“Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions Friday [at an education reform conference in Austin, Texas], claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers,” April Castro reports for The Associated Press.
MacDailyNews Take: Never have we agreed more with anything Steve Jobs has ever said.
Castro reports, “Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs. ”What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?’ he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference. ‘Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win.””
Castro reports, “In a rare joint appearance, Jobs shared the stage with competitor Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc. Both spoke to the gathering about the potential for bringing technological advances to classrooms. ‘I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,’ Jobs said. ‘This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.'”
Castro reports, “At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap. ‘Apple just lost some business in this state, I’m sure,’ Jobs said. Dell responded that unions were created because ‘the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good. So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bizarro Ballmer” for the heads up.]
One very big reason why the state of U.S. public education is woeful is precisely because of what Jobs said today. And Michael Dell is a simpering ass-kisser who’s more concerned about saddling schools with his garbage PCs and reaping the profits than speaking the truth and trying to effect positive change. Those are two facts, as clear as can be.
Apparently, at the conference Dell also did not utter a peep about shutting down companies and giving the money back to the shareholders.
Two more points:
• Teachers for too many years were grossly underpaid, but at least you knew the majority of teachers weren’t in it for the money.
• While unionization served teachers very well, it has grown beyond what it should be. The situation is currently out of balance and has been negatively affecting the quality of U.S. public education for years.
And, before anyone starts, let it be known that we’re not jumping on the bandwagon just because Jobs said it. We’ve been on this bandwagon for years. One such example:
MacDailyNews Take (March 29, 2005): Teachers who don’t want to learn new things should be fired immediately. Sorry for the burst of truth, NEA. The NEA’s Code of Ethics of the Education Profession states: “In fulfillment of the obligation to the student, the educator shall not unreasonably restrain the student from independent action in the pursuit of learning. Shall not unreasonably deny the student’s access to varying points of view. Shall not deliberately suppress or distort subject matter relevant to the student’s progress.” The NEA has been around since 1857; supposedly “working to provide great public schools.” However, U.S. public schools are generally woeful. Is it the National Education Association or the National Education Anchor? Perhaps it’s time America tried something else, something that’s actually effective and improves the nation’s public school system?
Related article:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs: ‘I’m going to just stay away from all that political stuff’ – August 25, 2004
“Michael Dell is a simpering ass-kisser who’s more concerned about saddling schools with his garbage PCs and reaping the profits than speaking the truth and trying to effect positive change.”
Actually, in this venue, it is Jobs who is pandering.
Texas is a “Right to Work” state (which, statistically, means “Right to work for less”) and has a history of hostility to labor in general.
In the middle of Texas … at an “education reform conference” … it is far more courageous to stand up for teachers unions than it is to dump on them.
Never thought I’d say this… but this one Dell is right on, Jobs is just plain wrong.
Business needs to shut the f* up and pay their fair share of taxes—not pontificate about how schools should be run like a business…
Get the Wall street mini business crud curriculum out of schools (like stock markets-gambling classes) and introduce courses about collective bargaining, forming workplace unions, and labor history… see now that would be education for the people.
Lets get real… business wants free child minding for its employees, and a docile work force… if they were really into education then they’d have work place child facilities… yeah right Bizness has a solution… send the brats to the coal mines
I have no problems with unions per say-they have helped workers a lot.
My two experiences with them were not at all helpful to me, though. They also took my money and gave it to a party that I seldom vote for, without my permission.
The idea of unions is great in many instances, but the practice has been hobbled by far too many greedy politicians and union bosses. Making it almost impossible to hold some teachers accountable for their failings is unacceptable.
I may be a conservative, but I can agree with, or at least respect, any person who puts common sense and principle above politics and business. Go Steve.
As someone who has been in public education for over 20 years, Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head. Until this society faces the realities of what he and many others are saying, the USA will continue to be near dead last in the western world on standardized testing (and related knowledge) while spending anywhere from 3 to 8 times more money. It’s good to hear someone with liberal political leanings (Jobs) speak so truthfully on this issue.
My wife’s principal is a moron and won’t push for any of the things she and her fellow teachers want in their classrooms, such as computers. Couple that with degenerate kids with no parental support and you get a mix that will yeild nothing but bad results with a few success stories mixed in.
Good job Steve. Now you’ve just insulted all those teachers who were fighting to keep Macs in schools. I guess we could always just hand everything over to the IT contractors now; they have the kids interests in mind, right?
What do you mean teachers WERE underpaid. They still are. It’s pathetic how we treat the people who are educating our children in this country. They live at or just above the poverty line in many instances.
