For some reason this post at Women of Color Blog and this post at the way here reminded me of my childhood, and the social class dynamics of growing up poor. In her post on Women of Color blog BFP mentions working at McDonalds, which reminded me of my own food service experiences. I worked in fast food, but my first actual food service experience was in elementary school. This is where Monica’s post fits in. Somehow in a very long comment thread the subject turned to government cheese (or in Rosyln’s words “gubmint cheese”), which they served in the cafeteria at my elementary school.1
How do I know what was served in the cafeteria at my school? Well, like all of the other kids in the 5th and 6th grade, I worked in the cafeteria. I can imagine the middle class mostly white suburban readers gasping now because no “respectable” middle class school would ever make their students work in the cafeteria, but my school did.
Here’s how it worked. There were a total of two 5th grade and two 6th grade classes. Each week one of those classes had cafeteria duty, and most of the students in the class would go down to the cafeteria around 10:30 and start helping the janitors and cafeteria workers serve lunch to the students. There were different jobs, which were gendered and assigned base on skills. The most prestigious job was selling ice cream since it involved actually having to count money, and the teacher picked the smartest kids. It was also cooler out in that part of the cafeteria, and only people who had an extra 30 cents to spend on lunch could buy ice cream, so there wasn’t any deluge of kids running to the counter. The rest of the student workers were in three groups, which were assigned by the cooks and janitors. You had the lunch servers, who put food on trays. This was mostly girls with a few boys mixed in, and it was the moderate prestige position. Then, there were the lowest prestige positions: dish washers, (mostly girls), and tray dumpers, (mostly boys). The tray dumpers had to empty the trays after the students were done eating, and take out garbage. Oh and I almost forget, that there was a person who had to wash tables, which I believe was one of those mid-level prestige jobs. Lunch generally ended around noon, and we had recess around that time period.
The students were paid for their work in free meals, and of course this work was also considered valuable job training because it taught us about hard work and responsibility. Moreover, in a low income school, this was one more way to save money. I don’t know that they could afford to hire that many people to work at the school because the local tax base was very low. The school also saved money by getting government subsidized food, such as government cheese. (Which in my opinion was pretty good, but that’s for another debate.)
I suspect lunch was very different than it would be in a middle class school for other reasons as well.
The majority of the kids in my school were eligible for free lunches, and very few kids packed their lunches. How do I know this? Because we had to line up for lunch based on how we were paying–free lunch kids went first, then reduced lunch ($.45), and full price lunch was last ($.75). Most of the kids lined up for free lunch. I also remember when my mother finally got a full time job teaching special education at the school because I got to move to the back of the lunch line with Jason and Aaron, who were the “wealthier” kids in my class. My Dad said we were probably still eligible for the reduced price lunch, but my mother’s pride was not going to allow her to have her kids on reduced lunch while she was teaching in the school. I also knew many of our kids were eligible for free lunch because I looked at data when I was in high school and we were campaigning for a school levy. All of the people campaigning were given a sheet of paper that had data comparing our school to other schools in the state of Ohio based on test scores, per pupil spending, teacher pay, and other relevant socio-economic indicators. As I looked through the sheet all of the numbers were very low, mostly in the bottom 20% or bottom 5%. Finally, I got to the end of the chart, and I leaned over to my mother and said,
“Hey mom we’re really high in this one. What does AFDC mean?” My mom replied,
“That’s welfare.”
We both started laughing because it was the only figure where the school was actually in the top 5%. (I don’t think they had teen pregnancy or drop out rates because we would have been in the top on those, too.)
In junior and high school things were a little different. The kids still served lunches, but it was only the kids in special education who worked in the cafeteria, and they did so almost every day. Those of us who were not in special education were weeded out of food service, and we spent our time in the classroom.
