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The Gucci Killers

Kudos to Linda Tischler for giving Fast Company readers a glimpse into the future and demonstrating your commitment to exploring business innovation wherever it may be ("The Gucci Killers," January/February 2006). I've been a fan of Shanghai Tang's for years. After every business trip to Hong Kong, I'd bring my wife something beautiful from them. I am often stunned by how little Americans know about the Chinese market… and the brands that will soon be coming to our shores.

Josef Blumenfeld
Boston, Massachusetts, and Beijing, China

The Gates Effect

I was interested to learn about Bill Gates's efforts to improve U.S. public schools in "The Gates Effect" (January/February). However, I was somewhat puzzled by the author's comment that "throwing a lot of money at the problem can actually help." Later in the article, Wendy Zellner acknowledges that the Gates Foundation and its money may not be making much of an impact on our public schools: "The early results of its high-school reinvention efforts--with many foundation-backed schools now in their fourth year of existence--are mixed at best." Ms. Zellner does not seem to be aware that, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the amount of money spent per student in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools increased eightfold from 1945 until 2002 (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Despite these huge increases in funding for public education, our schools seem only to have gotten worse.

Mark Sonnenklar
Los Angeles, California

In your article about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you cite the enormous failure of America's public-education system. How true. In 2004, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education, which made separate education unconstitutional. Yet according to a Jonathan Kozol story in Harper's last September, schools are as segregated today as they were in the 1970s. In Chicago, Hispanics and blacks made up 87% of the public-school enrollment for the 2002-2003 school year. Less than 10% was white. In Washington, DC, 94% of public-school students were black or Hispanic, and less than 5% were white.

Correspondingly, per-pupil expenditures in minority-dominated school districts cannot compare to what's spent in white communities. In New York City, where three-fourths of the school population is black or Hispanic, the per-pupil expenditure is $11,700 a year. In the wealthier suburbs, it exceeds $22,000. For the 2002-2003 school year, the median teacher salary in New York City was $53,000. In tony Scarsdale, it was more than $95,000. The enormous failure of the public schools represents the nation's failure to live up to Brown vs. Board of Education and to provide equal opportunities for minorities and the poor.

Jack Pease
Clarkston, Washington

The Wal-Mart Effect

Your article ("The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart", January/ February), and my recent experiences at Wal-Mart, will make me think twice before shopping there again unless I absolutely have to (the sad thing is that there are often so few alternatives now). I expect that someday soon the Chinese will turn the tables on Wal-Mart and give them the same treatment that Wal-Mart now gives its current business "partners." That will be a wake-up call for Wal-Mart and for American business in general, which seems to be all too eager to sell China the rope they will eventually hang us with.

John Cline
New Brunswick, New Jersey

In my career, I've learned that the best way to resolve a problem is to eliminate it. Wal-Mart is proof that the nation's laws have not kept pace with the ingenuity of corporate attorneys in finding ways to circumvent and frustrate the intent of the law. That intent has always been to protect independent pricing and to ensure the ability of others to compete freely. Because Wal-Mart manipulates every element of business to its benefit by means of its massive purchasing power, it effectively eliminates competition by means of suffocation.

Teddy Roosevelt, the Great Trust-Buster, is dead. So we need a "Wal-Mart Law," one that will impose a graduated excess revenue tax on businesses. One that will be zero to most businesses but will be supersubstantial when it approaches Wal-Mart's gross revenue range.

Cecil Byrd
Whittier, California