Time To Buy Some Apple Stock

Steve Jobs speaks truth to power:

Steve Jobs has guts — enough guts to speak his mind about what he thinks is wrong with public education even at the risk of harming his business interests.

In a speech on Friday, the chief executive officer of Apple and Disney honcho declared: "I believe that what's wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way."

The problem with unionization, Mr. Jobs argued, is that it has constrained schools from attracting and retaining the best teachers and from dismissing the less effective ones. This, in turn, deters quality people from seeking to become principals and superintendents. "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? Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, ‘I can't win,'" Mr. Jobs said. He concluded by saying, "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

There is a price to be paid for this kind of frank analysis and Steve Jobs knows it. " Apple just lost some business in this state, I'm sure," Mr. Jobs said. Of course, Apple sells a large portion of its computers to public school systems. By taking a stance against school unionization, Mr. Jobs may lose some school sales for Apple.

Sharing the stage with Mr. Jobs was Michael Dell, the chief executive officer of Dell, a competing computer manufacturer. By comparison, according to the description of the event, Mr. Dell "sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap," during Mr. Jobs' speech while the audience at an education reform conference "applauded enthusiastically."

Hell hath no fury like a teacher's union scorned, so Jobs' gutsy display will no doubt be rewarded with protests from the educrat ranks.

Mistake No 1 in American education was making teachers government employees.

Mistake No 2 was allowing government employees to unionize.

Mistake No 3 was creating a federal education bureaucracy.

It's no wonder so many families are willing to pay out-of-pocket for private education out of the interfering hands of the NEA, the AFT, the DoE, and the state and local educrats.

I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to be a good, dedicated teacher and have to deal with the time-punchers, power-players, and hacks our misguided approach to public education have saddled them with.

If the Horace Mann had it all to do over again, one must presume he wouldn't model public education on the DMV.