Speaking at an education reform conference in Texas, Apple CEO Steve Jobs blamed teachers’ unions for making it impossible for principals to fire bad teachers. The Houston Chronicle reports:
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.’”
Jobs and Dell CEO Michael Dell were there to speak about how technology can help education, but Jobs said technology can’t do a thing if unions are blocking change.
“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.”
Based on his contributions, Jobs is a Democrat, notes Mickey Kaus.
Looking back over the thread, I see where we shifted to pay for performance. When I pressed Andy for details about how teachers would be paid in a school choice system, he responded as if I had suggested that teachers should be paid for doing nothing and having no students. I think I may have even thrown the term out there.
Again, though, Andy, you’ve yet to describe any kind of system at all, much less some kind of exhaustive list that I’ve rejected.
Andy, are you saying that you want to have a system of school choice that maintains the same teacher retirement and benefits system, but that for all other funding the money follows the kids to the schools they attend?
There was a really good piece in the Atlantic Monthly back in 1999 about utopian thinking and how dangerous it was. The author identified what he thought would be the utopian myths following us into the new century. There was the technological utopia — that technology would solve all our human problems — and its opposite, the green utopia and the religoius utopia and, of course, the free-market capitalism utopia of which privatization — of everything governmnet — is an expression….
I don’t know if Andy Freeman believes in that but I think that a lot of school choice advocates do.
Government does such a lousy job with so many things that it is difficult to argue with the sentiment. But governments and their entities can be reformed. New York City might still have corruption but they are a long way from Tamany Hall. It didn’t take privitization to desegregate American schools.
Larry, have you looked at the Tennessee Value Added Assessment website?
It really looks like a pay for performance system that would work.
http://www.shearonforschools.com/TVAAS_index.html
http://www.cgp.upenn.edu/ope_tn.html
I agree with you about utopian thinking about education. Most solutions to problems in education seem to elect to ignore any inconvenient issues that the solution doesn’t address.
(And the worst people about this, IMO, are the educational professionals who aren’t current teachers.)
Thanks for the link, NDC.
Am I missing something, though?
On both sites, it said that they consider more than standardized test data but I didn’t see what else they considered in determining the “gains” that students were making….
There are some pretty obvious problems with the standardized test as a tool to evaluate a teacher’s or school’s effectiveness…
There are a number of factors which can cause a student to perform lower — sometimes much lower — than they are capable of:
-The student wasn’t feeling well that day
-The student was tired
(Schools encourage students to go to bed early, etc. the night before testing because they understand that)
-The student was depressed
-The student knows the test doesn’t impact him
-The student was angry at the teacher, the school
-The student thinks the test is stupid
I could go on….
There is only one way that I can think of that a student can perform better than he is capable on these tests.
-Cheating (either the student, the teacher, or both)
Anyway, what — besides test scores — is Tennessee using? I didn’t get it.
As far as I know it’s just test scores, and you are right that without the kids having a big stake in the test, it’s hard to know they will try.
But it’s the best system of academic pay for performance that I’ve seen.
What else, other than test scores, do you think really could be used? People expect a lot from us, but how much of it is measurable?
Well, NDC, a lot of what we do is difficult to measure so I understand the need for tests but then the tests would have to be very different than they currently are — and I’m not sure if anyone is willing to change any of that.
As I said, the student must have a stake in the results. It isn’t hard to figure out a way to do that but it needs to get done….
–Also, you cannot measure writing ability with a multiple choice test — I don’t care what the testing companies say, writing is writing and bubbling is bubbling and one cannot measure the other…. It’s like measuring someone’s marksmanship or boxing skills with a written test.
For me the best system would be to simply have each teacher evaluate himself and get paid based upon that evaluation.
That would solve everything….
That last suggestion was a joke….
I understood as soon as I read it that you were joking.
I don’t specifically know what the Tennessee deal does in writing, but it seems to me that the AP English tests assess writing as a component of the over AP English score. Obviously, I don’t think all high school kids should take the AP exams, but I suspect some agency could develop similar test for each grade, assuming that AP was the college freshman level, and work down from there. Anyway, even if it’s not like the AP test, you could develop standardized writing tests that were pretty good. Teachers might have to emphasize how to produce a good final product more than making sure kids show the “writing process,” but I tend to think being focused on process and portfolios is mainly a load of crap anyway.
Making the test count for the kids’ grades or promotions gives kids a pretty big stake in it, but I agree it seems weird for elementary school.
I figured you’d know I was joking. I added that disclaimer in case some one without a sense of humor happened to be reading….
I actually have issues with the AP exam — that they ask for three analytic essays in two hours tends to discriminate aainst the really best writers who care so much about style that they run out of time. People who care deeply about language and work hard on their sentences ought never be penalized for doin so.
So a test to measure how well the average student writes ought to be more reasonable but that isn’t difficult to accomplish.
It’s expensive but might be worthwhile.
