Catching up on my blog reading, via Joe Malchow, I find Steve Jobs taking issue with teacher unions in K-12 education:
CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.
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.'"
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."
I think Jobs has missed the mark here, in two ways.
First, the part of K-12 education that is off-the-charts crazy is how little choice there is for consumers. When did we decide that sending our children to education factories with hundreds or thousands of students was a good idea? With more choice and thus more competition, parents and students could better hold K-12 educators accountable for the quality of the services they provide. Bad practices--if unions and lifetime employment contracts are bad practices--wouldn't survive vigorous competition in the product market. Education reformers should be focused on expanding the choice of provider in education. Almost everything else would fall into place. The prospect of losing "economies of scale" in education doesn't scare me a bit. It shouldn't just be the rich and the religious who have choice, and we shouldn't be using our political system to actively undermine and restrict choice.
Second, as a wise man once said, "there is more to life than increasing its speed." I think the benefits of technology in the classroom are overstated. The best things to put in a classroom to promote a student's education are good instructors and good peers. The props are very much secondary. The best lecture is a conversation, not a slideshow or a video.