02/23/2007, 3:20pm, EST
Friday, February 23rd
Jobs to get "Rotten Apple' award without apology
The California Federation of Teachers has invited Apple CEO Steve Jobs to either attend an annual CFT convention next month or offer a public apology for his "insulting comments" to California's teachers. Should Jobs fail to apologize or neglect to attend the conference, where he is encouraged to speak with the people who educate California's children and hear from them what the situation is like, the CFT will create a new award specifically for Apple's chief. "We'll call it the Rotten Apple, for the individual who best personifies the need to think differently about public education and teacher unions," California Federation of Teachers president Mary Bergan wrote in a letter to the executive. Bergan aggressively rebuted Jobs' statement to an educational reform conference last week, where he expressed belief that the schools have become unionized "in the worst possible way" and that the unionization with lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is "off-the-charts crazy."
Bergan offers a history of Apple's "Think Different" ad campaign, pointing to the Cupertino-based company's black and white photos featuring instantly recognizable heroes such as Latino civil rights icon Cesar Chavez. The CFT president says Apple resisted granting union recognition to its low paid largely Latino contracted Silicon Valley janitorial workforce in the 1990s until the Justice for Janitors union embarrassed the computer maker sufficiently "to bring Jobs and his company around."
Another icon shown in black and white by Apple in its now-dated advertisement campaign was famed physicist Albert Einstein, who as Bergan points out was fond of teacher unions. Quoting Einstein, Bergan writes: "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."
The head of the group noted that Einstein joined the American Federation of Teachers in 1938 as a charter member of the Princeton University local, highlighting the fact that the famed scientist "practiced what he preached."
"I guess it's harder for a billionaire CEO of a non-union company to understand," Bergan wrote. "It's easier, 'think different' aside, to simply mouth something that's been repeated a lot over the years: teacher unions are the problem in public education."
The group leader says the big problem is actually under-funding, and contested Jobs' likening of public education to a business.
"Let me do the same. How well could a business -- say, a computer company -- operate if you paid its professional employees so poorly and put them in work environments so unsupportive that nearly half of them left the company within five years?" Bergan asks. "How long could that business survive if it had to hold bake sales to get enough chips to build its machines?"
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Yes, a principal must have the authority to fire and hire.
The only thing that will safeguard against a bad leader is a good board of directors.
Kind of like how he didn't take action in his own field of expertise where the mantra was that either IBM (way back when) or Windows is the problem in the way we use computers today.
The problem is not that teachers are unionized. The problem is that the teachers have lost a voice in most teacher's unions today. Instead, the union leaders presume to know best, sometimes to the detriment of our schools and children today. When teachers are discouraged from operating outside the box for fear of setting a precedent of performance or work ethic that goes beyond the negotiated contract, we have a serious problem in the system.
The recent lobbying efforts by the Cal. teachers unions, and the amounts they have spent, show that they are out only for themselves.
Sure, some work for what they get and are great educators and money isn't eveything to them. But very few people will give up a carreer at Boeing or MS to teach for $35k a year.
Job's is right. Change the teacher's union into a professional guild, pay them double of what they get now, hire quality admins and hold them responsible for the schools, and start giving education the position in our society it deserves.
I digress. Jobs had a point. As do many of the others. Teachers unions have created a situation (as have civil service unions) where you basically have to intentionally burn the place of work down to have anything bad happen to them. However, clearly these unions and unions in general have provided a basic foundation of rights and expectations for workers so they are not totally under the thumb of their supervisors.
In this case, I think Jobs may have been a little less than tactful perhaps, but it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that because Einstein liked the idea of teachers unions, everything they have done has been beneficial. Unions these days very often protect their own interests far more than those of their members. The days of 16 hour day six day work weeks for 12 yr olds making $1/hr are long past.