Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Education

Mary, Mary, Why Ya Buggin?

by Clay Staggs

I am a fan of Macintosh computers. I work on a MacBook Pro, which I adore, and there are no fewer than 7 other Macs in my house. It’s one of my interests. So, I peruse several Mac-related websites on a regular basis.

Recently, I came across an article where Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, who is famously liberal (Al Gore is on Apple’s board of directors), made some very pointed comments about teachers’ unions. He said:

“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.’”

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way.”

“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Now, I didn’t really think that comments like those would go unnoticed. And it’s one thing for union supporters to disagree, but, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Enter Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers. Mary is upset with Mr. Jobs, and has decided to take him on. She, on behalf of the CFT, has demanded that he either attend their annual conference to respond or issue an apology for his “insulting comments.” Should he fail to do either, then the CFT will award Mr. Jobs its inaugural Rotten Apple Award, “for the individual who best personifies the need to think differently about public education and teacher unions.” Clever play on Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign, no?

Mary apparently put all this in a letter to Steve. She tried to turn the tables on him, writing:

How well could a business — say, a computer company — operate if you paid its professional employees so poorly and put them in work environments so unsupportive that nearly half of them left the company within five years? … How long could that business survive if it had to hold bake sales to get enough chips to build its machines?

This made me wonder just how poorly teachers were paid in California. So I did a little googling. According to the California Department of Education, in 2003, beginning teachers’ salaries ranged from $33,000 to $37, 000, varying with the size of the school. A midrange salary is $50,000 to $58,000. Now, I realize that the cost of living is higher there than here, but that didn’t exactly sound like poverty level living to me. So I googled to find a standard of comparison. According to the US Census Bureau, the median household (note that there are two earners in many households) income in California from 2002-04 (in 2004 dollars) is $50,000. So a midrange teacher’s salary (alone) equals or exceeds the median household income.

But what about that bake sale part? What’s the state of California putting out each year per pupil? According to the National Education Association, $7,860.000 in 2003. I believe that would cover just about any private school tuition here, and I suspect many fine ones in California too.

Mary is definitely buggin. She certainly does not have to like Steve Jobs’s view of teachers’ unions. But why attack him with accusations that are disprovable with a few Google searches? A cynical reader might think that Mary couldn’t refute Steve’s points, and was just trying to change the subject.