Like many who are sickened by low graduation rates and sub-basement test scores, I have been outraged at the way the teachers’ unions–both LA’s and the statewide union (and those in a lot of other states)—have been unforgivably obstructive when it comes to school reform.

Thus I was excited when I saw that Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools by Steven Brill, was featured on the cover of the NY York Times Book Review, knowing that it would bring a lot of buyers to what promised to be an important book on the utterly essential topic of what is standing in the way of fixing the nation’s schools.

But it was with a sinking heart that I finished the review by smart cookie writer Sara Mosle, who was also clearly excited by Brill’s book—until she read it.

Mosle’s disappointment is obvious as she points out Brill’s unwillingness to include pesky facts and inconvenient complexities that don’t support his one-villain thesis.

Here’s how the review opens:

Steven Brill is a graduate of Yale Law School and the founder of Court TV, and in his new book, “Class Warfare,” he brings a sharp legal mind to the world of education reform. Like a dogged prosecutor, he mounts a zealous case against America’s teachers’ unions. From more than 200 interviews, he collects the testimony of idealistic educators, charter school founders, policy gurus, crusading school superintendents and billionaire philanthropists. Through their vivid vignettes, which he pieces together in short chapters with titles like “ ‘Colorado Says Half of You Won’t Graduate’ ” and “A Shriek on Park Avenue,” Brill conveys the epiphanies, setbacks and triumphs of a national reform movement.

Some of his subjects, like Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, are by now household names; others, like Jon Schnur, an adviser to the Clinton and Obama administrations, are more obscure. But in Brill’s telling, they have all come, over some two decades, to distrust or denounce the unions and to promote the same small set of reforms: increasing the number of charter schools and evaluating and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures that rely heavily on student test scores.

Throughout, Brill reminds us he’s just an objective reporter. Disinterested, however, is not how he comes across. He recounts an educator’s motto to “teach like your hair’s on fire.” For most of the book, Brill writes like his hair is on fire. His sympathies clearly lie with the unions’ most adamant critics, like Michelle Rhee, the controversial former superintendent of the District of Columbia public schools, and Joel Klein, the combative ex-chancellor of the New York City system.

I say this as someone whom Brill might pick for a jury pool. I taught for three years in New York as a charter member of Teach for America and had my own run-ins with the union. (An article I wrote, which praised Kopp’s then-­fledgling organization and made some of the same criticisms Brill does, angered my union representative.) This fall, my daughter will be attending public school, and I’ll be teaching at a private, reform-­minded urban academy in New Jersey…..

For those who are interested in school reform there is no question that Class Warfare is a must read. However, judging by what Mosle has written—which seems to ring sadly true—reading it may make many of us wish that Brill’s book was a better, less choir-preaching read.

NEW YORK FINDS ONE OR TWO TEENSY PROBLEMS WITH ITS VALUE ADDED TEACHER RATINGS

The New York Times reports. Here’s how the story opens:

No one at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies works harder than Stacey Isaacson, a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher. She is out the door of her Queens home by 6:15 a.m., takes the E train into Manhattan and is standing out front when the school doors are unlocked, at 7. Nights, she leaves her classroom at 5:30.

“She’s very dedicated,” said Tejal Bahtt, a fellow teacher. “She works way harder than I work. Yesterday I punched in at 7:10 and her time card was already there.”

Last year, when Ms. Isaacson was on maternity leave, she came in one full day a week for the entire school year for no pay and taught a peer leadership class.

Her principal, Megan Adams, has given her terrific reviews during the two and a half years Ms. Isaacson has been a teacher. “I know that this year had its moments of challenge — you always handled it with grace and presence,” the principal wrote on May 4, 2009. “You are a wonderful teacher.”

Anyway, the story goes on and on listing even more of Ms. Isaacson’s amazing qualities.

And then….dum-da-dum-dum.

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

Read the rest.

THE BILLION $ OVERTIME BILL

I’m so glad someone is finally doing this story This is from the San Francisco Chronicle:

California prison guards and their supervisors have racked up 33.2 million hours of vacation, sick and other paid time off – an astounding accumulation that amounts to nearly half a year per worker.

