We should also have children factory workers! Why stop at school janitorial work? Just have classrooms in factories, hold school sessions there, maybe an hour a day, and the rest of the time the poor kids who don’t know anything about working and making money (unless it’s by doing something illegal) can work in the attached factory.
And let the janitors teach class!
This already happens where I went to high school, except it’s only the handicapped students. They wash windows, pick up trash, etc.
I had some really great teachers, and some really nasty ones. The nasty ones had favorites, and didn’t mind showing favoritism. If kids were supposed to do cleaning jobs, I can easily imagine the nastier teachers picking which kids got the coveted chores, and then relegating the rest of the less desirable chores to the kids who weren’t their favorites.
It’s one thing if all the kids in a particular grade have to do the same thing. It’s quite another if some kids are consistently picked for the plum jobs like beating the erasers and all the other kids have to do stuff like clean the grease trap in the cafeteria.
So they can get a head start on their career paths. 
What is an open plan school? I assume by “smartboard” you mean a whiteboard?
That isn’t “very old”!
They have several buildings connected by covered walkways. There are no halls in the buildings - each classroom’s door goes to the outside. You know those strip motels, where each door opens onto the parking lot instead of into an interior hallway? It’s like that. They have to walk outside to go to the cafeteria, or the gym, or the library. So, no interior hallways to sweep or wax.
Smartboard = interactive white board. Looks like a whiteboard, and you can write on it like that, but it’s also hooked up to a computer and the kids can manipulate things on it like you would on a touchscreen.
Also, re: the smartboard, the thing you write on it with is a stylus, not a real pen with ink, so there’s nothing to clean. You “erase” with the stylus or a command from the computer.
In my Junior year of high school, someone came up with the brilliant idea that, since some people couldn’t be arsed to throw their garbage in a garbage can, and the school didn’t have enough money to pay the janitors to pick it up (and do their other duties), there’d be a rotation of classes that went around the grounds to pick up garbage.
I refused on the grounds that I had already put my garbage in the garbage cans, and if the minority of people who didn’t do so were given some detentions in which they had to clean up their mess, the problem would go away quickly.
If it had been an issue of helping out to do normal cleaning tasks to keep the school running, I think that’s different. But in this case, it was clearly a case of a few people making a mess, and everyone being punished for it.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hiring kids to work at schools. When I was in elementary school I worked in the kitchen preparing lunch trays for students. It doesn’t take a full-time union employee to put an apple and a milk carton onto each tray and hand them to the kids coming in, nor to push a broom. It seems to me that this plan is mostly a way for Newt to attack unions. If we create low-paying school support jobs that students can do, we reduce the power of the various educational support unions.
I also don’t think it should be a major issue that only poor kids will take these jobs. This may be callous, but: there are a lot of jobs that only poor people will take. Do we think poor kids won’t realize they’re poor if they have a crappy job provided by someone else? Or maybe the rich kids won’t notice? Does it make a difference in social standing if you’re cleaning the high school or slinging fries? I doubt it. The kids whose parents gave them new cars for their 16th birthday knew who they were, and so did everyone else.
We had to clean our classroom, in weekly shifts, starting in 4th grade, which is the year when we went from having desk-chair units to having separate chairs; the first step of the cleaning was going all around the room putting the chairs on the desks. The Nephew now attends the same school and I know the “big kids” still do that, but not in what year they start.
The rest of the buildings is cleaned by cleaning ladies; the yard doesn’t need anybody going around picking garbage up because anybody throwing garbage out of place discovers the meaning of “peer pressure” real fast.
I’m thinking it may be part of the reason why I don’t care half as much about mess in places I see as “exclusively mine” (such as my bedroom) and those I see as more “common property” (such as the living room - even in my house and even being alone). We were taught to keep common areas clean and orderly since we were in preschool, and once we were old enough to get those cleaning shifts, we learned very fast that anything you left out of place/dropped on the floor would have to be picked up.
Here’s the actual quote from Gingrich, it’s not as crazy as everyone is making it sound.
Actually, it’s JUST as crazy as everyone is making it sound. Newt is still pushing the “poor people are lazy, so force 'em to work” meme, ignoring the concept of the working poor. And he’s still pushing the implication that poor kids only understand the value of a dollar when it’s attached to some illegal activity.
Read the quote. Nobody is being forced to do anything. He is proposing a voluntary student job program, stating that jobs help lift kids out of poverty.
I’m not defending anything else he has said, nor am I endorsing the man. This one idea is not completely crazy.