I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on social class over the last 5 or 6 years, especially as it relates to education. I know my own children are not going to grow up like me, and I have mixed feelings about that. As much as I know that many middle income people would find it offensive to have their kids work in the school cafeteria for free food, I have more mixed feelings. Poor kids and working class kids seem to grow up quicker, and they are not coddled in the ways that middle and upper income kids are. I suppose many people are going to say having kids serve in the cafeteria is child labor. I guess it is, but I’m more ambivalent about it. I’ve been doing this type of labor since the 5th grade. I stuffed envelopes for my dad in high school, and I worked as a Whopper flopper at Burger King. I think work is valuable, and I think we shouldn’t shame people because their jobs are low paying or low prestige, but the other side of me knows that we are really funneling kids into the occupations that we expect for their social class. Middle class kids don’t have to grow-up as fast, in part because they will be starting their labor force participation later and because their parents know their incomes are going to be directly linked to having a higher level and better quality education.
I know I’m the exception. I’m the person who grew up in the very poor environment and “made it out” thanks to my mother’s college degree, my smarts, my determination, help from others, and lucky breaks (I’ve written a little about this before.). There is a huge part of me that feels happy that I had the experience of being poor, of having an outhouse, and of having to working in the school cafeteria, but that is largely because that was temporary for me. For a long time I didn’t regret these things because I didn’t really know exactly how middle class people really lived. Of course, I knew that they had wealthier schools (and indoor plumbing) and more opportunities, but I couldn’t clarify what exactly those were. I guess the one advantage I have at this point is that I am fairly able to go back and forth across class divides–I know about government cheese and I know what feta cheese is too. :) I wouldn’t be able to do this had I not grown up poor, and I wouldn’t have know how hard working and determined poor people are. I also wouldn’t recognize the advantages and privileges of my current class position, and I would treat them more as a given.
Congrats you made it to the end of this loooong piece!!!
- I also remember my dad going down to the fire station and getting some government cheese to eat at home. I would suspect that many people who have been poor and are over the age of 30 are familiar with government cheese, but if you are not, go check out the link. [↩]
This sounds so familiar.
My parents were religious radicals, so I went to a school run by our church. And it was just normal and expected that the schoolchildren did all the work they could. (And the school had no indoor plumbing.) We did almost all the work that janitors would usually do, some of what teacher’s aides would do (drilling slower students, checking). I think it was good for us; I hope my children can have a similar experience.
I just love, “I guess the one advantage I have at this point is that I am fairly able to go back and forth across class divides–I know about government cheese and I know what feta cheese is too.”
You know the type of cheese you eat is strongly related to your social class. :)
When I was in Japan I ate a number of meals in a cafeteria that was shared by a number of youth groups of various ages. The kids all cooperated in cleaning up. When I remarked on it, I was told that in Japanese public schools it is quite common for all the kids to have a hand in maintaining the school, not only in the cafeteria but in cleaning the rooms and even the lavatories. It sounded good to me (although probably not to the unions), not only for the benefits you describe but also because I figure the kids would be less likely to make a mess and vandalize a school that they would have to then turn around and clean up. I would be fine with my kids having had to have done this if everyone had to have taken their turn. But you’re right – I can see that such a policy would never fly with the parents in my community. Their precious little children wasting their time cleaning up the school and serving their peers when they should be getting their violin lessons or playing Little League? Hell, no. That’s what illegal aliens are for.
Poor kids and working class kids seem to grow up quicker, and they are not coddled in the ways that middle and upper income kids are.
Amen! I see this in my Scout Troop all the time.
I had government cheese and government peanut butter at summer camp, and I also had that and a few other things when my wife and I were first married. I was a full-time student still and she was substitute teaching – we didn’t have a whole lot of money for a while.
I think work is valuable, and I think we shouldn’t shame people because their jobs are low paying or low prestige,
My family is white collar and my dad and both my brothers and I went to college. My wife’s family is blue collar and she was the only one in her family to get a college degree. When I was first married I worked for my father-in-law (who was a union carpenter) on weekend side jobs as a general scut-work/laborer. He was very surprised to see me do physical work and get dirty without complaint – he didn’t know my parents had me working on my grandparents’ farm when I was a kid. I told him that my father had taught me that any honest work was honorable work and to look down on someone because of the job they had was dishonorable – bringing shame to you, not them.
