The new Edison strategy and child labor

In October 2002, Edison Schools founder and head Chris Whittle proposed turning to unpaid student labor in his schools as a cost-cutting measure. This immediately provoked outrage and ridicule.

But either he has forgotten, he figures the public has forgotten, or nobody told the authors of the E2 strategy about any of it.

So the E2 Design Sketch resurrects that notion, proposing to "cut lunch aides and custodians by 50%, use students..." Also, "Student prefects would play an essential role in making the independent learning labs successful by assisting IL lab teachers in managing large numbers of students."

The E2 Design Sketch does note that its parallel strategies of relying on student labor and minimally supervised independent learning may not be surefire crowd-pleasers:

Will customers permit students to tutor students, taking over "jobs" that would normally be filled by unionized paraprofessionals? Will they permit students to spend a significant portion of the day in independent learning environments with very different staffing ratios?

Here's an example of the press reaction to the previous child-labor idea, in a (reposted) Oct. 30, 2002, Toronto Globe & Mail look at Edison's problems:

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 labor, 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-labor plan in place by 2004, school board officials were quick to say they would have nothing to do with the proposal.

Most of the critics, needless to say, surely approve of giving students responsible tasks and encouraging young people to mentor and tutor their peers. The unabashed proposal to replace paid professionals with volunteer students as an undisguised cost-cutting measure tends to get people's goat, though.