Steve Jobs knows when to push the envelope:
The report says that Jobs' words were quite strong, noting that the Apple and Pixar CEO "lambasted" teacher unions and likened schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs. Teacher unions, he said, that the unions have directly contributed demise of public education.
Dell, on the other hand, came in like a rowboat in the wake of Jobs' Man O' War:
The report says Dell also blamed problems in public schools on the lack of a competitive job market for principals.
Neither of these things will happen until the public education system as we know it is brought down. The fastest way to force this reform would be for religious parents to withdraw their kids from the system and put them in private schools or in homeschooling programs. That would be eminently possible were it not for the fact that many of them are attached to the idea of using their kids to reform the system from within. Unfortunately, that tactic has never been shown to work at reforming broken government bureaucracies. The only solution is to take away the funding and resources of the group until it capitulates, and losing 10-15% of the school kids would do that in most states.
Unionization would not even be an issue if it were not for the fact that we have a government school-dominated system. No private school worth a damn would ever allow itself to be so thoroughly crippled because it would go out of business. Again, this is only possible because the public schools have so crowded out the competition that they don't need to worry about efficiency.
Holy Snikes!
Steve Jobs pissed up that tree? Hell, there goes 90% of Apple's computer market!
I guess it would be the tech industry that would break corporate America's silence about the abject joke pragmatic education is in America. Like I've said over on mine, it's going to be second-hand computers that will lift the world out of its intellectual poverty.
A more enlightened generation is going to look back at the century+ of government education as something truly tragic, if not outright insidious.
Apple has already lost a lot of the government market there, but has won the hearts and minds of a lot of the students themselves. The iPod is the must-have MP3 player, a lot of families want Macs for their students, and Macs are doing quite well in universities. In 2003 I got my PowerBook G4 and was one of only two CS majors at JMU with one. By the time I was about to graduate, about 25%-33% of the CS majors owned a new or used Mac of some kind, and many others wanted one. A lot of other students got them as well because they were a lot cooler than some crappy Dell that breaks down all the time. Apple can tell the K-12 bureaucrats to go to hell because they'll just pick up the students in college if they ever get there.