I found this confusing:
> I can imagine the middle class mostly white suburban readers gasping
>now because no “respectable” middle class school would ever make their
> students work in the cafeteria, but my school did.
I grew up in Palo Alto (very white, mostly suburban, and upper-middle class) and was in middle school in ’78, and I worked in the cafeteria in 7th grade, and at the snack bar in 8th grade.
I would suspect that many people who have been poor and are over the age of 30 are familiar with government cheese,
I’m familiar with government cheese, but haven’t thought about it for a long time…does government cheese no longer exist?
I was surprised by this belief:
>I can imagine the middle class mostly white suburban readers gasping
>now because no “respectable” middle class school would ever make their
>students work in the cafeteria, but my school did.
I grew up in Palo Alto, (which was very white, mostly suburban, and at least upper middle class) and worked in the cafeteria in 7th grade and in the snack bar in 8th.
Now this was in about ’78, so maybe this is a generational thing but if not, then you may have an inaccurate perception of middle class white suburban readers.
Good article Rachel! It’s interesting too what you write about the contrast between elementary and high school in terms of who worked in the cafeterias especially when reading the following that you wrote.
I was thinking about this because I took sociology and it talked about the tracting that’s done in schools by race, national origin, class, geography(urban and rural) and learning disabilities for example. It’s been an issue in these parts in many ways. It seems that the cafeteria assignments are following that pattern too.
But like you, I have mixed feelings about working in elementary schools but it seems that it’s often used as a means to define a person’s social class just like there’s mechanisms in place in schools to define a person’s educational class(which I guess like a social class is supposed to be fixed in stone) and that’s not right.
In my high school, this is how financial aid was paid back by working in the cafeteria for breakfasts and lunches(as it was a boarding school run by Catholic nuns) while everyone had to do time serving food and cleaning dishes during dinners and weekends.
Some of us corrupted the system in place by opting to do dinner/weekend serving for others if the price was right. And there are advantages to serving food because if they had cherry cheesecake squares or cream puffs for dessert instead of bread pudding or green jello with cottage cheese “frosting” and a vegetable and fruit medley inside, you had first dibs.
Sundays were the fanciest meals so no one wanted dish duty on that day. More dishes. Deeper grime in the cooking pans.
Partly it was to save money in hiring staff people to do the work, mostly I think it was part of the work ethic of that particular order of nuns. Because the nuns whether in their 20s or their 90s, worked hard too and it was a tenet that they practiced and got the students to practice too. And the other source of labor came from another pool, the detention group so in that case it was both practical and a means of imparting morals for bad behaviors. Each detention was paid off by an hour of labor. Except that if you got caught drinking then the first offense was 250 hours.
Students also had to do other chores. Sweeping dorm hallways, cleaning bathrooms, the laundry room and the dreaded mop room which beat bathroom duty by a hair.
It was good training because I would clean communal type bathrooms later in another job(though I had no such training in the art of urinals) and I’d worked usually doing housekeeping or cleaning jobs since I was about six during summers including at military bases with my older sister and cousin. And washing hundreds of dishes was good training as well. So by high school, it was just part of the routine.
It’s interesting the message that gets sent out by calling this type of work “menial” and such and devaluing those who do these jobs yet at the same time, assigning people including children to do these jobs is seen or explained as a way of building moral character and work ethic.
It’s definitely a generational thing. I grew up in the yuppy subburn Ohio schools Rachel speaks of at approximately the same time as she did and there is NO WAY parents would have been ok with their kids working in teh cafeteria. Less because of the stigma of food service work I think and more because they’d be pissed if every other week 2 hours of the school day were “lost” on working in the cafe.
