I don’t own an iPod or a MacIntosh computer, but I admire Steve Jobs. He’s made mistakes, of course.
One mistake was hiring John Sculley; a man of limited ability, and zero vision, who successfully maneuvered to have Jobs removed from Apple a short two years after being recruited from Pepsi.
Apple barely survived the incompetence of Sculley. Jobs returned to run the company in 1996, and take on the seemingly impossible challenge of competing against Microsoft. Jobs’ stunning comeback is one of the all-time great business success stories.
The Jobs stock option scandal doesn’t interest me. What does are comments he made recently at an education forum, concerning public school teachers. He doesn’t like unions. He wishes school principals could fire teachers.
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
Michael Dell, who was present, explained succinctly why unions came into existence.
“The employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.”
Thank you, Michael Dell.
I neglected to tell “jrb”, who I don’t know (as least I don’t think so), thank you for the comments. Thanks!
Let me add one more comment. There is one form of private school that cannot always pick its students, and that is the parochial, or religious school. Here where I live, in Mifflin County, alone, there are dozens of them. Most common, of course, are the Amish schools. If you aren’t Amish, you are automatically shut out. These mysterious little schoolhouses sprang spectactularly to the public’s attention last October with the horrific shootings in West Nickel Mines (a suburb of Lancaster).
There are also the Mennonite schools, which DO accept children of other religions. However, at the largest one nearby, Belleville Mennonite, you have GOD rammed down your throat:
http://bellevillemennoniteschool.org/about/twoquestions.phtml
Rumors also still abound that the principal wields a wooden paddle with holes in it to punish naughty kids, and that parents have to sign a note at the beginning of school NOT allowing the school to use corporal punishment on their child. The other creepy rumor that still persists (that you won’t find on the website), is that the vast majority of the non-Mennonites who send their kids their LET the principal paddle their kids!
Finally, we get to the regular Christian and Catholic schools. There is only one Catholic school, which my daughter attends, and has attended since kindergarten. Yes, the quality of education has been outstanding, with a much smaller student-teacher ratio. On the whole, and this would surprise many people, the Catholic schools don’t ram religion down the kids’ throats every single day. Yes, they have a morning prayer and have to go to Mass every Thursday, but never is there any pressure for a non-Catholic to “join up.” In fact, they are hurting for students. They have gone from a Pre-K to eight school to a Pre-K to Grade 5 education since Molly started in the infamous fall of 2001. There are only 65 kids in the whole school! Sacred Heart School has to due a lot of PR to keep up with Mifflin Christian Academy, which is more of a fundamentalist Christian school. The folks who can afford it prefer to send their kids there, since there are not too many Catholics in this neck of the woods.
The last alternative, and this is quite large here in PA, is “home schooling,” an old throw0back to the agricultural days. Because there still ARE many working farms where we live, many of these kids are often home-schooled by their parents, if you could call it that. One set of these kids used to spend most of the day riding four-wheelers up and down our road, until we threatened to call the cops.
Everybody has good points here, and now I’m going to add my 2 cents worth. I used to be a teacher, – briefly. My Mom was a teacher for a short time before having children and retiring. My Dad started as a teacher, became a principal, and then a superintendent of schools in a northern New Jersey city not too far from New York City. He held that position for about 35 years.
Teachers do not instantly get tenure, the “lifetime employment” referred to above by Steve Jobs. I was miserable as a teacher – a profession my father pressured me big-time into preparing for, in college. I just wasn’t very good at making learning fun and entertaining for the high school kids I was supposed to teach English grammar and literature to. (The textbooks I had for the classes didn’t seem to have real great ideas for how to do this, either!) Consequently I had bored kids who became discipline problems, which I was not good at handling. I was fresh out of college and barely older than my students. So I quit at the end of the school year, but it was made pretty clear to me that if I had not quit voluntarily, I would not have been rehired for the following school year.
