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>keep schools open until 6 Sounds great, how do you fund it? >keep school in session 11 months out of the year Ditto. >let principals hire/fire based on mer

• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• andrewtbham 15y ago
  I disagree about the teacher's unions. Drastic measures need to be taken. Some of the teachers with tenure are a disgrace to their profession and they can not be fired because of the strength of the unions.
• outworlder 15y ago
  >>keep schools open until 6 >Sounds great, how do you fund it? Reduce the "defense" budget. I wouldn't be surprised if you did the calculations and found out that schools could be open 24/7 with minor tweaks to the budget allocation. It is not a matter of funding, it is only a matter of priorities. Education and research should be first on the list. I believe Jobs was right, once again.
  • Zev 15y ago
    How do you reduce the defense budget, without screwing yourself over politically? At best, you could not increase it as much.
  • loggedintocom 15y ago
    Is there any research that indicates that more time in school leads to better educational outcomes?
    • gte910h 15y ago
      Yes, for lower income student it has * stupendously* good outcomes.
      • protomyth 15y ago
        I would be interested in what studies this information comes from and what locales it was done in.
        • gte910h 15y ago
          http://www.pbs.org/makingschoolswork/sbs/kipp/index.html http://www.pbs.org/makingschoolswork/sbs/kipp/index.html is something about it
          • protomyth 15y ago
            That study seems to draw all its conclusions from inner city / low income. I would submit it is not a model for the rest of the country unless further testing is done in other environments. story: A couple of decades ago I used to work on grants and educational programs. One group came to ND to give a lecture on risk factors. In Minot ND, they told the crowd that "firearms" automatically means more violence. "It has been proven in studies" they said. One member of the crowd asked how many people in the room owned firearms. The poll came back at about 90% with many (40%) owning 3 or more. No history of violence in that crew. They were all social worker types who liked to hunt or in the case of one, target shoot. I got ahold of their source data for studies and found two things. A specific firearm study was never done and all the data came from CA or NY cities. The USA is a large and diverse place, I am a little cynical of best practices taken from urban environments and applied to suburban and rural areas without add research and being a little more specific on why stuff seems to be working.
  • gwright 15y ago
    I have no idea if the math works as you say but the federal government doesn't fund primary education. That is all done at the local and state level and so it isn't just a matter of tweaking the federal budget (as if that itself was easy). I think the bigger problem is that teacher's unions have created a calcified public education system that is risk and change adverse. Hard to experiment with new ideas in that environment.
    • yardie 15y ago
      > teacher's unions have created a calcified public education system that is risk and change adverse. Child from the 80s here. I've had just about every teaching method crammed down my throat through the 90s. This includes more homework, more lectures, socratic desk arrangements, independent study, peer review, group work, class review, and many others I care not to remember. I have never heard any teacher say, "my union asked me to do this." And, usually, it was some teacher or principal working on their MA or Ph.D that had to invent a new teaching method. So far the only thing that works consistently is listening intently, sitting down quietly and banging out the work, and raising a hand for assistance when your stuck. And that is how it's been done for 100 years. It may seem calcified to you but the rest of the world uses it while the US tried all types of new-age teaching methods. I would wager the bigger problem with schools is bad, obnoxious students. The classroom bully that disrespects the teacher, disrupts the students and gums up the educational experience for everyone. They used to be kicked out of school but that became illegal, then they were put in detention, but a chaperone costs money. Now it's left to the teacher to be educator and babysitter to some asshole.
      • morsch 15y ago
        The rest of the world does not teach that way, and particularly the countries that have good results in education -- e.g. Scandinavia -- don't. What's with the American exceptionalism? But (as you also hint at) good teaching methods are just one tiny piece in a much larger puzzle. In fact if anything, my personal impression is that the teaching method itself is among the least important factors; if everything else is in order, kids are going to learn no matter what teaching method you employ.