I can second mittman. I went to a middle/upper-middle school whose kids came from a neighborhood known for being “up-and-comers”. I.e. most of the people there were striving for big dog positions, VP’s, CEO’s, etc. A week’s work in the cafeteria was required each year, with additional hours available as “time-served” for detentions and the like. Granted, it’s not the same as an expected year of service, but if the school had made a convincing argument for more hours being of benefit to the kids’ futures, the parents would have supported it in a heart-beat.
Rachel,
Great post. We share similar backgrounds (although I did have indoor plumbing in my small town).
I teach mostly first-generation college students. A few weeks ago, one of my students said something about “those jobs that all the college students do”. I don’t remember the context.
I took a deep breath and said “you know, not all college students work. Lots don’t.”
There was an absolute stunned silence around the room. I mean dead silence. Then they asked how those other students pay for school.
This raised all sorts of questions for me. First, I wondered how these bright students had gotten this far in their education and still didn’t know that there are others their age who live within considerable material comfort. Second, I had to think for a long time about how to help them to figure out what it said about them that they were all working so many hours to afford school when others don’t.
We did talk a lot that night about the value of work, even while they often experience how little their customers/clients/ co-workers value them in the work roles they play.
Do middle class students know how hard students like mine work for the education that they take for granted?
Jane
EducationandClass.com
“Do middle class students know how hard students like mine work for the education that they take for granted?”
Generally speaking, of the ones I have encountered, NO. Not one bit. It’s pretty sad.
I ate the government cheese in the early 80s, but not so much that my family was poor, as because my grandfather was eligible for it because he was a senior citizen, and he was cheap. (This is a compliment – why should he give money to Giant Eagle if he could get for free cheese his taxes paid for?)
I think the Japanese cooperative schools thing upthread is a great idea – and have every kid do some work, not just kids serving detention or on free lunch.
My college jobs: assistant to university archivists, clerk in alumni association mailroom, football and basketball official for intramural sports. I worked summers as a dishwasher (in my dad’s restaurant, but I cleaned out the trap of the industrial dishwasher and worked in the kitchen in 90+ degree weather), and bottling line worker in a brewery.
As someone who came from a suburban mostly white middle class high school (2001), I’d say that’s an accurate description of the attitude people would have if they tried to implement that in our district. I think it’d be a fantastic idea, at least they could say they gave us some skills that carried over to “real life”. /cynicism. But really, I think that would be a great way to break some of my peers out of the coddling we get.
You’re lucky if they know students like yours exist outside of fiction. Ok, that’s possibly overly cynical too. But there’s a huge sense of entitlement and just general disrespect that I see in many more of my peers then I’d like to have (it’s been screened out more at the grad level but undergrad survey classes made me want to beat people with the textbooks they weren’t reading).
Besides, having to care for a place makes it more yours. If you’ve invested in it, you have more respect for it. And that can’t really be a bad thing, I don’t think.
Jane and Kate–
YES. Some of us do. I come from an upper-middle class white family and worked my butt off to put myself through college. My parents could have covered everything my scholarship didn’t, but chose not to. They’re Dutch calvinists, which may have something to do with it. I started scrubbing toilets at the age of 5, and have had jobs cleaning locker rooms, cashiering at minimum wage, landscaping, cleaning rat cages, and hauling lead bricks out of the physics building basement. I know a lot of others who have similar experiences, and of course, many more who don’t, but don’t lose hope for the middle-class kids. My dad never went to college, and definitely wasn’t going to let me take it for granted.
I dont know. I was educated in one of the poorest school districts in my state (Detroit Public Schools) and it was not a practice of that district to have kids working in the cafeteria…ever. Not even in high school. I know that they served government cheese though. My grandmother used to get it from the senior center near her house along with government peanut butter. So I ate a lot of it because I was often at her house. You can say what you want about government cheese but that stuff was pretty good!
Social class can be such a mixed up thing. It was weird for me because I my family is very upper middle class but my parents chose to live in Detroit and send me and my siblings to Detroit Public Schools which certainly exposed me to more diversity in socio-economic class than I would have gotten elsewhere.
I had my way paid in college, and am having it paid through grad school, too.
