Saturday, June 30, 2007

Jobs' Jabs at Teachers in Unions

ET, IPhone Home.
Or, ET TU, Steve?

"I believe that what's 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." Steve Jobs, Founder and CEO of Apple, Inc.

As a loyal Apple user, and one of so many unionized, tenured, lifetime teachers Jobs is talking about who did so much to help build Apple's business in the schools, this attitude is very disappointing, to say the least. But I'm pretty sure Bill Gates, the esteemed leader of Apple's competition feels the same way Jobs does and has actually put his money where his mouth is to bring his faulty new vision into effect. Linux, anyone?

Check out Murray Bergtraum Chapter Leader John Elfrank's great rant on Steve Jobs' statement on teacher unions at his blog http://laborslessons.blogspot.com/

Some excepts:
Steve Jobs seems to have had an epiphany regarding what ails education. It's the slacker teachers who enjoy tenure and seniority through union contracts. They stifle innovation and creativity; the kind we would see in the great Man of the Century, Albert Einstein, whose image Apple has exploited in its "Think Different" campaign.

However, there are a few things Mr. Jobs doesn't know. 1. Albert Einstein was a founding member of the Princeton, New Jersey chapter MY UNION: The American Federation of Teachers. He believed strongly in unions and thought intellectual workers especially needed to belong to them.

"I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field." Albert Einstein

The second point of Mr. Job's ignorance is that he presumes teachers are so coddled that they remain in the profession for a lifetime. The truth is that the job is so stressful teacher turnover is rampant. A CNN story shows the teacher supply problem is a myth. The challenge is keeping them in the classroom. More at John's blog.

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