It also adds up to a $1 billion liability for taxpayers of the deficit-plagued state.

Poor management at California’s prisons has for years allowed workers to stock up on generous amounts of paid time off – a benefit that employees must either use or cash out when they retire. But the numbers swelled when former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger imposed furloughs in 2009, forcing prison guards and their supervisors to take unpaid days off each month to help save state cash.

But somehow it worked out that guards came in on their furlough days and then got paid overtime.

Read the rest.

MEXICAN WOMAN POLICE CHIEF SEEKS ASYLUM IN U.S

The AFP has the story:

A 20-year old woman police chief who fled her northern Mexican border town after receiving death threats could soon have her asylum claim heard by a US judge, an immigration official told AFP Tuesday.

An official with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) told AFP that Marisol Valles Garcia is in the United States after fleeing her post as the top law enforcement official in the Mexican town of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero in northern Chihuahua state.

A college student and mother, Valles, who officials said already has filed her asylum petition, was fired over the weekend by local officials for abandoning her job.

Relatives have said that the young woman received death threats from a criminal group that wanted to force her to work for them….

“JUAREZ IS DROWNING IN DEATH”

And while we’re on the topic of trouble in Mexico, LA reporter Daniel Hernandez, now living in and reporting from Mexico, filed this alarming report on his site Intersections:

…[Ciudad Juarez is a government-sustained human rights disaster, a 21st Century-style slow-burn multi-actor city-cide. Don’t get the daily carnage tally by Molly Molloy at Frontera List? It tests the stomach. Juarez is drowning in death. But Juarez is just the tip of it all.

Read this piece in Spanish by Froylan Enciso in a recent issue of Gatopardo. Up in a town in the Sierra Madre, up from Mazatlán, a drug-trade-related ambush during Christmas 2009 leaves at least 40 people dead, maybe up to 100, Enciso writes during a visit home.

The incident never makes it into the press. It didn’t happen. I checked the federal government database on homicides this morning. For Mazatlán, only 97 homicides are reported in 2009. That doesn’t sound right …

They tell us lately “at least” 35,000 have been killed in Mexico’s drug-trade violence since the governments ignited it on themselves in 2006. That can’t be accurate. Just ask someone who knows better, ask Metinides. As Enciso illustrates, so many dead are not reported, so many kidnapped are never returned. We’ll never know….

Read the rest.

JON STEWART ON THE PETER KING “MUSLIM RADICALISM” HEARINGS

Representative Peter T. King, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, will begin Congressional hearings on Islamic radicalism on Thursday.

On Tuesday’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart had one or two things to say about King’s approach:

Just watch it.

MEANWHILE, ANOTHER BIZARRE MOMENT IN JURISPRUDENCE.…

The California Supreme Court is presently struggling over when one may define a pimp as a pimp.

Read the Sf Chron’s account.

And while you’re here, check the Libya updates on the WLA Twitter feed to the right. Amazing.

On Sunday, the LA Times ran a devastating story that illustrates the real cost of the state’s seniority-based teacher layoff policy that was pushed through some years ago by California’s largest teachers’ unions, including UTLA.

The story, by Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith, focuses on one school—Liechty Middle School—to show a drama that has unfolded at many of the district’s schools, particularly those in lower income ares, where some of the most gifted and dedicated of LAUSD’s teachers were among the first to be pink-slipped, their jobs given to teachers with more seniority—some very good, some far less so— or to long-term substitutes, with children suffering as a result.

Here’s how it opens:

John H. Liechty Middle School opened in 2007 in Los Angeles’ impoverished Westlake neighborhood with a seasoned principal, dozens of energetic young teachers and a mission to “reinvent education” in the nation’s second-largest school district.

The students had come from some of the lowest-performing schools in the city. But by the end of the first year, their scores on standardized tests showed the most improvement in English among district middle schools and exceptional growth in math, according to a Times analysis.

“It was a dream job,” said Monique Gascon, who taught English and history at Liechty during its first two years. “We had a lot of autonomy as teachers, we had a lot of support from administration and the kids were really learning. We could see the progress.”

