An 11 month school year would be a nightmare and screw up summer activities. Plus, the misalignment of HS and College schedules will hurt advanced students. School going to 6pm in the northland is a non-starter and dangerous.
(getting a little sick of the down votes without comment)
Also, it's a very American attitude to deficiency (just work more/harder) that ignores the far deeper problems. Outside of the Asian countries, who nobody should be emulating, the countries that do education well all have sane school hours. let kids be kids and figure out what you're doing fundamentally wrong. Poverty and a basic lack of respect for education are a good place to start.
Look at the Jews (not the Chinese, they go a bit overboard). They take education and achievement seriously. When my buddy Dave was in grade 11, his father was making him spend an hour a day studying for the SATs. He volunteered in research labs, got great grades, and got into a very good combined college/med school (rpi). He now does medical research, at 25.
Dave's parents placed a lot of emphasis on educational achievement, and it paid off. His brothers are similarly successful, and this attitude pervades Jewish culture in away that can't be said of society as a whole. Now, obviously, this is a value that individual families must hold, and something that Government can't just legislate. Still, there are ways of encouraging this behaviour that don't involve determining funding by standardized test scores. Most of it, however, needs to come from Americans themselves.
I thought that the "American Dream" was to be an all-star quarter back in high school and college, and then get signed by the NFL. Now that's a sound career path that everyone should follow... </sarcasm>
I will agree with you. I grew up way too fast, have a few kids of my own, and they are growing up way too fast for different reasons than I did. My reason? I worked from 13 on for wages. My kids? They're working much harder than I had to just to get a chance to go to a decent university.
The pressure on our kids is pretty significant. To the point they WILL NOT miss school when they are sick. Can't miss this, can't miss that. It's better to go to school and get everyone else sick. It's out of control.
6PM would be a nightmare. The amount of homework my kids have is astonishing. I never experienced anything like it when I went to school. They are ALREADY working on it most of the night trying to get it all done.
Yes, they are in AP classes - maybe it's a little different than the normal classes, but it's an option to those who desire it. Shall we keep them in school from early hours of the day until late hours at night?
When do most of you eat dinner? 7PM? 8PM? 9PM? Anyone recall that "family dinner" - or did we all forget because we work 10, 12 or 15 hours a day trying to "do something." I can see how this is especially difficult in the midwest, and other parts of the U.S., where it is dark very early in the day in the winter.
Maybe Steve imagined something like the European system. You go to school until 5/6pm but you do your whole homework in school and the afternoon is for that and other activities to broaden the mind.
Otherwise, that's a stupid idea. In Germany teachers are civil servants so they can't build unions, they can't get fired too, but they can pushed off their position when they are bad teachers.
"the European system"? The systems in individual European countries are about as different from each other as any of them are different from the US system.
One attempt to somewhat align the different European systems for higher education was the ECTS [1], but even that isn't quite perfect..
Fair enough on the 6pm thing. However, there seems to be evidence [1] that the typical 2 month summer break is hurting student performance - especially for poorer students whose parents can't afford to put them into enrichment activities in the summer. How, exactly, would 11 month school years be a nightmare? Misalignment already exists - Colleges get 4 months off, don't they?
I also recall seeing a talk about this exact topic, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.
So Chinese factories along with Chinese style education?
I strongly disagree. Finland leads the world in education because they provide individualised learning and teach critical thinking. The children start school there at a much later age too. They don't run a 9 hour a day, 11 month military camp for kids.
I agree that 6pm is too late to end the school day. I don't see the issue with 11 month school though. Especially since it doesn't necessarily mean less vacation time overall - that "lost" month can be spread across 2 week windows elsewhere in the year. The point is avoiding the big 2 month gap.
In the US there are plenty of summer programs for low income children. More important, summer is a time many kids work or be kids. This belief that he only place to learn is school is bunk. It is bad enough the amount of busy work students are assigned now (3+ hours) of homework a night. Adults get mad at our work / life balance, yet we seem bound and determined to heap soul destroying hours on our children. We need to get out of the mode we are raising factory workers and give children back some time to be creative and dream.