I tend to agree, though I also concede that it is to some extent an over-simplification, and I have witnessed the opposite effect as well. My father was a teacher for many years, and a good one. He left the profession and in his case this was the reason. Not his salary, not his students. This is perhaps a problem inherent with unionization/socialization; if one does not fall in line with established attitudes they are at the very least shunned within their milieu. It is sad that passionate, capable educators have to consider abndoning their vocation through traditional channels where they could concievably have the most impact because they don’t fit the mold. The protection unionization offers must be viewed with some degree of culpability. Kids deserve better, especially those that can’t afford a private education.
I find it highly interesting that so many people…..who’ve never spent the first minute in front of a classroom full of students…..are such experts on what’s wrong with schools and how to fix them.
Yes, there are bad teachers and bad administrators……there are also ridiculously ignorant, apathetic students who want nothing to do with being educated…….and there are lazy, non-supportive parents whose little darling can do no wrong. If you want some REAL insight with regard to how a businesman learned about the realities of educational challenges, Google “Blueberry story” and get a good read.
Schools are NOT businesses and the people who belong to the “Widget School of Education” and look only at the bottom line are ignorant and blind. The “raw material” teachers are given is NOT of equal construction….every child is a unique individual with unique strengths and weaknesses…and cannot be treated like a uniform blob of plastic to be squeezed into a mold and spat out.
If you’ve never taught…..I’d say butt out until you can speak from experience.
Unionization and tenure in schools is BULL. Many teachers need to be fired right now. They work 8 months a year if they are lucky (summer vacation plus 1 month vacation/personal time), piss and moan about not getting paid enough, and drag their lazy asses at the expense of our children because they CANNOT be fired. Jobs is right; it’s CRAZY!!!! I hate unions with a passion, and I’m sorry to say I’m forced to belong to one. All the union does is advocate for the worst of the worst and make us all look like asses. I would close my business before I’d ever let a union take over. Unions breed complacency and low lives…PERIOD!!!!
I have been an Apple devotee since the days of II2e. I am also an educator. Mr. Jobs needs to better understand the educational system in this country. Where I teach, there are “Regents” examinations which dictates that the material is covered in a specific time, so there is little time to linger on anything which is out of the subject area. What I mean is that there is no time to teach anything using a computer that is student directed. It simply would waste too much valuable time. Computers are great and there are many programs to elicit student response. But there is little to no time for students to explore ideas, concepts or do research. I suggest that Mr. Jobs devote his time to investigating those non-educators who make the rules, standards and inane rules to which we must abide. Are there bad teachers? Of course. There are bad whatevers in any field, but those bad teachers are the minuscule minority and have little or no impact on the educational system. Mr. Jobs might want to venture into a high school, sans computer, and go against the “clock” to teach the information. If he did, I would think that he would sing a different tune.
If students are customers, should we only teach them the courses they select? Shouldn’t they then get to select the materials- movies over books? “Call to Duty” instead of reading letters from WWII vets? Maybe, but the state has a whole series of standards and benchmarks that they say must be met every year.
I see my students (high school juniors and seniors) more as employees and they receive grades instead of money. My job is to try and train all of them and use as many different strategies as it takes to get them to their goals. If it was a business and they were serious about results, I would be much better funded- California ranks about 44th in the country in how much it spends per students each year.
The trouble is government, not teachers’ unions. No Child Left Behind is the biggest problem right now. And things were bad even before that. In my school district, the schools are closed on Wednesdays so that the teachers can keep up with all of the stupid governmental paperwork. That’s pathetic.
Wow! If we will all eat only fruits and vegetables, cancer will be wiped out! And if Rex Grossman had just had more time to throw, the Bears would have won!
These statements are similar to the statements above made by Steve and MDN. The problems in the educational arena are enourmously complex. Citing only one thing to change–bad teachers, the NEA, or anything else– among the galaxy of problelms in education is ineffectual and does nothing to improve the system. Give me a plan that identifies most of the problem areas in our schools and how to improve them. Then I will listen.
As an example, please tell me how the teacher unions or bad teachers are responsible for the following real world educational situation and how banishing them will improve it.
The class is a group diagnosed by a M.D. and psychologist as ADHD. They read at a very low level due to their attention problems. However, the medication prescribed for them by the M.D. helps them to focus their attention and during their 3 rd and 4th grade years (with the same teacher) they gain in reading level to beginning 4th grade level–a remarkable achievement. The 5th grade year, with the same teacher, about half of the students are taken off of their medication by their parents (without consulting doctor, psychologist, or teacher) because their child “no longer needs it”. At the end of the 5th grade year the half of the class on medication has progressed more than a grade level in reading. The half not on medication is reading at a mid-third grade level.
I await your simple solutions!
In my mind, we should double teacher salaries, fire three-quarters of the administrators, and repeal No Child Left Behind. Then the teachers’ unions would no longer be relevant.
