WSJ: Non-Union jobs

WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 23, 2007

Non-Union Jobs
February 23, 2007; Page A10

If Apple CEO Steve Jobs had praised teachers unions as the backbone of public education in the U.S., it would have made the front pages. Instead, at an education conference in Austin, Texas, Mr. Jobs offered some constructive criticism of teachers unions and barely anyone noticed.

Sounds like news to us.

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they've become unionized in the worst possible way," said Mr. Jobs during a Q-and-A session on technology in the classroom. "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

The real crisis in public education, he noted, has nothing to do with the amount of technology in the classroom. It's the fact that union work rules prevent principals from firing the bad teachers and rewarding the good ones. "Here's the problem," said Mr. Jobs, using a business analogy: "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them, when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people they thought weren't any good in the first place? Or they couldn't pay people three times as much when they got three times as much work done?"

Regular readers of these columns will find nothing particularly shocking in Mr. Jobs's broadside. Still, it's nice to hear such sentiments coming from a titan of industry, especially his.

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report was released yesterday. The dismal results are what we've come to expect from an elementary and secondary public education system in the vice-grip of the National Education Association and its political acolytes. According to the NAEP survey, nearly 40% of high-school seniors scored below basic level on the math test, and fewer than a quarter of 12th graders rate proficient.

Except for high-skill immigrants, this would be Apple's future labor pool. Mr. Jobs is right to point the finger at the union stewards of public education. And fellow business leaders, who have as big a stake in this matter, would do well to lend him public support.

URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117219910015216918.html