But when budget cuts came in the summer of 2009 — at the end of the school’s second year — more than half of the teachers were laid off. Among those dismissed were Gascon and 16 others who ranked in the top fifth of district middle school instructors in boosting test scores, The Times’ analysis found. Many were replaced by a parade of less effective teachers, including many short-term substitutes.

By the end of the last school year, Liechty had plummeted from first to 61st — near the bottom among middle schools — in raising English scores and fallen out of the top 10 in boosting math scores.

“Everything we worked those two years to instill is gone,” said Amanda Uy, a math and science teacher who was laid off and now teaches part time at a private school. “It’s really tragic.”

Read the whole thing.

THE OBSTRUCTIONISTS

Once again, California lost out in its bid to win a share of the $4.35 billion in federal education grants under the competitive Race to the Top program. Several of those involved say that, despite what has been announced in public, it was the state’s biggest teachers’ unions failure to cooperate that ultimately sank California’s chances.

Race to the Top requires states to demonstrate that they are making large strides in instituting aggressive education reform in order to be eligible for the money. Had it been chosen, California stood to get as much as $700 million. LAUSD alone would have gotten around $120 million of that money.

Race to the Top’s admitted strategy has been to use the carrot of federal $$ to break through the logjam of politics that often keep states from reforming their failing educational systems.

California is a prime example of why the ploy is needed. We have bottom-feeding test scores, a lousy drop out rate, yet for several decades we have been hog-tied by special interests, and partisan wrangling, any time real reform is proposed.

On Tuesday morning, when state education officials got the bad news that California was not selected to get the grants, the reason why was portrayed as fairly simple, as someone close to the process explained to me.

“They said, ‘You don’t have the union buy-in, and we don’t feel you’re going to get it.”

In fact, just one-third of the active unions in the state signed on to California’s Race to the Top application. Neither of the state-wide teachers’ unions participated. The most notable and likely the most damaging regional hold out was UTLA—the union that represents the teachers of LAUSD, the nation’s second largest school district.

The issue of Race to the Top was so contentious an issue in the state’s education circles that for a while California wasn’t even going to apply for the second funding round. But Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan reportedly made a special plea to Governor Schwarzenegger to go for it.

And so the state gave it the best shot they could, given the political limitations, as Howard Blume reported for the LA Times:

The California superintendents told evaluators that they thought they could bring local unions on board, and, if they could not, they were prepared to return federal dollars accordingly. L.A. Unified has moved on that front in the last few days, with union officials signaling a willingness to negotiate over the possible inclusion of test scores as part of a reshaped, multifaceted teacher evaluation.

California’s plan focused on strategies favored by the Obama administration, such as placing the most effective educators in struggling schools and improving instruction through the improved use of data.

The state blueprint also embraced the federal endorsement of aggressive remedies, such as replacing the staff at a poorly performing school and converting it to an independently run charter school. Most charters schools are non-union, another arena of discomfort for teacher unions.

But the evaluators simply didn’t believe the state’s hopeful promise that the unions would jump aboard later, if California got the money. The official message was that the union non-participation was not the deal breaker. But in less public communication, said an insider, state officials heard that UTLA and CTA’s refusal to play ball effectively torpedoed the state’s application.

“We heard over and over again, that we had to have union buy-in,” said the insider. “And, at the end of the day, we didn’t have it.”

The fact that right before the selections, UTLA’s A.J. Duffy had such a loud and public fight with the LA Times over the Times’ series on value-added teacher evaluations, likely did not help matters, the insider added. “We keep having all these fights on the national stage. That isn’t exactly lost on the people in D.C.”

“I have always said that this race was not just about the money” said Senate Education Chair, Gloria Romero in her statement following the news. “It was about a vision for public education that is best for our children. The status quo is entrenched in our public school system. We made Herculean strides to even be able to compete and I am proud that we did not abdicate on this responsibility. But the Obama Administration’s decision today demonstrates that we need to demand even bolder changes in order to enter a new era of education renaissance in California.”

