Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, started the ball rolling with his comments… Here’s a clip:

…Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions Friday, 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'”…

“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”…

And then, last night, on Fox New’s “Hannity and Colmes,” right-wing radio personality Neal Boortz asserted that teachers unions are “much more dangerous than al Qaeda.”

Whether you agree or disagree, it seems as though something’s in the air. For whatever reason, it looks like public sentiment may be turning against our teachers. (“Damn those lazy teachers, getting rich on our tax dollars!”)

I know that this is going to lead to a lot of shit in the comments section, but I’m tempted to agree with Jobs. (Boortz is an asshole, but I think that Jobs might be on to something.) I recognize the importance of teachers’ unions, but how can public education excel if underperforming teachers can’t be gotten rid of? I think it’s a fair question. I believe that funding is probably a bigger issue when talking about the quality of public education, but I don’t think that teachers’ unions should be exempted from responsibility just because, historically, they’ve been a force for good.

So, what do you think?

(As long as we’re kind of on the subject of technology’s use in education here, I thought that I should aslo mention that our friend Sam has launched a new blog on the subject. Check it out. It’s pretty cool.)

update: My original post (see above) was admittedly pretty weak. I’d stumbled across two quotes attacking the teachers’ union and I stuck them together without too much thought, kind of wondering out-loud if they perhaps signified the beginning of a trend. The cool thing is, however, those quotes began generating a lot of really great conversations in the comments section, as both teachers and non-teachers began sharing their insights about teacher pay, the use of technology in the classroom, and how we as a culture perceive of our teachers. What follow are a few clips. (Sorry if yours isn’t included, but there really were a lot of great things said.)

Old Man Gordon:

…Good teachers can teach equally well with used books, VCRs and mimeograph machines as they can with DVDs and xerox machines. Bad teachers will always blame the materials and equipment….

Trusty Getto:

…Our current state educational policy (structural deficit aside for the moment) is to spend more to educate children who live an affluent communities and less to educate children who live in less-than-affluent communities. Unless a child fits into a legally-defined category of disability or “at risk” status, there is no significant consideration of the child’s particular needs in allocating tax dollars toward his or her education, other than the value of the tax base of the community in which the child resides…

AMC:

…But there’s another problem, too, and it’s with the teachers themselves. It’s not the bad ones I’m worried about, I’m inclined to believe there aren’t really that many (heinous though the stories may be), it’s the mediocre middle that concerns me. We have tasked teachers with shaping the future of our culture, nation, etc., a heavy weight if ever there was one, but we’ve never been quite sure about what teachers are. Are they mystical guardians of Holy Youth (the story we tell ourselves), or just glorified babysitters (the salary we pay, the training we require).

If the education majors I see every day on EMU’s campus are any indication, the future looks dim, if not dark. Some are exceptional and will change lives. Most are genuine but intellectually incurious, which (as I see it) is incompatible with being educationally inspirational. How do we teach people to be intellectually curious? Well, we need inspiring teachers, and therein lies the Catch-22.

Skinner:

I had lunch recently with a writer who’s researching lightning calculators (people who do math in their head). Most of the champs are Asians who learned their arithmetic on the abacus. It seems that the abacus makes it easier to visualize and retain calculations. Sometimes the cheap tools are the most effective.

Dr Cherry:

The system isn’t about educating anymore, it’s about accrediting.

Dirtgrain:

…Shit. At my school, we have rows and rows of computers. But we have a puny, crappy supply of deteriorated books to use in teaching. I’m not an ignorant teacher on this topic, either–I minored in computer science for teaching, and I’ve followed up with several technology-in-teaching graduate courses. To hell with all you vapid technology pushers. I’ll John Henry my classroom, with a decent supply of books, up against any techno innovator with a classroom full of technology. Bring it. Feh.

As for unions and bad teachers, it is a tiny problem–not some huge one. The way these ignorant Jobs-type bastards talk about bad teachers, you would think that without unions, public schools would fire half of the teachers. Bullshit. All of the English teachers on my hall kick ass. That said, I know of a few crappy teachers. There is a mechanism in place to go about firing them. It’s too involved for administrators, though. They just don’t have time. They first have to observe the teacher, record problems and things that need to be corrected (our administrators can’t even keep up with this level). Then they have to work with the teacher, pointing out what needs to be improved. Observe some more; meet again. I haven’t looked into all of the steps, but I know that teachers can be fired, and several have in my nine years of teaching. We need more administrators in my district to come close to dealing with the problem (tiny, remember) of bad teachers, but we are up against budget cuts every year it seems. It’s a wonder we get by. By the way, teachers are probationary teacher (no tenure until fifth year) for four years when they start. The can be fired relatively easily in this period, but, again, administrators have difficulty following through because of time constraints. Our administrators are having a hard enough time trying to bring in qualified teachers. They invest a lot of time in these hires. Many new teachers change careers within the first three years of teaching.

So many teachers are teaching because they want to help students become competent, healthy, skilled, critically thinking members of society. Looking at my colleagues, I just don’t get where the mindset comes from that teachers and public schools suck. Note, I am in a suburban school district, and teacher pay is pretty good (until you start a family, that is).

And unions do things for the good of education. They back a lot of initiatives to improve schools. They help teachers when they have problems.

Unfortunately, it is all too often the case that those calling the shots about education know so little about it. If I were to address some of the problems in public schools, I would start with the corruption at the political level. I saw a presentation at the National Council of Teachers of English convention several years ago about a school district in California that implemented scripted teaching. It was so scary to see the teacher-presenters run through one of the scripts (even the praise they gave was scripted). Their district had done poorly on the state’s standardized test. So, the district bought the scripted lessons from the company that makes the state test. Big business reaping profits, just like Jobs has done for so long.

The big business model? See my old blog post that is still up at Blogcritics.org: “Education, Globalization and the Big Business Model.”

Let’s follow in the footsteps of Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers. We can have a system of corrupt, profit-driven schools that lie and cheat to make money (some charter school companies have done this (see the Edison Schools), and Bush’s people did this with public schools in Texas by excluding dropouts from statistics that were use to ‘show’ Bush’s great success with education so he could NCLB us). We can outsource our students, sending the Mexico or China for education. I don’t see big business being all that efficient, and the profit-element would worsen schooling for our children.

Sam:

…(S)chool funding should be equalized NOW!! It is absolutely inexcusable that certain districts in Oakland county are getting upwards of $12,000 per kid while other $7,500. We pay just as much for diesel fuel, and electricity and health care, and spend a lot more on dealing with the issues of underprivileged kids. Also not a single dime of our tax dollars should be going to charter schools run by for-profit companies…

Thank you all so much for contributing to this conversation. I hope that it continues… If you know of a teacher, someone who might be on their way to becoming a teacher, a fellow parent, or just anyone who might be interested, please send along the link to this post. I think they might find it interesting, and I’d like to hear their opinions.