Personally, I’m VERY grateful. I don’t know if I’m as grateful as I should be. I’m sure I’m not. But I do know that I’m getting what other students can’t take for granted, and I’ve known that since I was an undergrad.
Now that I’m teaching, one thing that’s surprised me is how many of my students are working a significant number of hours — it seems to be a much higher proportion than it was where I went to school. Many of the students I knew as an undergrad worked 20 hours a week or less, and many didn’t. It seems, here, that almost every student I have works at least 20, if not 40 hours a week.
Mandolin,
I read a study recently (and of course can’t put my hands on it right now) analyzing the rising costs of education relative to stagnation in pay for “college kid” jobs.
The study said that in earlier policy climates, students could earn enough working 2o hours a week to pay for college.
Now, with tuition going up so rapidly, more limited financial aid (apart from loans) and the declining purchasing power of the current minimum wage, a student would have to work closer to 50 hours a week to pay for school. It really can’t be done.
I’m intrigued by Berea College, where there is no tuition and every student has to work on campus. They actually have a family income cap, above which students won’t be admitted. Daniel Golden writes about Berea in his book The Price of Admissions.
Jane
educationandclass.com
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Jane said, “I’m intrigued by Berea College, where there is no tuition and every student has to work on campus. They actually have a family income cap, above which students won’t be admitted. Daniel Golden writes about Berea in his book The Price of Admissions.”
My best friend from high school went there. I had done a lot of research, and I told her about it because her family definitely could afford to pay for college for 3 kids on a waste water manager’s salary.
The students also get strong perferences if they are from Appalachia. They attract fairly high quality students from lower income backgrounds, and I do believe the graduation rate is high. My friend had to work 20 hours a week, and she said most of the jobs are related to the upkeep of the campus.
She also said that they talked a lot about the over reliance on standardized test scores. Apparently, the students at the school, since they are mostly poor, do very poorly on standardized tests. They tried to help the students improve their test taking skills, but I also think they didn’t really too heavily test scores in admissions.
“The study said that in earlier policy climates, students could earn enough working 2o hours a week to pay for college.”
Totally. But I only took one year off between college and grad school. Did the climate change that fast? (I’ve been putting it down to geographical/economic difefrences between the two institutions.)
Yeah, the institutional differences are huge.
I teach students that a probably about 1/3 working class, 1/3 lower middle class, and 1/3 upper middle class. (With a smattering maybe 5% upper class and 5% lower class.
Tuition at my school is over $30,000 dollars a year–it’s a private school
It is really only the upper middle who don’t have to work. I have frequently been surprised at how many worked. But when I was a University of Connecticut, very few students worked. They were mostly middle and upper middle class kids (very few working class), and their loans and family incomes could more easily cover tuition.
At Bowling Green State, the population was overwhleimingly working class and lower middle class, with maybe 10% upper middle class and 10% lower class. The tuition was really low, but I had the distinct impression that fewer of them worked than my current school but more than UCONN.
At my undergrad school in Detroit, I think most people worked. It was a relatively cheap private school with a large population of people from Detroit. I think most people worked, but they also gave tons of scholarships, which is why I went there.
slynne, What is interesting about Detroit is the test schools, which are public schools that required admissions and were designed to reach out more middle income families.
Tapetum,
I think the big difference was that it served in part as a punishment for the kids at your school. It was a “reward” at my school.
Radfem said, “I was thinking about this because I took sociology and it talked about the tracting that’s done in schools by race, national origin, class, geography(urban and rural) and learning disabilities for example. It’s been an issue in these parts in many ways. It seems that the cafeteria assignments are following that pattern too.”
Yeah they do, and don’t forget gender.
One year, when my teacher really liked me. I got to be the ice cream girl, which I was really proud of, but the other year they kept putting me on dishwashing. I was humiliated to be down graded to dishes.
I like to see students working; I had to scrub pots and make pizza to get through school, damned if anyone else should have it easier. ;)
But I’d be concerned about the socially-disapproved getting the crap jobs, which seems from your anecdotes to be a real problem. Maybe they should randomize it.