That’s a nice way of putting it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I was glad to see the LA Times’ analysis of teacher performance published Sunday morning (led by Times education writers Jason Felch and Jason Song), and was deeply annoyed by the angry posturing and threats from UTLA prez, A.J. Duffy in response to it.

But, as Monday wore on, I heard from an increasing number of teachers who objected to the Times’ methodology in a big way, and were particularly horrified when one of the low-rated teachers was pictured in the article as he taught.

Among the angry educators I heard from was my friend, novelist/teacher and WitnessLA contributor, Dennis Danziger—whose opinion I respect a great deal (even if we occasionally disagree on a few of the finer points of school reform—and school reformers).

Danziger’s point of view on the Times’ analysis seems to be representative of that of a lot of devoted teachers, thus is important to hear. After all, these are the talented men and women in the trenches with LA’s kids. In other words, they are the experts.

Okay, here’s Dennis (and he’s pretty mad at his hometown newspaper):

The LA Times Blame Game

by Dennis Danziger

Ahh, the LA Times, a newspaper that for the past few decades keeps losing readership, firing staff and being fumbled from one ineffective owner to another has found a group to look down upon: incompetent public school teachers.

And who better to point out failure than a newspaper whose readership is about half of what it was in the 1990s? Who better to examine the LAUSD’s failures than The Times whose parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2008 when they were carrying a debt load in the billions?

The Times knows failure. And with those credentials why not believe them when they jump on the President Obama, Secretary Duncan, Mayor Villaraigosa bandwagon and simplify the failure of America’s public school crisis to this: it’s all the fault of bad teachers.

It’s not class size. It’s not the economy. It’s not hunger. Or broken homes. Or kids who come to school from foster homes. Or kids who barely come to school at all. It’s not living in violent neighborhoods. It’s not screwed up parents. It’s not limousine liberals, religious fanatics, wacko home schooling parents, and your every day racists who bailed out of the public schools decades ago. No. It’s none of that. It’s all about those bad LAUSD teachers and their oh-so-powerful unions who protect the rotten apples among them.

I’m an LAUSD teacher, an 18-year veteran, and I want The Times to know that they can count me in when it comes to hiring energetic young teachers and booting out the old, ineffective ones.

I’m all for streamlining the firing process to rid our classrooms of crummy teachers.

I’m all for rewarding tenure after seven years instead of two.

I’d even support our mayor taking over not just a handful of schools but every school in the District.

Heck, I’m even for merit pay.

There’s just one thing I want to know, and that is this:

What system would The Times and our educational reformers use to prove which teachers make the grade and which don’t?

A standardized test and nothing else? That seems to be their sole measurement.

And, honestly, that’s what worries me.

Let’s use me as an example.

For 14 years, from 1995 – 2008, I taught English at Palisades Charter High School; in those years it was an LAUSD school. This past June I attended PCHS’ graduation where I saw many of my former 10th grade honors English students cross the stage. Those kids, come fall, will be attending Wellesley, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin (two on full academic scholarships), USC (a full academic scholarship), Wake Forest, Tufts, UCLA and UC-Berkeley.

Trust me, these kids are bright and know how to bubble in the correct answers. I’ve seen them do it.

One week earlier I attended graduation at Venice High School where I have been teaching for the past two years. Of the 87 students crammed into my two classes of senior English this past semester, 29 did not graduate because they just quit coming to my class; another nine didn’t graduate because they didn’t do enough work.

Of these 87 kids, 38 didn’t graduate, and few of these kids test nearly so well on standardized tests as did my former students. I’m pretty sure at least part of the reason is because some of my students at Venice HS and their parents do not consider regular attendance in school a high priority.
But here’s what I need to know from The Times and their education reformer consultants:

Am I a brilliant teacher who inspired and shepherded my students into some of our nation’s most prestigious colleges?

Or am I a lug, deadwood, a card-carrying AARP and UTLA member whose teaching style is so ineffective my students drop out by the busload?

Oh yeah, there is this: Last May, within a three-day period, one of my current students at Venice High won a prestigious city wide creative writing contest and a $1,000 college scholarship; while two of my former VHS students were sentenced to jail. One convicted of armed robbery (13 years) and another for attempted murder (22 years).

