An Apple for the Teacher? Perhaps, But Not for Teacher Unions

The Huffington Post now reports that Steve Jobs was quite harsh with Barack Obama when the two met last year in San Francisco. “You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs bluntly warned the nation’s chief executive.

The story comes from Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming book on the revered Apple CEO, a copy of which the Huffington Post recently acquired. Other revelations include Jobs’ belief that Obama’s administration failed to understand or appreciate how private industry really works. Jobs “seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative,” according to the Huffington Post.

In his discussion with Obama, Jobs was gravely concerned over the state of the nation’s schools, which he felt were “crippled by union work rules.”  He favored empowering principals with the authority to hire and fire based on merit, as well as longer school hours and a longer school year. Jobs said, however, these kinds of reforms would never materialize “until the teachers unions were broken.”

While these views might seem uncharacteristic of a man widely regarded as a liberal, education issues have increasingly united reform-minded individuals across the political spectrum (witness the rise of Democrats for Education Reform). And this wasn’t the first time Jobs endorsed bold measures in the realm of K-12 education.

In a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution, Jobs fingered the unions as the #1 barrier to meaningful reform: “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened.”

Unleash Competition

Jobs went on to call for “a full voucher system” that would unleash the power of competition and spur innovation:

I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for $4,400 dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students.

Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have 25-year-old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you'd see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There's no question about it.

It would be rather painful for the first several years, but far less painful I think than the kids going through the system as it is right now. The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that's like saying "Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody's going to make a $10,000 car." I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the $10,000 car area.

Systemic Reform Needed

Perhaps most strikingly, the Apple CEO cautioned that his products were no panacea for what ails the nation’s schools. Without systemic reform—and a particular focus on teacher quality—computers in the classroom would add little in the way of educational value:

It is so much more hopeful to think that technology can solve the problems that are more human and more organizational and more political in nature, and it ain't so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46-year-old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn't be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer.

Steve Jobs has already transformed the way Americans receive, share and interact with all forms of media.  His enduring words now remind us that a similar revolution can—and must—take hold in the nation’s education sector.

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