18、School meals
Eat up your greens
Dec 2nd 2004 From The Economist print edition
Can school meals be appetising, nutritious and profitable?
PUPILS, like soldiers, march on their stomachs. A well-nourished child is more likely to be a studious one. But food has been seen as a cost to be cut, rather than an ingredient of good schooling. That may now be changing: as the government worries about obesity—which is rising fast among children—and urges everyone to eat less salt, fat and sugar, and more fruit and vegetables, the paucity and unhealthiness of most school meals is striking. But cash constraints and rules on public-sector contracts make improvement hard.
Since cost-cutting began in the 1980s, quality has fallen along with food budgets. More and more children have chosen to bring packed lunches, spend their dinner money on fast food or skip lunch altogether. Now only half the pupils who could eat school meals do so. As numbers fall, the overheads become more burdensome and the pressure on ingredients greater. Of a typical ￡1.20-1.30 ($2.30-2.50) charged for a primary-school meal, labour costs account for 55p, equipment another 5p, administration charges up to 15p and profit 8p, according to Paul Kelly of Compass, a leading catering company. That leaves barely 40p for the ingredients. By contrast, a prison would spend 60p (per adult). The Dragon School in Oxford, a top junior school in the private sector, spends 75p per child and a hospital 90p.
The easiest way to get more children into the school dining room is to offer fast food, like chips and pizza—but that conflicts with improving nutrition. What is both tasty and good for you is likely to be more expensive. One way round that would be to cut labour costs—which is impossible thanks to a government directive which says that workers in privatised services must have the same terms and conditions as they would have enjoyed in the public sector.
All this is no fun for contractors, whose margins are being squeezed. Compass and another big firm, Rentokil Initial, a conglomerate with its roots in rodent control, have complained that they are finding the primary-school business unattractive. “We have decided not to go into that market,” says Mr Pollard of Avenance, an upmarket catering firm which mainly works for state hospitals and independent schools. “We cannot provide the right food to put on a child’s plate for 42p. The government has made the effort with hospital food, but has yet do so with schools.”
Some local authorities are getting fed up too. Essex County Council has given its 600 schools direct charge of catering. That has been good news for some—chiefly large ones, or those able to form clusters in order to negotiate good deals. But it is bad news for small schools in remote areas, who benefited from a cross-subsidy under the old scheme. Around 75 of them have given up offering hot meals.
It is not just about money, says Neil Porter of the Local Authority Caterers’ Association, who notes that school meals are only 15% of a child’s annual food intake. It is unrealistic, he says, to think that they are the key to delivering better nutrition. “Children live in a processed-food culture with at least two generations of parents who cannot cook and are themselves unfamiliar with certain foods,” he says. “The vast majority of children will not eat in school what they do not recognise and do not eat outside of school.”
19、提到种族和教育问题，白人们都会有些紧张，不过如果是一个黑人提起这个话题，白人们就会滔滔不绝。英国种族平等委员会主席 Trevor Phillips 一提到黑人男孩子在学校表现的特殊问题、并认为将他们和其他学生分开教育兴许是个好主意时，就有一连串的意见和建议。其中有的赞成，有的持批评态度，不过没人质疑问题的起因。个个都承认黑人男孩子是个问题。
从表面来看， Mr Phillips 好像是对的。仅有27% 的非洲–加勒比裔男孩在16 岁孩子参加的 GCSE 考试中得了A到C的成绩，相比之下，男孩整体上是47% ，而非洲 – 加勒比裔女孩则是44% 。由于在某些科目中，得分低于50%的人会得C，学校里达不到这一程度的学生就更是微乎其微了。
Mr Phillips 建议黑人男孩应当单独接受教育意味着种族和性别决定了他们智商低。当然，男生在学校里确实是处在下峰，所有种族都是如此：全部女孩中有57%得到了5个A到C的分数，而男孩则只有47% 。然而问题的根源是否在于黑人孩子，就不是很清楚了。
就孩子们整体而言，非洲–加勒比裔的确表现不佳，可是他们也同样相对贫穷。因此深入了解是否真的是种族、而不是贫穷，才是考虑经济地位所必须掌握的。由于英国教育统计方面的局限性，唯一的办法就是把享用学校免费膳食孩子的考试成绩区分出来：只有穷人能得到免费食物。
穷人孩子的成绩说明了一个更加不同一般的问题。非洲 – 加勒比裔孩子仍然非常糟糕，不过白人却排在最后，所有少数族裔都比白人表现好。即使是相当缺衣少食的孟加拉裔，在考试中也比本土白人好两倍;印度裔和华裔就更好了。而且表现不佳的白人的绝对数字也远远超过非洲–加勒比裔：去年， 131,393 个白人男孩子没能达到政府规定的标准，非洲–加勒比裔则只有 3,151 个。
这些数字说明，至少在学校，黑人的问题在于贫穷，而不是种族;而且还打破了单独教育黑人男孩子的观念，因为如果贫穷的白人比贫穷的黑人表现差，就不会为挑出黑人孩子特殊对待而广为争议了：白人孩子正是因为表现糟糕而需要帮助。
很好的想法
然而，这并不是一则人人都愿意听的消息。很多白人都认为这个对黑人有根本性错误的认识很令人欣慰：深刻证实了一些固有的偏见，并且让他们更加心安理得地认为一个诸多社会问题的复杂整体(起源于学校里孩子们表现不佳，但延续下来导致失业、毒品成瘾及犯罪等)和他们毫无关系。
种族关系部门也对以种族划分来解释教育中的成绩不好问题颇有兴趣。一个由委员会、机构及专门工作组组成的救急机构已经建立起来了，前提是种族差异是社会问题的基本原因。如果这是错的，那么所有那些知名人士们还不如卷起铺盖、回家算了。
试图将教育成果不佳推卸为种族问题可能是既令人欣慰又让人感到便捷，不过也同样很危险，因为这将人们的视线从真正的问题转移开来 — 学校系统放弃了穷人。那就既不是黑人的问题、也不是白人的问题：而是一个英国的问题。
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