So what is it, LA Times? I’m dying to know if I’m in line to be lauded and receive merit pay or if I’m the next guy whose picture will be featured on your front page with the word: INCOMPETENT emblazoned beneath my photo.

It used to be that it was conservatives who railed about public schools— asking for vouchers, wanting to break up big unwieldy districts, furious at the teachers’ unions.

They didn’t really get anywhere.

But in the last few years another kind of push for reform is starting to smash through the calcification that has put US student performance in the bottom third of developed nations. And those doing the pushing are a loose coalition of progressive reformers, high profile charter school founders, like Green Dot’s Steve Barr, a few big, adventurous philanthropists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and others like Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp, the New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein—and the Obama Administration’s Arne Duncan.

(A list of conservatives are on board too.)

One of the things the reformers want in this movement spreading across the country, reports Steven Brill in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, is “to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores.”

What reformers have come to believe matters most is good teachers. “It’s all about the talent,” says Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

However, America’s teachers unions, long the stalwart base of the Democratic party, are the main opposition to such reforms.

For instance, Brill writes:

In Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen, also a Democrat, pushed the Legislature to pass laws allowing more charter schools and making student test scores 50 percent of annual teacher evaluations. The statewide teachers’ union ended up supporting both bills.

Bredesen explained the new politics of education in his state this way: “For me there’s a little bit of a ‘Nixon goes to China’ feel about it, because I had done a lot of things that teachers were quite happy with over the years. My argument to them was that this is coming from a Democratic administration. This is not a Republican idea anymore. I told them that I know this goes at the core of what you and your colleagues have been protecting over the years,” Bredesen continued, referring to how he broached the subject of teachers being evaluated and paid based on individual performance ratings. “But now, we’re all going to have to evolve. It’s coming, and you can either help to structure it, or you can fight it, and it won’t be as good.”

Read the rest. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read in some time on the education reform that has exploded in proportion and influence in the last five years. I think you’ll find it worth your time.

The New York Times editorial pages are praising a new system for teacher evaluation that the New Haven school system has tentatively worked out in cooperation with The American Federation of Teachers. In other words, unlike, say, UTLA and LAUSD, which appear to get nothing done in this realm, in New Haven the union and the district have stopped squabbling and have, instead, tossed out the old rules and have come up with a new method that everyone seems to think will benefit both students and teachers. (Whatta concept!)

Here’s a clip from what the NY Times had to say:

To improve the quality of schools, districts need a rigorous system for evaluating the quality of teaching — rewarding teachers who do their jobs best and retraining or removing those who fail their students. The city of New Haven and the American Federation of Teachers deserve high praise for the new teacher training and evaluation system they unveiled earlier this week.

[SNIP]

In most schools today, teacher evaluations are not worthy of the name. An administrator typically observes the teacher at work once or twice during the year. Nearly every teacher passes — even at the most dismal schools. Struggling teachers rarely get the help they need to improve. Once they are tenured, it is nearly impossible to dislodge them.

The New Haven system would completely rebuild the evaluation process. Instructional managers, mainly principals and assistant principals, will be assigned to teachers to help them lay out academic goals and development plans. These managers will then meet with the teachers throughout the year to give detailed feedback.

At the end of the year, teachers will receive a rating, on a 1-to-5 scale, based on how much students learn, how well teachers do their jobs and how well they collaborate with colleagues.

There’s lots more so read the rest.

22 LAUSD SCHOOLS GIVEN TO LA TEACHERS TO RUN—HIGH PROFILE CHARTERS COME UP EMPTY

At LAUSD school board meeting Tuesday In a large win for UTLA, the teachers’ union, 22 schools were handed off to the districts’ teachers to reorganize. That was 22 out of the 30 that were that were up for grabs as part of the controversial school choice plan. Three of the 30 were given to the mayor’s group to reorganize and another three were given to charters, with one last school given to some kind of partnership between teachers and charters and—I don’t remember who else..