JOBS FOR PRESIDENT!
My wife used to be a State worker. So I’m all too familiar with how difficult it is to fire bad workers: next to impossible. That’s not to say there aren’t those really good, really hard working teachers out there. But their accomplishments get overshadowed by the horror stories. Like any job in civil service, there are slackers and you can’t do a damn thing about them in the majority of cases. There was the case of an English teacher who accused a child of theft. When the parents came into school to hear the charges, the teacher said “I seen it. He done it!” Once again, this was an ENGLISH teacher.
Unions protect workers from abuse by business. Unfortunately, unions also protect the incompetent. The whole union thing is broken.
I think Steve is getting ready to die. He’s clearing the air.
It’s not just bureaucratic unionisation that’s the problem—it’s also a trend away from a liberal arts education and a focus on the non-creative wrote learning for standardised testing. The whole problem is the emphasis on the learning and memorisation of facts to show benefits for such things as the No Child Left Behind act. These things stifle the liberal arts view of education—where the learning is combined with play, acting, arts, music, and other such creative endeavours. It’s training a nation of engineers and scientists without the ability to think critically and criticise problems very like this.
AMEN, STEVE JOBS!!
STEVE JOBS FOR PRESIDENT!!!
WHO’S VOTE DO I HAVE FOR STEVE JOBS FOR PRESIDENT?!
As a teacher, I have to say that teacher unionization is WAY down on list of things f’ing up our schools. There are some bad teachers, but it is a broken system that is the main problem and prevents many teachers from doing better. Low budgets, school over-crowding, large class sizes, run down facilities, poor texts, lack of parent and community support, the undermining of teacher authority by the constant depiction of teachers as incompetent or ‘the enemy’ in popular culture, the meddling of corporate types and politicians who talk out their asses about education and accountability when they have no clue what they are talking about. We have a shorter school day and school year than much of the industrialized world, and there isn’t an emphasis on the importance of education that there once was (school isn’t cool). Where there used to be the idea that you got out of the ghetto through academic achievement, now it is the hoop dream of becoming a basketball star or rapper that kids aspire to.
The politics of school “accountability” has recently created an incredible number of hoops that schools have to jump through but it does little to nothing to actually improve the education of students. We live under a fiction that standardized testing is the sole measurement of a students education. Arts and trades have been cut from many school curriculums because we are so focused on “the academic core.” We have forgotten that many people have aptitudes and interests that will take them far afield of that realm, and which society needs. If cultivated, those skills and talents can actually have a positive feed-back on academics.
Now as for this nonsense about principals having the power to fire any teacher they want on a whim: Bad principals are just as big an issue as bad teachers. You would end up with bad principals firing a lot of good teachers because of petty politics. The truth is, when there really is a bad teacher, there is a course of action a principal can take to get rid of them.
Want more and better teaching candidates? Make the credentialing process more rigorous but reward those who become teachers with higher pay. If you want the best and brightest, make it worth their while… otherwise they will go into medicine or law or business management or some other higher paying profession. If you have more teaching candidates to choose from, you can get rid of the ones who are bad before they can become credentialed or tenured.
The truth is, teachers are on the front lines of a constant uphill battle and are an easy scapegoat for politicians and business people. Jobs piling on doesn’t help, it directs attention away from where the more urgent educational issues are.
The problem isn’t getting rid of bad teachers, it’s attracting good ones.
Well one step is to allow parents and teachers to DISCIPLINE kids again.
Today’s public classrooms are anarchy. Who the hell wants to work there??
Now, I’m not talking about bringing back the Bad Old Days of raw physical assault. But there has, HAS to be a way to drive home respect and keep kids in line.
Always Wrong strikes again. You are truly pathetic.
One piece of the educational “system” that is hardly ever addressed is the part that parents play. Please voluteer or substitute in your local school and take a close look at what educators do every day. You will be shocked at what you learn.
This is not to say there are not inept teachers. But there are many inept, even evil parents. There are many students whose lives have been completely sabotaged by their parents. The number of sad, terrible, horrific stories that students bring to school every day, and that their teachers try to address, is astounding. The fact that parents are not even required to be a part of their children’s education is a sad commentary indeed.
The entire public education system is out of wack including the teachers. Parents are to blame as well as they have become increasingly disinterested in their child’s welfare at school. The teacher’s union is a bloated shell of its former self. High School should be run like college. Students should dictate their areas of study with the basics as well. What if I wanted to learn film in high school. My only option of film production was a stupid high school news. High School should be treated as college prep. US History and government should be taught as freshmen and seniors. An educated population makes for a democratic population.
you guys have no clue whats going on. ask the rockefeller family. maybe google can help.