How can anyone justify putting children in a school for 10+ hours a day for 11 months? You wouldn't work that job and neither would I. Heck, in many countries it would be illegal to have an adult work those hours.
College & HS are pretty close in most states.
Imagine being able to skip the annoying 2+ weeks of review at the beginning of every school year - that's the goal/benefit of trimming summer vacation to 1 month.
So, to save 2 weeks we take another month of the students time away from activities that might have been teaching the student different things than the school is willing to teach? Sounds like an unfair trade-off. School is not the only place of learning and cutting down the large breaks removes possibilities of doing something else just as educational and often times more fulfilling.
I'm pretty sure these studies have been debunked in the past. I tend to agree with the debunking, because the arguments against summer vacation always stand up a strawman with the assumption that "good parents" send kids to camp, take the summers off, etc.
None of my circle of friends went to camp. We played outside, hung out with grandparents, etc. My parents weren't teachers, so they didn't have summers off.
Personally, I lived for summer vacation until I was like 14. If you took that away, it would have negatively affected me, and many others.
> Personally, I lived for summer vacation until I was like 14. If you took that away, it would have negatively affected me, and many others.
I honestly think this is a product of society and not some intrinsic driver for kids in school. Would a 14 year old me like it if someone told me summer vacation was canceled? No. But if I had been in a system with a shorter summer vacation from the beginning, I don't think I would care too much.
Maybe I'm biased, but my best times with friends were usually during school months. Summers were usually spent playing a lot of video games and going on boring camping trips with various relatives. At the time I loved the break, but I can hardly remember a summer where something really interesting and eventful happened.
"No. But if I had been in a system with a shorter summer vacation from the beginning, I don't think I would care too much."
I suppose it's like someone that lives in North Korea: They don't know the freedoms they are missing because they've never had them.
" Summers were usually spent playing a lot of video games and going on boring camping trips with various relatives. At the time I loved the break, but I can hardly remember a summer where something really interesting and eventful happened."
Most of my favorite childhood memories happened during summer vacation. The thing is, once you are older..you can't ever re-create that time of complete freedom because you have life responsibilities. I don't want to take that a way from kids.
Here in Australia kids get 6 weeks off in summer, plus 2 weeks in autumn, winter, and spring. This seems much more sensible than getting everything off over the summer.
Here in France kids get 2 months off in summer, plus 1 week in autumn, 2 weeks for Christmas, 2 weeks late winter, 2 weeks in spring. The best of both worlds from the kids point of view.
These are inconveniences, not fundamental obstacles. Our preference for convenience at the expense of results has led us to our current position of having a poorly educated underclass and a higher educational establishment in which the biggest earners are football coaches. Jobs' specific proposals may not be the right ones, and simply jacking up time spent in school without addressing educational methods etc is not going to take care of the problem by itself. but we have some serious catching up to do.
I didn't downvote but would you care to explain your reasons for all of these statements? What is so nightmatish about schools open 11mths of the year? How is school being open until 6pm dangerous? Is it something to do with darkness? Is darkness inherently dangerous?
Personally I think the suggestion about union rules and hiring/firing based on merit is the most significant of the bunch. More of the same type of school environment is not going to help.
I'm guessing that in the northern states, part of the year is a harsh winter and early sunset, so having kids leave school at 6pm could lead to them walking home in the snow and in the dark.
Yep, having a bunch of K-6 students on a bus at 6 - 8pm every night in the winter is a safety hazard. It gets dark early and school buses are not the best for long term warmth when they break down.
Working 11 months for 10+ hours a day is a nightmare for most parents. Add to that the inevitable homework and you get a "work" / life balance that is a nightmare. No time for friends, dance, music, or play. Wakeup, goto school, do "approved" activities then come home and eat, do homework, and go to bed. More hours are not the answer. We need creative workers in science, math, engineering, and vocational. Not a bunch of factory robots.
A lot of people in this thread seem to think that being in school until 5 or 6 PM would mean being in the classroom for ten hours a day or more.
That additional time would be fantastic if used for athletics, self-study, club activities (with a lot of personal freedom for the students), and so on.
With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government stimulus loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.
"There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."
"There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."
