[...] More than 160 countries, the Times tells us, have laws that ensure all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness. The US does not. The reason goes no further than the influence of money on politics.

We once provided much of our social contract through the corporation rather than the Congress. Strong unions could negotiate a family wage, health care, overtime pay, paid sick leave, paid vacations, and pensions. Many non-union employers offered benefits similar to those provided by union companies. But over the last decades of this conservative era, as unions grew weaker under attack, more and more corporations simply shredded those agreements. (Read the rest.)

So what's the "slantwise" connection? Simply this: The biggest players in the charter school movement - the Walton Family of Wal-Mart fame, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, New York City Mayor Bloomberg and his appointed school chancellor Joel Klein - are all on record as being anti-union. The Walton family's hiring practices at Wal-Mart are infamous for creating precisely the class of working poor that Borosage discusses above:

The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving $50 million a year to support them. The Waltons specialize in giving money to opponents of public education. “Empowering parents to choose among competing schools,” said John Walton, son of Wal-Mart’s founder, “will catalyze improvement across the entire K–12 education system.” According to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report, “Some critics argue that it is the beginning of the ‘Wal-Martization’ of education, and a move to for-profit schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and private schools as well as public schools.” Wal-Mart is a notorious union-busting firm, famous for keeping its health-care costs down by discouraging unhealthy people from working at its stores, paying extremely low wages with poor benefits, and violating child labor laws. The company has reportedly looted more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments. Its so-called philanthropy seems also to be geared to the looting of public treasuries. (source)

I could go on (and if I did, I would go to this 2004 feature on Wal-Mart's regressive employment practices, and their $2.5 billion annual cost to taxpayers having to foot the emergency room bills of Wal-Mart's un- or under-insured employees, in the New York Review of Books).

But instead I'll close with these questions: In these economic times, when fewer and fewer have living wages and benefits, and labor is a shell of its former self due to three decades of anti-union legislation, why should we be sanguine about trusting the Waltons, Bill Gates, and company with the fate of the teaching profession? Do we really expect them not to do their best to add America's 4,000,000 teachers to the already swollen rolls of America's under-paid and under-insured former middle class? Will worsened working conditions and Wal-Mart-low morale among teachers result in better student achievement?

In short, do we really want schools on the Wal-Mart model?

--image source