Robert said, “I had to scrub pots and make pizza to get through school, damned if anyone else should have it easier.”
Did you have to do this as a paid job during high school? Or was it a school requirement?
Paid job so I could have a car. We were middle-class. Then I did the same thing for most of the college years, when I couldn’t find a brain-job.
Rachel:
We had to work at the cafeteria at my elementary school, too. I don’t think the school was predominantly lower class, but I’m not sure. Several of my classmates were from upper-middle-class families, but that was the gifted class, so there was probably some selection bias there. The jobs were rotated so that everyone had a turn at everything.
They’re not actually paying that, are they? Don’t schools just jack up the sticker price and discount heavily for lower- and middle-class students?
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She also said that they talked a lot about the over reliance on standardized test scores. Apparently, the students at the school, since they are mostly poor, do very poorly on standardized tests. They tried to help the students improve their test taking skills, but I also think they didn’t really too heavily test scores in admissions.
Even the top schools are dropping the weights they give the standardized tests. They certainly are useful, but there are a lot of other predictors of success in college that are given more weight now.
So, based on the comments of a few people stating they didn’t think middle class people would have a problem with their child working in elementary school, I asked the question to my Mommy board – we’re all relatively in the same age bracket late 20s-30s, it’s overwhelmingly middle class and white.
The majority said they would not want their child working in the cafeteria – some said because it was inappropriate to have children working for the school – there are “workers” hired to do that, some were concerned for germ/food safety reasons (they don’t trust kids), some simply said it was not an appropriate use of educational time.
The select few who said they wouldn’t have a problem with it were the same ones who did it themselves in elementary school – which was a tiny portion of the posters that responded.
It’s of course totally unscientific and annecdotal, so no meaningful conclusions can be drawn, but I do wonder about a shift in the idea of work and work ethic for middle class focus based on a generational difference.
Now, you have a lot of middle class and upper middle class folks who grew up that way – they’ve always been “comfortable”, many of them had their educations paid for, had lots of luxuries as children, and if their parents did struggle, they probably didn’t see much of it themselves, they are further removed from the generations of people who started out more working class, or having parents who lived through the depression and were much more frugal… I’ve definitely seen that kind of environment in my peers and particularly now that they are parents. It’s not even a question that they should be saving for their children’s education – OF COURSE they will pay for it, no, they don’t want their kid to work in high school or college, they want them to focus on school. They are spending $40 on BABY CLOTHES on a regular basis because they want their kids and toddlers to look cute… etc.
Even though by the time I was in high school and paying attention to such matters my parents had safely arrived at middle class/upper middle class and remained there, there was a time when they struggled. They once had 4 mouths to feed and worked multiple jobs to make it happen. I grew up in a do it yourself household, where the exotic vacation we took once a year was “up north” in MN to a cabin on a lake for a week. Frugality, work ethic and knowing that my education was primarily my responsibility – even though they did help out considerably was part of my frame of reference. I was the odd kid out a lot of the time compared to a lot of my peers.
mando,
that difference is true for me too, more students I teach work and work more than my peers in college. For me this is explained by the differences between my undergrad college and the one I teach at now. public/private, high cost/lowish cost.
Yes, I went to a “test school” for middle school (Burton International School) where the idea was to draw a lot of middle class students to the inner city school located in an area with a lot of immigrant students. I think when I went there about 50% of the students were from the local neighborhood and the other half were from all over the rest of the city, mostly middle and upper middle class.
I grew up in a “mixed” school district – half rural, half suburban. We moved from the suburban part of the district to the rural part of the district when I was in 4th grade, as my parents had inherited a house that was bigger than the one we were originally in. (It needed a lot of fixing-up work, too.) I never really thought of it until I read Rachel’s post, but there were definitely differences between the two schools, even though they were in the same school district.