• ryanhuff 15y ago
  >let principals hire/fire based on merit Its a simplistic idea. Principals weren't hired because of their ability to build a successful team of teachers. They are administrators. Why does anybody think they can suddenly (successfully and equitably) cast judgement on teachers? If you want to transform how teachers are hired, managed, and evaluated, to be more similar to a private business, you have to start at the top.
  • 9999 15y ago
    The best teachers I had in highschool all seemed to despise their principals, precisely because they were nothing more than overpaid bureaucrats. The best case scenario was a principal that just stayed out of the way. Of course, it's the system that made them that way. If you let principals actually make performance based decisions, then you would attract a different sort of person to the position.
    • ryanhuff 15y ago
      I agree that principals are a result of the system, and it likely goes even higher to the school districts and superintendent. I doubt instituting a merit-based system can be done effectively without transforming the whole system, from top to bottom. I don't know if that's in the children's best interest, or would address the perceived problems. Small changes to address the cases of real incompetence are probably the low hanging fruit, and don't require radical change.
• drink 15y ago
  Yeah, because an anonymous HN commenter knows more about the state of American education than the guy who ran the company that provided American schools with leading-edge technology for the past 3 decades.
  • juiceandjuice 15y ago
    You mean the guy that beat cancer?
    • gobongo 15y ago
      Yes, that one. Paul Allen.
  • serge2k 15y ago
    How exactly does selling computers to schools make you an expert in education. I think it would be better to focus on making schools better rather than just telling students to spend more time at them. Or have the students there for 40 hours a week, but ban homework. Use the extra time to get it done at school. Then students will actually do it, and they don't have to worry about it at home anymore. Plus you don't have kids going to school for 40 hours then being expected to do an extra hour of homework at night.
• jerf 15y ago
  "Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here?" While I also have various ideological preconceptions about the source of the economic problems in the US and elsewhere, I would observe that when someone like the CEO of Apple is expressing an opinion about what makes a factory easier to open in China than in the US, someone who has actually been the guy-who-can-say-yes to actual factories for which that decision was actually made, it's probably worth listening to that opinion. Even if you can somehow prove he's objectively wrong on the merits, his perception would still be a useful data point. On the other hand I wouldn't expect any particular insight into our school problems from him, beyond what any reasonably skilled businessman could present.
  • rayiner 15y ago
    Jobs was a businessman, not an economist. There is a good reason regulation makes it more expensive to open factories in the US: our regulations force companies to internalize the negative externalities their businesses create. China effectively subsidizes industry by forcing its citizens to bear the costs of pollution, injuries, etc, inherent in such activities. US regulation forces companies to bear some of these costs (hardly all of them). In its retrospective study on the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA estimated that the benefit of pollution control over the 20 year period was on the order of $22 trillion. Relative to the "so-called 'no-control' case, an additional 205,000 Americans would have died prematurely and millions more would have suffered illnesses ranging from mild respiratory symptoms to heart disease, chronic bronchitis, asthma attacks, and other severe respiratory problems... the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have resulted in major increases in child IQ loss and adult hypertension, heart disease, and stroke." Meanwhile, "the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits." What's good for business isn't necessarily good for the economy. The things that businessmen push for: deregulation, limitations on tort liability, etc, create more in costs to society then they create in benefits to businesses. Indeed, our measurements of things like GDP are so fundamentally flawed that they encourage politicians to adopt such measures. If a factory's poisonous emissions causes you to have lung problems, that doesn't count against GDP, but when you seek medical attention for those problems GDP goes up!
• badclient 15y ago
  Sorry, if 7-8 hours of schooling isn't enough couple more hours won't change much.
  • brianbreslin 15y ago
    but it could reduce the drop in productivity the parents have when they leave work to pick them up? (just brainstorming). OR it can provide for more customized learning/hands on experience for the individual kids.
    • badclient 15y ago
      I'd argue if we better utilize the hours kids spend at school right now we can do all that without needing more hours.
      • brianbreslin 15y ago
        oh i agree, but if we aren't increasing funding for education, we're unlikely to ever see any change. we as a society don't seem to place education super high on the totem pole come funding time.
