StickWithANose

If you need more evidence that current trends in corporate-driven education reform are little more than a farce wrapped in the rhetoric of educational equality, behold the Walton Family’s latest contribution to our fair nation!

The Detroit Public Schools have teamed up with Walmart Stores to provide job training and entry-level, afterschool jobs to students at four high schools…

Students will get 11 weeks of job-readiness training during the school day and 10 high school credits for the class and work experience.

Sean Vann, principal at Douglass, said 30 students at that school will get jobs at Walmart. He said the program will allow students an opportunity to earn money and to be exposed to people from different cultures – since all of the stores are in the suburbs.

Wow! That’s a win-win! WalMart will be able to tap a dependable low cost labor pool with state subsidies in order to drive its overall labor costs down, and they can do so under the banner of helping out a struggling school system and its students. Only in Banamerica!

I think old Adam Smith was hip to this kind of “combination” when he noted, “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbors and equals. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labor even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.”