I don't think this was a dig at US factories just the fact that the type of factory they were looking for doesn't exist in the US. They want a factory to build cars on contract. Car factories are incredibly expensive, take years to build, and decades to recover the cost. But if someone asked you to build something and you know its going to cost millions in retooling you want a bigger guarantee than 3-5 years.
Tesla was lucky by the fact that the old Toyota plant was available and ready. And they didn't contract the work, they bought it which means they are committed for the long haul.
In most US jurisdictions, dozens of entities have the ability to say "no" to a development project. In states that are actively hostile to business, like New York or California, there may be hundreds of people or groups that can slow down projects.
Examples: Local Zoning Board; Whomever controls permits for running utilities; State/local environmental boards (Lots and lots of $$$ permits); Land speculators ("building a factory in this industrial park will ruin the views from XXX piece of land that we own"); Historical preservation maniacs. ("That collapsing house was was rented by Richard Nixon's maid"); Local politicians ("Oh, you need to build a 200,000 square foot building? Our master plan was modified last week -- buildings are capped at 150,000 square feet.); Local politicians in neighboring municipalities. ("Your project will generate too much traffic"); Local real property tax boards.; State politicians; Local construction unions. (Who will sabotage your project if you don't play along.); State Labor Departments, acting as agents for the construction unions.; Environmental pressure groups. ("Your stormwater mitigation strategy is insufficient, you're getting sued"); Federal regulators.
In New York, things are so bad that any significant project is essentially done under the aegis of the state government, usually via a public authority. The government provides funding, and can cut through some of the red tape, since the State is not subject to local zoning law. But there are usually strings attached, and the process takes years.
In China or Brazil, you basically partner with a connected local, and build your factory in a few months.
In China or Brazil, you basically partner with a connected local, and build your factory in a few months.
I really think you are severely underestimating what actually goes into building a factory. It's not handshake and 3 months later something magically springs out of the ground. Most modern factories are into the billions of dollars. For example Foxconn is opening a new factory in Brazil that won't be ready before 2013 and will cost $12 billion.
If you're just producing commodity items then you can buy commodity factory equipment. But high end manufacturing requires specialty equipment (usually from Germany, Japan or the US).
Anyway, after farming, manufacturing is the largest consumer of freshwater. I think the people have a right to know how the water is being collected and how its being disposed of since it is state money being used for the treatment. Unless you preferred the bad old days, before the Clean water Act, where factories would regularly dump toxic waste into the river, the Mississippi and the East River used to regularly catch on fire, and New Jersey literally stunk from all the pollution in its estuaries.
>n states that are actively hostile to business, like New York or California
If you think things are easier in Finland, then you're wrong. Turns out this is a specific case looking for a specific type of factory that could make a specific car on a specific contract. Your right-wing screed is not as convincing as you think it is. I'm not even going to point out how huge NY and Cali economies are.
>n China or Brazil, you basically partner with a connected local, and build your factory in a few months.
Replace "regulatory bullshit" with just as much bullshit except involving bribes, shakedowns, and forced contributions to political parties and dealing with a level of corruption and labor conditions that are staggeringly awful and depressing. My gf does work with BRIC economies all the time and the lesson I want to somehow teach you is that civilization and labor/environmental protections are worth it. They are waaaay worth it. I'm afraid people like you purposely refuse to learn this basic lesson and are otherwise spoiled by the Western privilege you refuse to share.
You've declared me a right-wing nut and then stuff words in my mouth. Thanks.
I'm not an expert in California, but I happen to live in Upstate NY and pay careful attention to what is (or isn't) going on. The size of the New York economy is an illusion in many ways; New York lives and dies on the back of a single industry -- Finance. That wasn't true 30-40 years ago. The valleys and lakefront between Buffalo and Albany were industrial powerhouses well into the 70s. In the early 20th century, Buffalo was one of the nations great cities, today, it's more like Detroit.
I'd also suggest that you read about the major economic development project going on in New York right now, the construction of a multi-billion dollar chip fab for Global Foundries just outside of Saratoga Springs, NY. Total cost of that project is something like $7 billion, with just under $3 billion being provided by the State of New York under various guises. That's what it takes to do manufacturing in the US today -- even with high-end manufacturing which requires extremely skilled labor.
