AppleInsider | Apple’s Jobs blasts teachers unions

[complicittheory]

AppleInsider | Apple’s Jobs blasts teachers unions

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs lashed out at teachers unions during an education reform conference on friday, claiming that no amount of technology in the classroom would better public schools until principals had authorization to fire bad teachers….

Jobs said the problem with U.S. institutions

Comments

[theweaselking]

There needs to be a middle ground. The current situation, wherein incompetents cannot be fired and, in fact, the most common solution is to promote them to a position where they no longer deal directly with students, is unacceptable. The corresponding position, wherein teachers can be fired on little or no actual evidence of wrongdoing, is equally unacceptable.

[complicittheory]

Exactly. Would be nice if teachers could fire administrators!

[roger_kuin]

Once upon a time, they did. In the early years of Oxford University, it was the students who hired and fired teachers; later, when -- very gingerly -- administrators came in, they were lowly help hired by the Senate of the University. Even at York, a friend who was a VP said to me, when I bitched about the industrial-management attitude of the administrators: "You know, you guys could fire the lot of us, as long as you can convince the Governors. But would you academics really want to be doing our jobs as well, on the side?" Er.......

[complicittheory]

:) Agreed. I was never thinking of mob-rule. And I think the notion of tenure itself is important as well. But I can't imagine why it should be without some form of reflective evaluation, and that people who aren't even trying to fulfill the requirements of the job need to be at least held responsible for the fact in some manner. And I guess branding is not an option.

[roger_kuin]

Thing you have to remember is -- as a union man once told my father -- that union leader is a career too, and that they have their own agenda which is only partly that of their members and not at all that of the institution. It's true that bad management creates unions (YUFA's origins are, alas, a case in point); but the problem is that even good management cannot then uncreate them, and once you have a union, you have people who have a vested interest in a permanently adversarial structure and (thus) attitude-set. Which is why union people are the harshest critics of what they call 'corporatism', which starts from the idea that all those working in the same institution ultimately have the similar goal of the institution's wellbeing and improvement. (Of course, it too has its dangers, like co-optation by unscrupulous management; but with an ever more educated and aware work-force, those diminish sharply.) What gets my goat (probably in part because I've known a fair number of excellent managers and even CEO's in my life) is people

[complicittheory]

ah, the dream of a learning community will never die in my heart.

[complicittheory]

he's done lots of things I don't like, but he helps with the design of good stuff.

[roger_kuin]

Point is, one ideologist's ineffective teacher is another ideologist's dream pedagogue. As an architect once said to me, "You know, our problem, yours and mine, is that we're in the only two professions at which everyone's an expert."

One thing everyone seems to be overlooking is the need kids have for order and regularity and repetition in their lives. It's true that every teacher needs about 15 new, exciting and compelling ideas per day; but that same teacher needs (and her institution should help her in this) to give them a huge and reassuring sense of order and authority.

[complicittheory]

"Point is, one ideologist's ineffective teacher is another ideologist's dream pedagogue." Well, ya. BUT, there are agreed upon minimums that most people can agree with that is at a higher level than criminal acts. "One thing everyone seems to be overlooking is the need kids have for order and regularity and repetition in their lives." Well, not me!