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February 20, 2007
Steve Jobs and Education
Categories: Classes
I am an Apple fan. I'd use Macs exclusively, if possible. But I am not so sure Steve Jobs is who we should listen to when it comes to education reform.
Steve addressed a recent school reform conference (I am trying to find out what conference, exactly) and said the biggest issue with education reform was the inability of principals to fire teachers. He says similar things, claiming teacher's unions are at the root of our educational problems and supporting school vouchers, in a Wired article from 1996.
He says some good things -- like technology alone cannot reform education (duh), but I think his comments are a little off base. His central claim is that there is too much bureaucracy in schools and that stifles innovation and drives smart creative people away from education. In that, he sounds a lot like Robert Holland in How to Build a Better Teacher. Like Holland, he claims teacher unions are at the root of the bureaucratic mess that results in poor schools. But are teachers unions really the root of bureauracracy? What about NCLB? What about state curriculum standards and pacing guides? What about a litigous society that necessitates layer after layer of legal and personal protection for school employees?
What about the difficulty in defining what constitutes a "poor teacher", which comes from difficulty in defining benchmarks for learning, which has led to our current reliance on standardized testing? There are many complex issues here and teachers unions are only a small part of the equation, as this commentary in Wired points out.
Edit: The conference was sponsored by the Texas Public Education Reform Foundation. Not really sure what sort of organization they are and what they have done before. Seem to be busniess oriented, so that would make sense why they have Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Ross Perot, and others on the panel.
Posted by Nakia at February 20, 2007 10:47 AM