And a most perplexing decision, three charter school operators were yanked completely out of the mix: the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and ICEF Public School—and Green Dot (which only bid for one school). In other words, the charter companies that are best known for their success in running schools in Los Angeles County.

“We missed an opportunity to make bold change today,” the Daily News reported that school board member Yolie Flores said grimly. Flores, who was the one who authored the district’s School Choice plan, was not a happy camper. “Clearly, there is a line of board members that are still beholden to unions. I am beholden to children.”

Howard Blume at the LA Times has the best account of what was evidently a very wild, very woolly day.

Hey, we all hope for the best.

Photo by Brian Vander Brug for the LA Times

On Monday, California lawmakers saw their pay cut by 18 percent. Instead of earning $116,208 a year, they will drop to $95,291.

It was a move that our dear legislators did everything they could to keep from occurring, including pleading with State Attorney General Jerry Brown to declare the cut illegal. (He wisely and correctly declined to do so.)

This brings us to this past Tuesday when the LAUSD board threatened cuts closer to home. The board told the LA’s public school teachers that either 5000 more jobs would be slashed from the district payrolls in the next two years, OR the teachers could take a more than 11 percent drop in pay.

It hardly needs to be said that, if LA’s teachers take the proposed wage hit, they will NOT be grossing $95 grand as their remaining take home.

On the Huffington Post, impassioned Venice High English teacher Dennis Danziger takes a look at the brand new unholy choice of LAUSD cuts from a perspective other than purely fiscal: He sees the cuts as a civil rights issue.

Here, in part, is what he writes:

I stood in a crowd of four or five hundred red-shirted fellow teachers outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters near downtown LA late this afternoon. Inside the LAUSD Board was debating, and would later vote on a budget plan which called for a 12% teacher pay cut; plus they’d consider tossing in a few furlough dates just for good measure. All totaled, the package, if approved, would amount to just under a 15% pay cut.

There goes cable TV. Christmas gifts to everyone on my list. The photographer at my daughter’s upcoming wedding. Hand sanitizer. July, August and September rent. Abbot Kinney pizza. The 3,000 mile oil change. Bully sticks for my dogs Leo and Soni. And the land line.

[SNIP]

More disappointing than imagining my shrinking paycheck was the Board’s lone alternative to the proposed pay cuts. In lieu of a pay cut we teachers could vote to have 5,000 LAUSD employees, including 1,400 of our fellow teachers, canned. Kind of a Sophie’s Choice move by the Board. Your money or your colleagues’ jobs. You choose.

This year the LAUSD booted 2,000 teachers off its payroll, and the English classes I teach at Venice HS jumped from 27 students per class in 2008 to 37 students per class this year. Another round of teacher cuts and my classes will be so packed they’ll be in violation of city fire codes. Oh well.

We few hundred protesters milled around in the cold shouting the same old lame union chants: “Enough is enough. Enough is enough.” And the old reliable United Teachers of Los Angeles chant, “U-T-L-A! U-T-L-A!”

Someone with a microphone shouted, “Louder, so they can hear you upstairs!”

Maybe if the 48,000 UTLA members who stayed away from our demonstration had showed up, the people upstairs would have heard our voices. Would have thought twice before threatening our livelihoods, trashing our profession, before threatening to turn a second-rate school district into little more than storage units, holding facilities for the poor. Because that’s what the LAUSD is fast becoming.

Check out the LAUSD website and you’ll learn that over 90% of its students are non-white and the vast majority of them are poor.

So I don’t take the Board’s proposed pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs personally. It’s not that the Board hates teachers. Heck, I figure they could care less about us one way or the other.

This is a civil rights issue. What the Board is doing, if they impose these cuts, is making sure that LA’s poor and working class children don’t stand much of a chance when it comes time to compete for college slots. When it comes time for these kids to enter the workforce.

What the Board will insure if they pass these cuts is that the status quo will prevail. They’ll make sure the tech schools and the military fill their quotas. Make sure there’s another generation of cheap labor. Bus boys, car wash attendants, people who can answer phones, vacuum office floors, deliver pizzas, rake leaves, change diapers, stock shelves and check the oil…..

Read the rest here.