Steve Jobs and the Teachers

Apple President Steve Jobs got a lot of press this week for taking on the teacher's unions:

Steve Jobs has guts — enough guts to speak his mind about what he thinks is wrong with public education even at the risk of harming his business interests.

In a speech on Friday, the chief executive officer of Apple and Disney honcho declared: "I believe that what's wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way."

The problem with unionization, Mr. Jobs argued, is that it has constrained schools from attracting and retaining the best teachers and from dismissing the less effective ones. This, in turn, deters quality people from seeking to become principals and superintendents. "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? Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, ‘I can't win,'" Mr. Jobs said. He concluded by saying, "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

There is a price to be paid for this kind of frank analysis and Steve Jobs knows it. " Apple just lost some business in this state, I'm sure," Mr. Jobs said. Of course, Apple sells a large portion of its computers to public school systems. By taking a stance against school unionization, Mr. Jobs may lose some school sales for Apple.

I guess you could call this "guts", though the response from the media demonstrates that as long as a controversial statement is made by a liberal, it's courageous. However, I've heard numerous conservatives, including national talk show host Rush Limbaugh, make similar statements about teachers and their unions for many years and at no time were they ever credited with "guts". Instead, they were excoriated for picking on the poor teachers.

Bottom line - Jobs is right. The education system favors the medicre and outright bad teachers because it rewards them with permanent jobs. Those who excel haven't got many avenues by which their hard work will be rewarded, again thanks to union contracts which try to eliminate merit systems. The last thing the teacher's unions will ever allow is for their work to be judged by actual results.

Jobs may have lost some business for Apple, but he said what needed to be said.