Slightly off topic, but Finland leads the world in junior and high-school education. They have only one universities in the top 300 of the Shanghai rankings and nothing indicates that the advantage Finish students have leaving high school gives them any advantage at University. One needs to be careful about idolizing the Finish school system. While they are no doubt awesome at producing students that can do really well on PISA tests, they don't seem to be producing students who can go on to achieving academic excellence in a post-high school setting.
The purpose of education is not to enable schools to score highly on the Shanghai rankings - it's to enable students to develop the ability to think critically and independently, understand the world they live in, and learn to sustain themselves within it.
The focus on arbitrary aggregate rankings and making "us" more "competitive" is a dangerous distraction.
The Shanghai ranking doesn't put much weight on student performance.
"The ranking compares 1200 higher education institutions worldwide according to a formula that took into account alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (10 percent), staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (20 percent), highly-cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (20 percent), articles published in the journals Nature and Science (20 percent), the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index (20 percent) and the per capita academic performance (on the indicators above) of an institution (10 percent)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Unive...
However, nice bit of selective statistics to only use the top 300 in your calculation. The shanghai list actually has 500 universities listed, which bumps the number of Finnish universities to 5. So on a per capita basis Finland comes out ahead of USA!*
Not exactly building factories. The facility where they're doing the Karmas has existed for half a century, surviving on whatever specialty manufacturing it has been able to find (e.g mostly Porsches for the last 15 years or so, I think some other sportscars before that). In the news once a year with gloomy reports about how they might lose their current contracts in a couple of years, and don't have anything else lined up yet.
So not exactly a case of a ballsy decision from Fisker to build a new production plant in that corner of the world, but rather having exactly the right kind of factory be out of work right at the time Fisker needed it.
Seems legit, do we really have to BREAK the unions to do that? The teacher unions have many legitimate reasons for their existence regardless of some of their negative attributes.
>relax regulations on building factories
Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here? It's not the cost of labor and providing benefits to workers? I can see how the additional costs of creating factories here might make it slightly harder to manufacture things in the U.S., but I find it highly dubious that Apple would suddenly start manufacturing its machines here even if all zoning/health/environmental laws were scrapped.
"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.
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!
In theory, sure, a disinterested regulator would ensure that the cost of polluting was higher than the cost of not polluting. (Another solution to this problem is via property right enforcement, by the owners of the nearby polluted properties that share airspace/water table with the polluter).
But in practice the EPA is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to publishing studies on its own cost effectiveness. It exists to increase its budget and scope, just like all other agencies, but has no check on its behavior. Its officials are not elected, cannot be fired, and are effectively invisible to the public. Moreover, opposition to EPA malfeasance/corruption is often caricatured as opposition to clean air and clean water itself.
As an example of regulatory pathology, consider that the EPA is giving grants and instruction manuals to NGOs, telling them how to sue the agency into expanding its powers.
The EPA even tacitly encourages such suits, going so
far as to pay for and promote a "Citizen's Guide" that,
among other things, explains how to sue the agency
under "citizen suit" provisions in environmental laws.
The guide's author — the Environmental Law Institute —
has received $9.9 million in EPA grants over the past
decade.
And, to top it off, critics say the EPA often ends up
paying the groups' legal fees under the Equal Access to
Justice Act.
What's going on? "The EPA isn't harmed by these suits,"
said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during
the Bush administration. "Often the suits involve things
the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and
then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal
cover from political heat."
Most people have never read an expose on the EPA; they think of them as the "good guys" who protect us from the evil polluters. What's funny is that we can see through this kind of logic when the normal police invoke it to justify any action in the pursuit of common criminals, but not when the environmental police do so -- and the EPA is most certainly a branch of the police, with the power to raid, fine, and seize property.
This sounds bad in a soundbite, but this is the way the system works.
Consider this loose example: suppose 2 people get into a fight. One guy really beats up another guy, and the cops are called. If the recipient refuses to press charges, the cops can't do anything.
Similarly, a lot of government agencies can't proactively do something, until someone sues them. By getting sued, they get to act on the complaint, and the legal opinion can be used to justify similar action elsewhere.
