More Steve Jobs Education Fallout

Jim:

"But imho, the NEA should be abolished and in its place an organization that hold its members responsible for failing to adequately educate students."

Ever been in a union? It's not the union's job to discipline it's members, it's management's. Thats why principles and administrators exist.

It seems like you've never really considered why you experienced such a difference at private school compared with public school. I'll give you two hints:

a) The very fact that your peers were at private schools demonstrates that there parents were taking extra care in their education. Further, they would by nature fall into a higher income bracket. These are two very important factors in considering the performance of students in educational environments.

b) Private schools attract better teachers. Why? Because they pay more, the students are garanteed to have supportive homelives, and generally discipline problems will be less frequent.

Now, consider these points as you assign blame to public school teachers, who altruistrically are performing a job that their private school counterparts wouldn't take.

I have to agree with Jobs on the NEA. Like any organization, the NEA cannot serve two masters, teachers and education, so lazy, incompetant, or poor teachers remain protected while kids are dumbed down.

Some teachers say that their pay is too low; and it may be. Will increasing teacher pay solve today's education problem? Nope. Why is it that a kid educated in a private school does so much better than when in public school. When I went off to private high school, it took more than a year for me to catch up to where my classmates were in Math, English, Liturature, and Languages. They had been given the benefit of private school throughout their pre-high school education. I was the product of the public education system. And every year that I was away, the PSAT, and then SAT, scores of my friends back in home vs. mine quickly diverged.

Yes, parents bear allot of the blame as well, thinking that dropping their kids off to school means the school will take the responsibility to educate their children. But imho, the NEA should be abolished and in its place an organization that hold its members responsible for failing to adequately educate students.

As always, Mr. Terkel is illuminating. There really is zero education about labor history, whether domestic or international, in US schools. Combine this with the fact that so few Americans are lucky enough to work in an organized workforce, and you get the kinds of beliefs that we saw on this comment thread. Most people have little or no contact with unions, so what their opinions are from "knowing a guy who was in a union once" or something like that. People have no idea what unionization actually means, and go around thinking it's just a way to keep bad employees from getting fired. As Studs said, people died for this movement. It's tragic that while people still enjoy the gains of the movement, they've forgotten the battles and sacrifices, and are now forgetting the tools that made it possible.

Many of the commenters, and perhaps Jobs as well, can't seem to view education through a perspective other than the "wealthy suburb". The worst schools...the ones that are truly failing, are not doing so because they can't fire bad teachers. They are doing so because they suffer from chronic under-staffing and underfunding. If a school in a poor area (East Oakland, East Saint Lewis, etc) fires a teacher they will not be able to replace them. In aggregate we are probably spending more than enough on education. But the money isn't going where it is needed. For example, wealthy districts, by nature of how schools are funded, have more money and pay their teachers better. They also usually have more applicants than jobs. Oakland unified can't even fill their open positions because they pay less and offer far worse working conditions.

Also, union contracts vary widely across the country, so it is hard to generalize, but in most districts it is actually fairly easy to fire teachers, but it does require more work than firing your average programmer (but much less than a cop). If teachers are not fired it is usually, in my limited and anecdotal experience, because administrators are too lazy or afraid to do it. (just like any company has a few employees that could go). Now, the thing that sucks, and a lot of union contracts bear some of the blame for this, is that pay is not at all based around merit. So you get raises for seniority, and good performance is not rewarded. Hard to fill jobs are paid equal or less than easy to fill ones. Tougher standards and easier to fire teachers just make this worse...all stick, no carrot. Teachers are expected to excel, for pay often well below average salaries for college grads, and there reward is to be not fired. Nice.

Today's CA $3 million bipartisan report on education came out - guess what it says? One of the main problems? Teachers that can't be fired ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/15/BAGJCOLASI1.DTL

BTW, Job's wife sits on a couple education reform foundations so they're not exactly just sitting around pointing fingers ...

You might want to read John Stossel's reply to the Teachers' Unions:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1701265&page=1

Also, you should take a look at Dale Hill's website if you want a good laugh. Seriously:

http://www.dalehill.us/

From the inimitable Studs Terkel.... “The thing that’s so ironic, is we are stuck with what I call national Alzheimer’s disease. The general American public, through no fault of its own, but through the media—which is laughingly called, absurdly called, obscenely called—liberal media, which is a joke, of course. But the point is that because of that, day after day after day, putting down of labor organizations, or not mentioning them led to the children not knowing a thing about it.

How did the eight-hour day come into being? It began in Chicago and four guys got hanged for it—the Haymarket affair in 1886. What were they fighting for? The eight-hour day.

There’s no knowledge what the labor movement did for the lives of people. Social Security came out of the New Deal, and the minimum wage idea, and the idea of national health, these all came out of [labor]. And that’s all being dismantled by what we have now."

Are unions perfect? No. What would your life be like if they hadn't existed? Well, let's just say the middle class in this country wouldn't exist. If teaching school is so important then pay teachers what they're worth and make sure that there are high standards of entry (and if there are really poor teachers then ensure that they can't remain a teacher...).

The two Steves wouldn't have been able to invent the Mac if unions hadn't ensured that their parents had a middle class lifestyle - with garages....

Think about the past and how we got where we are today...

The truth hurts sometimes....

Gerald:

How do you misspell my name when it's printed in the comment?

Also, your comment is silly. Then again, so are most of these comments. The fact that people conflate unions with "having bad employees you can't get rid of" is ridiculously ignorant. Yes, unions will often represent dues paying employees who do stupid things and are going to get fired. Just like a public defender would represent someone who gets caught committing a stupid crime. This provides due process, and due process is important. It's a check on arbitrary power.

If there are bad employees that aren't getting fired, it's often the fault of the employer for not being smart enough to prove that the employees deserve to get canned. If they're really that bad, building a case against them shouldn't be that hard.

This knee-jerk anti-unionism is tired and boring.

It didn't say he was 34 (nor did it say he was a 34-year veteran). Not the best grammar: the word "veteran" was excluded, as was "old" (as in 34 year-old or 34-year veteran), leaving us to assume that it's more likely he's a 34-year veteran than a 34 year-old retiree.