  • morsch 15y ago
    7 to 8 hours is probably too much organised schooling, already. However, there's an argument to be made for letting kids stay on the premises in a semi supervised environment after hours. There's lots of resources available in school which could be useful; you can offer some activities (but please, not an additional 5 hours on top of 7 hours of school), or help with homework (dito), and generally offer an environment that's hopefully more conducive to learning in the broadest possible sense than some of the worst home/street environments.
• mcantelon 15y ago
  The text "turning Jobs down on making campaign" isn't in the article. It says "he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential" which makes it sound more like Jobs' issues were the barrier to cooperation.
  • commieneko 15y ago
    Well, to be blunt, if you are going to get Picasso to design your logo you _don't_ art direct him. And you try your best not to piss him off. Because he's fucking Picasso... You don't have to use what he makes, but if you want genius, and why else would you want Jobs and his team to design an ad, you ask politely and then get out of the way. Edit: Somewhere online I read an article about Jobs getting Paul Rand (edited from Milton Glaser) to design the logo for NEXT. Can't find with a quick Google search, but it was a fascinating read.
    • magicofpi 15y ago
      It was Paul Rand who designed NEXT's logo: http://imprint.printmag.com/branding/paul-rand-steve-jobs/ http://imprint.printmag.com/branding/paul-rand-steve-jobs/ . And here's Steve Jobs talking about Rand: http://512pixels.net/steve-jobs-on-paul-rand/ http://512pixels.net/steve-jobs-on-paul-rand/
      • commieneko 15y ago
        That would explain why my Google search wasn't bearing fruit :) Edit: the video has the quote I was thinking of, but what I read was an article. From the video (Jobs talking): > I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.’
    • gojomo 15y ago
      It's not clear Jobs' judgement would work similar magic in politics. FYI: Jobs had Paul Rand do the NeXT logo.
• MaxGabriel 15y ago
  On the issue of manufacturing, there's actually alot of evidence about Chinese wages rising in skilled labor, converging with U.S. wages. The U.S. doesn't manufacture textiles or similar goods like China does, but even those jobs are moving to poorer countries than China. This article [1] provides a succinct explanation: "With Chinese wages rising at about 17 percent per year and the value of the yuan continuing to increase, the gap between U.S. and Chinese wages is narrowing rapidly… Products that require less labor and are churned out in modest volumes, such as household appliances and construction equipment, are most likely to shift to U.S. production...Support from state and local governments can tip the balance.” [1]http://www.bcg.com/media/pressreleasedetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-75973 http://www.bcg.com/media/pressreleasedetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-...
• abbasmehdi 15y ago
  Both of Jobs' school ideas do not seem to be rooted in a better education, rather keeping kids occupied longer while their parents worked for his or other companies. It could have been a measure against reducing daycare costs or as the way to keep people at work without having to worry about their kids. I do like his idea about breaking up teacher unions, but I think the root cause of all of that is very low salaries for teachers.
• cjoh 15y ago
  "keep schools open until 6" is one of these things that clearly demonstrates that people really don't understand how government works. If you want your schools open until six, take it up with your school board, not the freakin' president.
  • veidr 15y ago
    Yeah, but if you want all schools to be open until six, I'd say the president is a reasonable place to start that discussion. (That's not to say that I think this (good) idea could ever be implemented in the USA, though.)
    • Gormo 15y ago
      If you want all schools to be open until six, you need to take it up with each of the thousands of local school boards in the US, along with the many thousands of charter, private, and other independent schools. The federal government has no policy-making authority w/r/t education in the United States. And if such authority did exist at the federal level, the appropriate place to start would be Congress, not the executive branch. In reality, of course, you'd never be able to create a universal policy to reflect your particular vision of how education ought to work, and that's a good thing.
      • MatthewPhillips 15y ago
        Bureaucratic authority, no. Influence to the point of defacto authority, yes.
  • brianobush 15y ago
    funding usually doesn't happen on that level. It would be state-level (or fed), unless the district could pass a bond measure to fund it alone.