The late Steve Jobs was a Democrat, but apparently he minced no words with the President when he met him last year according to a new biography:
Coming from a Obama supporter like Jobs this is truly damning. Jobs was a good bit of a jerk at the best of times, but he knew how to make a huge pile of money in his industry and he could tell that what Obama has thus far done in regard to the economy is nothing short of a disaster.
I don’t know that opening schools for longer periods is teh solution – it’s not that enough time isn’t spent in school, it’s that the quality of education sucks. Schools are just too political, too much time spent on foolish subjects, many textbooks are simplypoorly written, etc. That has nothing to do with the amount of time spent.
Agreed cmatt.
I think longer school hours are a good idea in certain communities. They have worked well in places where kids don’t have any supervision after school like poorer inner cities. Kids can get into a lot of trouble between 3 and 6. I don’t see a one size fits all answer to our education problems. I agree whole heartedly about empowering principals.
If the problem is a diminishing ability to produce a globally competitive labor force, longer school days/years is part of the solution.
As for quality, putting aside the family variable which is a much larger social problem, the biggest factor is teachers. Schools need to attract highly qualified and highly motivated teachers. Jobs is right again here that the ability to fire bad teachers is important. I would also like to see more variability in classroom sizes. At risk students should be in small classrooms. Self-motivated students should have no trouble learning in a lecture hall. This, it seems to me, would be a better way to allocate resources.
I heard this weekend that there is an app for iPhones that make Steve Jobs a saint. It’s called iBA fi.