Ces bêtes non plus leur raison d’être. Les facteurs qui ont motivé leur apparitions n’existent tout simplement plus, et elles sont devenus des mécanismes d’éloges à la médiocrités et d’immobilisme chronique au Québec. Malgré tout le texte suivant démontre le risque de dérappage lorsque certains mécanismes de redistribution de la richesse n’existent pas.
Steve Jobs, Proud to Be Nonunion
By Leander Kahney| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Feb, 20, 2007
Cult of Mac columnist Leander Kahney
Cult of Mac
Steve Jobs makes a lot of sense when he’s talking about music and copyright protection, but when the topic is schools, he seems to be on a different planet.
The teachers’ unions, Jobs believes, are ruining America’s schools because they prevent bad teachers from being fired.
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs told a school reform conference in Texas on Saturday. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
Jobs knows a lot about schools; he’s been selling computers to them for more than 30 years. But don’t you love it when a billionaire who sends his own kids to private school applies half-baked business platitudes to complex problems like schools? I’m surprised Jobs didn’t suggest we outsource education to the same non-union Chinese factories that build his iPods.
As someone who sends his kids to a struggling San Francisco public school (where 60 percent of the students are eligible for free lunches), I know for a fact that Jobs’ ideas about unions are absurd, he’s-on-a-different-planet bullshit.
The solution, Jobs believes, is to treat schools like businesses: empower the principal to fire bad teachers like a CEO.
“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 said.
The issues are many and complex, and yes, there is a problem with firing incompetent or indifferent teachers, but it is not the number one reason schools are failing. It’s not even in the top 10.
In California, the most pressing problems are schools that are the too big, too bureaucratic and chronically under funded. Teachers are criminally low paid and under trained. Education — and school funding — has become solely about test scores.
Hiring only insanely great employees and firing the bozos has been one of Jobs’ longest held managerial principals.
“In everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world,” he said in a 1995 interview. “It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them … but nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun.”
This may work for Jobs, who runs his autocratic business fiefdom like Mussolini, but it’s patently simplistic to think that schools can be run like this, with performance measures and goals and metrics and other such nonsense. There are too many variables involved.
Jobs has also been a long-time advocate of a school voucher system, another ridiculous idea based on the misplaced faith that the mythical free market will fix schools by giving parents choice.
Jobs argues that vouchers will allow parents, the “customers,” to decide where to send their kids to school, and the free market will sort it out. Competition will spur innovation, improve quality and drive bad schools (and bad teachers) out of business. The best schools will thrive.
It sounds great — for the successful schools. But what about the failing ones?
Jobs thinks even the low end of the market will be hotly contested, like the market for inexpensive cars. Not everyone can drive a Mercedes, but there’s lots of competition for cheap Toyotas, Kias and Saturns.
But Jobs is using the wrong analogy. It’d be more like the market for the low-end food dollar — rich kids would have lots of choice, but for poor kids it’d be Burger King or McDonalds. For the system as a whole, vouchers are untenable.
A few years ago I visited a public elementary school in an extremely wealthy part of Palo Alto, California, not far from where Jobs lives. Not a computer in sight. Only one classroom had a few crappy old Macs.
I also visited a school in San Francisco’s impoverished Bayview district. The school is opposite some housing projects. The kids practice gunfire drills, scrambling under their desks when shots erupt across the street.
Surprisingly, the school was full of the latest computer equipment. There were several iMacs in each class, real state-of-the-art stuff. The principal explained that none of the kids had access to computers outside schools, so she applied for every grant and corporate sponsorship she could find. She even loaned computers to the kids to take home, so their families would have access to the technology too.
The kids in Palo Alto, on the other hand, all had computers at home — most of their parents worked in technology. The last thing they needed was more computers in school. They went to school to get away from computers.
The most pressing problems with schools lies outside the schools themselves: it’s the socio-economic circumstances of the students they’re trying to teach.
Last week Unicef released a report that was all but ignored in America, ranking the United States at the bottom of 21 industrialized countries in children’s welfare, thanks to enormous economic inequality and the total absence of social safety nets.
This is the problem, not the unions.