It takes a period of time to get tenure, during which the teachers must prove themselves to their department supervisors. I don’t know what the length of time is now, and I suppose it could vary from state to state, but in New Jersey it used to be a period of some years. I forget exactly how long.
School teachers even with tenure can be dismissed for misconduct, such as with students.
It is true that there are bad teachers out there, who are tenured. I guess they weren’t bad in the beginning, but over the years got burned out, bitter, cynical, – whatever. As kids, we all knew who the bad ones were, and we all prayed not to get stuck with them!
Looking at teaching realistically: the attrition rate of new teachers (such as I was) is very high. All you need is one or two behavior problem kids in your class to make your time miserable, and teaching difficult. Ask ANY teacher this, and you’ll see it’s true.
Also, for every kid added over 28 or 30 per classroom, it gets just so much harder to teach well and to maintain control. You’d think 32 kids shouldn’t be much different than 28 or 30, but trust me: the dynamics of the classroom atmosphere changes. Ask any teacher this!
The administration doesn’t always back you up, plus, it can slip up very badly in supplying adequate mentoring to novice teachers. I felt overwhelmed by the problems of being a new teacher, and the paperwork involved in teaching English, with nobody to mentor me except my immediate boss, the department head supervisor. It was HIS job to observe me and give me evaluation grades, and write up job performance reports on me. That kind of relationship certainly inhibits candid, frank conversation on the part of the new teacher!
The parents of the kids can also be very problematic, in that they often side with their child against the teacher, make excuses for their child’s behavior (with no desire to work on changing their child’s bad attitude or actions), and even take negative reports very personally as a terrible reflection upon them as parents…getting very defensive in the process.
Yes, there are teachers who love their jobs. But overall, statistically it is not a highly desireable profession to go into, for a lot of good reasons. How many intelligent, talented men do you know of who choose to become – and stay – teachers? Those who do often have (or soon develop!) a game plan to try to become department heads, and then principal, and perhaps from there even manage to become superintendent or assistant superintendent. Public school teachers don’t make that much money, compared to private industry, for those with comparable skills, education, and experience.
It’s mostly a profession dominated by women. If you took away the job security of tenure, as well as the other perks, like teaching only 180 days a year (at least, that’s what the law was in New Jersey for the length of each school year), you would attract even less candidates to prepare for this profession. Without tenure, there would also be much more of a revolving door of vacancies. Teachers beset by problems and modest pay would figure, “Why stay?” The balance scale of pluses and minuses would just tip in the direction of changing careers.
Like I said, everybody has made some valid points here, – but this is the reality of the teaching profession as I see it, and experienced it first hand. I’m not defending the status quo, mind you. I certainly understand the drawbacks mentioned above! But I, for one, do not have the answers, either!
Conditions for educators improved in great part because of the unions. But you have a point. There are abuses in unions, and an argument can be made that they have outlived their usefulness. If the abuses get bad enough, the teachers will have no choice but to demand reform.
For ten years I lived in a Massachusetts town where the teachers once went on strike, including the wife of my college roommate. She voted against it, but said other teachers had felt intimidated by the union leaders.
One thing that makes private schools seem better than public schools is the fact they can pick their students. The drop-out rates are going up in public schools in part because of standardized testing. To keep the score averages up, students who in the past would have been pushed through the system are no longer encouraged to stay.
I’m not an education expert, but I am aware of the realities and complexities of this issue. Realities that must include compromises on both sides. I agree that union reform is needed. But the sentiment that Steve Jobs expressed — “if teachers could be fired, that would fix the problem” — is unrealistic.
You’ve missed the point. Perhaps workng conditions for educators needed to improve a very long time ago. But now THEY are they are at the scene of a bigger crime in education: suffocating mediocrity. The staus quo needs to be changed but the collectivist mentality and political shenanigans of the Teachers Union beg redress.
For goodness sakes, the Teachers Union took its own members to the Supreme Court. This because union dues are used to support political activism of a particularly partisan nature.
There is nothing progressive about the current drop out rates and low SATs despite tremendous, and still rising, financial support.