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- Apple and Cisco Strike Deal Over iPhone Name
That was fast. The Apple/Cisco iPhone Trademark Battle of 2007 is over. After weeks of mutual ridicule, rumor, innuendo and intrigue, the two electronics giants agreed to share the oddly appealing name, Cisco using it for a pretty lame-looking VoIP...
That was fast. The Apple/Cisco iPhone Trademark Battle of 2007 is over. After weeks of mutual ridicule, rumor, innuendo and intrigue, the two electronics giants agreed to share the oddly appealing name, Cisco using it for a pretty lame-looking VoIP device and Apple branding their insane breakthrough mega-web browsing communications device similarly.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone
According to the San Jose Mercury News, Apple had until midnight to settle, and they did. Most intriguing out of the deal? Check this agreement:
But more significantly, the companies said they ``will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications,'' according to the joint release. The companies did not provide any more detail on this part of the agreement, and other terms of the settlement remain confidential.
Some, including Engadget, whose image I'm borrowing, believe it points to interoperability between Cisco iPhones and Apple iPhones. But the language doesn't bear it out -- specific products aren't mentioned for that part of the deal. But is this a signal of Mac compatibility for future Cisco solutions? Or is this just a generic commitment to networking standards? I mean Cisco is just across the Bay in Fremont, but I'm a bit perplexed here...
Pete Mortensen - Why I Disagree So Strongly With Steve On Schools
I was challenged by my reader Jeff to explain why I've turned such a bright shade of red in reaction to Steve Jobs's inflammatory comments about teachers' unions -- and the alleged inability of principals to fire bad teachers. Looking...
I was challenged by my reader Jeff to explain why I've turned such a bright shade of red in reaction to Steve Jobs's inflammatory comments about teachers' unions -- and the alleged inability of principals to fire bad teachers. Looking back at what I've written, I clearly haven't been explaining my point of view enough, so I'll try.
Gather 'round and click through, folks, this one might take awhile.
Technorati Tags: Schools, Steve Jobs
The biggest why behind my distaste is that I think Steve is zeroing in on one tiny piece of one possible explanation for why many U.S. schools have deep problems. More than that, I think he's deliberately refusing to look at the bigger picture.
Now, one caveat: It is true that small changes can have cascading effects for good or ill. The 1990s decision in New York City to take offline any subway car that had been tagged with graffiti until it could be cleaned has made the subway safer. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this extensively in "The Tipping Point." I don't buy the idea that these bogeymen, these unfirable bad teachers are the key flaw in the system that, if fixed, will magically make schools good.
Here are the two factors to consider for why Steve's depiction of modern education is misrepresented:
Teachers do not arrive with tenure. They earn it, often over the course of up to 10 years. During that trial period, the vast majority of school districts have the ability to let go any teacher who isn't up to par. And I have to say, if you can't tell whether an employee is good or not in the first 10 years on the job, you aren't fit to judge talent, whether in business or the public sector. I'm sure there are those who believe teachers automatically become soft upon earning tenure, but this is far from the truth. Many school districts offer tremendous incentives to their teachers to continue their educations, including raises tied to the earning of additional degrees. Complacency is typically not in the equation. And any principal not making good decisions about who to give tenure should be fired by the superintendent, which is well within that roles powers.
The second, much bigger point, is that the performance of teachers is based on what? The performance of their students. And guess what? The performance of great managers like Steve Jobs is based on the performance of his employees. Here's the crazy part: follow the metaphor through to the end, and it's students, not teachers, who are the employees in this metaphor. And that's a problem, because the definition of public school means no firing of students.
Schools and teachers don't get to choose who they work with. If a student lives in a district, he or she is eligible to attend. Even if he or she can't read in English. Even if the student is being neglected at home and hasn't had a decent meal in the last five years. Even if the student deliberately does poorly on standardized tests to express contempt for a cookie-cutter system. Even if that student stands up and screams at the top of their lungs "TEACHERS ARE PIGS TEACHERS ARE PIGS TEACHERS ARE PIGS!" during a lecture on "Huck Finn." These aren't bad customers who you choose not to work with and ban from the store for life (unless they do something worthy of expulsion), it's a person whose success you must commit to regardless of your mood, their behavior or other circumstance.
And this is where the metaphor of school as business truly breaks down: You can only fire (expel) students for extraordinarily bad behavior, much as even tenured teachers can be removed for any number of reasons that go beyond mere performance issues. So if you're saying that tenured teachers should be fired for lackluster performance, however you define it, you're ultimately saying that students should be fired for lackluster performance, and that's actually not a stance we as a society are ready to make. Students can drop out at 16 if they choose, but public schools won't turn away anyone who lives in the district with a stated interest in learning.
To be honest, plenty of students are not well-served by our current educational system. I have a friend who is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, and he graduated high school with a C average before dropping out of an extremely mediocre university after one semester with a D average. He's now an extremely successful wine specialist at one of the finest restaurants in San Diego. Does this mean his teachers were bad? No, actually. It means he's an incredibly individual learner (like, well, Steve Jobs...) who couldn't be well-served in large classes (they get bigger by the year) and so has done all of his best learning on his own time. He's told me several times that he could have been an A-student, but he just hated classroom learning too much to do so. Are his teachers to blame for the way his intelligence manifested in class?
Look at Steve and Rush Limbaugh, the central figures of this argument. Both have very individual intelligences. I'll refrain from using a stronger term to describe Rush in the interest of discretion. Neither did well in high school, particularly, and each dropped out of college after a year or less. School written broadly didn't jibe with the way they prefer to learn, with lots of hands-on attention. So they assume it's this way for the rest of students. Of course, Steve doesn't look at the inspiration he drew from Hohn McCollum at Homestead High School in Los Altos and assume that the teachers he didn't like can mean just as much to students with different needs than his. He assumes McCollum was the exception and that the rest of the teachers are middling-to-poor. With a bunch who should probably get the boot.
And yet a teacher will be judged good or bad by Steve Jobs or Rush Limbaugh or some other multimillionaire or billionaire who doesn't have children actually attending a public school will look at the test scores generated by the full spectrum of students, from the very best to the very worst, look at the schools or district whose average scores are worst and blame it all on "Bad Teachers." There's no first-hand knowledge driving these claims. It's memories of the way things were 30, 40, 50 years ago in a given school combined with dubious quantitative data.
The problem isn't a plague of bad teachers, though a fair share exist. The problem is the metrics we're using to make our determinations of good and bad teachers and good and bad school districts. Why are we basing our entire education system's credibility on a set of tests that have no context other than to measure the education system's credibility? When you give someone an empty basis for measurement, they'll change the way they work in order to look good for that system. This is why there have been teachers and administrators who have been caught cheating in order to look good for No Child Left Behind.
Why should we care about the growth rate of what a given school's math or English test scores are from one year to the next on a test that has no broader context? I'm more excited to see if the district's drop-out rate is down.Why not look at long-term goals that really matter, like number of students who end up with a college degree? Or number of students to be the first from their families to finish high school? Or number of graduates admitted to college?
And that's the big difference between Steve's and Rush's view of the world and mine. They look at standardized test scores adjudged to be below par and think "Bad teachers" to themselves. I look at those scores and think "meaningless measurement."
Federal control of public education has not made things better. I don't have a silver-bullet answer, but I can tell you that the answer isn't to spend all of our time bashing the people trying hardest to educate our children.
That's everything I can think to say about schools right now. Does that help, Jeff?
Image via Stanford.
Pete Mortensen
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