The suburban school did not require the students to work in the cafeteria, although the 5th graders took turns being the monitors, escorts, and runners. The monitors sat at each table and reported rule infractions to the lunch ladies; the escorts walked each class to the cafeteria and put the milk on the trays; and the runners went to each classroom to tell the teacher it was time to go to lunch. So they never did “food service” jobs, and it was rotated evenly, regardless of your payment status.
The rural school did require the 5th grade students to work in the cafeteria, but not putting food on the trays (I think the health department had rules about that). The work was rotated evenly, regardless of whether or not your parents paid for your lunch. I think we had government cheese, but it was always mixed in somehow, not served separately. I *know* we had government peanut butter, because we had celery sticks with peanut butter at least twice a week.
The suburban school was primarily populated by the children of business owners and factory workers (at various levels). The rural school’s students were either farm children or trailer park kids (the district’s only trailer park was a mile from the school). So I guess you’re right, Rachel, that there was a definite class element to the whole thing. But I think the school administrators were somewhat sensitive to the issue, because nobody was supposed to know who had subsidized lunches – all that paperwork was done separately in the school office, so nobody ever had to handle any money in the cafeteria.
I didn’t meet anybody whose parents were truly well-to-do until I went to college. I was truly shocked that somebody didn’t have to think about work-study or Pell grants or spend New Year’s Eve babysitting to earn money for textbooks. And the whole trust fund phenomenon was eye-opening, too.
The older students at my kids’ school not only work in the cafeteria (but not putting food on trays – again a health department issue), they also perform many other tasks. They are required to earn 25 service hours a year by helping around the school, such as photocopying, stapling, messenger service, safety patrol, weeding the flowerbeds, and so on. I think this is a good thing. AFAIK no parents object to this, but then maybe the ones who do send their children elsewhere.
some simply said it was not an appropriate use of educational time
Given how much homework and busywork those upper-middle-class neighborhood schools dish out, they have a point. I am quite sure that if my kids’ elementary school had them work in the cafeteria (not just at lunch, but in a way that cut into classroom time), they’d be given even more after-school homework to make up for the ‘lost time’. Whee.
but there are a lot of other predictors of success in college that are given more weight now
Like whether your dad went there. *snark*
Like whether your dad went there. *snark*
I remember we had a discussion a while back regarding “legacy” admissions. I forget how much influcence such a thing has these days. And, of course, it varies from school to school. Actually, the best way to get a free ride at a college these days (at least at one of the 260+ NCAA Division I schools) regardless of your family income is whether or not you have high skills at a revenue generating sport.
I can imagine the middle class mostly white suburban readers gasping now because no “respectable” middle class school would ever make their students work in the cafeteria, but my school did.
Sorry, I’m late to this discussion but I wanted to tell you that some of them will pay for a school that makes their students work.
I went to a private high school where we were required to work every day, for all four years, in order to graduate. The jobs varied from the cafeteria to the farm (yes, the school had a farm) to the library. Jobs were mostly assigned at random, though seniority often meant better jobs. I started out as a freshman doing food prep and washing dishes and ended as a senior assisting the archivist at the library.
Having the work requirement served several purposes. It helped keep the tuition costs down and the financial aid amounts up. It taught the students a solid work ethic. It added to a sense of community and pride in our surroundings.
I went to college with several alumni from that HS and worked at the same restaurant as a few of them. I noticed right away that we had a much stronger work ethic than most the other students who worked there. I think the work requirement has served us all well through the years.
Interesting update (If anyone is still reading this thread):
I just found out that the school my daughter goes to, (a public school in (very wealthy) Palo Alto) does require 5th grade students to help distribute & serve school lunches. This is done on a rotating schedule, so all students do it, but the net result is that each kid does this 1 or 2 times a month.
Outcry from parents:
Well I only found out about this because I brought up this thread when I had a bunch of freinds over, and my wife pointed this out. Now I don’t socialize with other 5th-grade parents much, but it seems to be a non-issue.
(on the other hand it is only half an hour once or twice a month.)
My local charter school (in a reasonably rich area) requires something similar I think. I’ll find out more next year.
that is interesting mittman…