There is now computer software that can read essays and evaluate them.
That is one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard of and I wouldn’t want to endorse it…
As for younger children, I agree that we ought not put pressure on them to perform on tests. It probably isn’t necessary. I think they often assume that the test results do matter. They want to impress their teachers and parents. It’s older students who become cynical and disenchanted who need more incentive to try on a test.
I’ve seen students put their heads down after five minutes. I’ve tried to make them pick their heads up. I’ve seen them bubble straight down the A-column…
I had a kid go to sleep during a test that counted 15% of his grade. He didn’t have a bad attitude usually, but he was staying up too late at night. I woke him up twice to take it, but he would fall back asleep. I think he was one of those kids who know how low they could get on the test and still be in the C range in the class, and that was good enough for him.
But in contrast, every other kid worked as hard as he or she could.
If we are going to have pay for performance with testing, I’d pick the TVAAS way.
I suspect though if the kids are also getting some positive result back in terms of growth, not just where they are relative to everyone else, they probably want to do better too.
> you have no idea how a school choice system could actually be implemented.
Actually, I do.
Each parent with a school age child is given a voucher every 3 months. Said voucher can be redeemed by an accredited school for cash.
The GI bill machinery works quite well.
What I don’t know how to do is design a pay for performance system that PSAs will accept. Since they don’t either, the only reasonable conclusion is that their stated acceptance of pay for performance is dishonest.
It’s easy enough to prove me wrong….
> When I pressed Andy for details about how teachers would be paid in a school choice system, he responded as if I had suggested that teachers should be paid for doing nothing and having no students.
I responded that way because that’s what NDC actually wrote. I’ll quote.
> If an individual school’s funding is solely based on the number of students enrolled, how will teachers be paid?
One possibility with school choice is that a school won’t get any students. Why should it get money? Another possibility is that it will get only a few students and have way more teachers. Again, proportional to students seems reasonable, even if that means that the many teachers at that school have to split a small pot of money. NDC apparently disagrees. Does NDC really believe that a group of teachers should be paid regardless of whether they have “enough” students?
I’ve repeatedly advocated for per-student funding with a bonus for cost of education (degree of difficulty, level of student, etc.). NDC seems to think that this is wrong without proposing an alternative.
I don’t believe in utopia, but I do believe that some things work better than others.
I believe that it is wrong to object to an improvement because it won’t deliver perfection.
I also believe that most parents want what’s best for their kids. I don’t believe that they’re always correct, but I do believe that their self-interest is somewhat effective.
I believe that people respond to incentives. I believe that teachers are people.
I believe that when someone says that they’d do something “if only”, but it’s impossible to satisfy their conditions, that they’re not actually willing to do said something.
> The fact that you’re now changing the subject from what a system of choice would be like to the related but different issue of pay for performance reveals just how weak your ideas for school choice implementation must be.
I’m not changing anything.
The two ideas are separable (one can implement either one without implementing the other) and we’re discussing them both.
NDC’s stated objection to pay for performance is the standards used to measure performance. We’ve yet to get to how different levels of performance map to different levels of pay.
NDC’s objections to school choice are different. The “what if a school doesn’t attract enough students” uncertainty seems unacceptable. I’ve pointed out that almost everyone else in the world has the same uncertainty. Yes, teachers aren’t used to that, but why should that continue?
Yes, there were perfectly wonderful engineers at Rambler who los their jobs when that company went under. NDC has yet to tell us why the existence of a few good teachers at a horrible school justfies keeping that school open?
It’s not about teachers, it’s about students.
Andy,
You’re the one who needs to outline how performance equals pay if you’re the one advocating for a change to the system.
You misrepresent what other people say and present it to justify you’re delusional views of education.
Andy,
At this point it’s clear you’re a disingenuous sniper who simply wants to complain. You’ve got no ideas, no solutions, and no real clue how school funding presently work.
You are living in a dream world if you think three month vouchers will work. (You imagine three month leases for facilities? three month long staff contracts? Good luck with that.)
That should be your delusional view of education.
I this point I’m throwing in the towel trying to talk sense with Andy Freeman. It doesn’t seem that he has any. Have a nice life.
One more thing about the GI bill connection: colleges continued to get funding from other source while GIs got money for tuition.
I don’t think there’s a college in the county that has tuition as it’s only source of funding.
Public colleges get allocations from Federal and State governments and always have. So the GI thing does not equal a “let the money follow the student” funding method. It equals a “give some people who have earned it tuition and fee money” argument.
I’ve got to stop posting when I’m angry. Of course I don’t mean that colleges have ALWAYS gotten federal and state money, but there is a long history of government funding of higher education. The GI bill gave money to GIs to pay for school. But they were only a portion of the students, and the school had other sources of funding which made up the majority of their budget.
It’s just not comparable to a system in which all of the funding is allocated directly to the students, and that’s what Andy Freeman had been suggesting.