There is no nefarious purpose here; it is disingenuous to claim so. Yes, government agencies have issues galore; but by conflating the necessary with the rest, we fail to identify the real problems.
Argh! Why the downvotes? This is the way the government works! A government agency often needs a legal cover to do something; so it asks the citizens to sue them in court, so that it will have the legal cover. It can't sue itself, because it can't be the plaintiff and the defendant at the same time.
> 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.
$22T/20 years is over $1T/year. US GDP in 1990 was under $6T. US GDP in 1970 was just over $1T.
> the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have resulted in major increases in child IQ loss
Oh really? Why would leaded gas in 1980 cause more problems than leaded gas in 1950?
> 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."
Just as the benefits are not limited to the money not spent on medical care, the money spent on pollution controls are not the only costs.
I hear what you are saying, but I think you're mixing units. Since the study is accounting for things that are not accounted for in GDP, It doesn't seem to make much sense to compare the dollar figure reached in terms of GDP. If GDP devalues human health as part of its basic assumptions, an analysis that does not devalue human health will come to different numbers. It's almost a tautology.
It's worth noting that during the Macintosh and NeXT days, Steve was fanatical about building computer factories in California. It was probably a lot of very hard-learned lessons that got him to accept Apple's arrangement with Foxconn.
>>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 don't have hard numbers, but I wold like to point out that Japanese students spend more days per year and longer hours in school, as well as hours of cram school on top of it for most of them, than Canadian schools, and yet Canadian students overall end up ranked higher on than Japanese students on every ranking I've ever seen.
Canadian schools also spend more than $3000 per student per year on average than American schools.
What American schools need is more quality, not more quantity.
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.
I'd contend communities with a large number of handguns (but no rifles) probably does have a crime problem, it's just likely the guns are a response to it, less than a cause.
Well, ND gun ownership and murder rates by means would seem to make your contention false. ND which has a large number of handguns per capita, had 2 murders in 2008 and both were stabbings.
Its not the guns or any other object, its the conditions and attitudes that make a place dangerous. Dangerous people will use the weapons they have or improvise weapons (IED) if they have none.
You misunderstood my statement I think: I'm saying 1> Handguns with no rifles is a situation you get when people feel they need personal protection, aka, high crime. I'm saying they are an effect, rather than a cause 2> North Dakotans probably have a large number of rifles as well, so don't fit that profile.
A cynical perspective: schools are prisons, and some lower income gang-joining students are criminals. An extra hour in school corresponds to a criminal spending an extra hour in prison instead of out wreaking havoc. The next question is forcing such students to stay in the school to begin with...
I think "schools are places that give people of a certain age something to do without giving them the option of leaving" is a perfectly valid sentiment and a good description of why more 10 - 14 year olds would perform less crime.
Calling them prisons implies the entire population of students would commit said crimes.
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.
> 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.
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.
Why does everyone defend the unions so much here? They are the reason we have a sub-par education system in the US. Teachers get automatic raises not based on merit and it's very difficult to fire a bad teacher. Until this problem is fixed (which the unions likely won't fix on their own), the other things you try aren't really going to help.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Conservative" or just gets shit done? Maybe the real reason why we don't get shit done in this country is because we're so preoccupied with these worn-out ideologies. What if Jobs was right? What if it's too damn hard to build factories in America?
I really hate all these politics links polluting the frontpage lately. If I could flag again, I'd do so quietly and not comment, but this is a little ridiculous.
Great point! He actually almost insisted on it: Jobs seemed to insist that he interact only with Obama ("On the meeting, Jobs insisted that Obama himself ask for a personal invitation"). He also got annoyed when he was forced to interact with Obama's aides, especially when they didn't do everything he said:
* "Jobs suggested that Obama meet six or seven other CEOs who could express the needs of innovative businesses — but when White House aides added more names to the list, Jobs insisted that it was growing too big and that “he had no intention of coming.”"
* "Jobs even offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. “He had made the same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential."
Yes. For Jobs to treat Obama otherwise seems somehow anti-republican: the fact that Obama is Jobs' peer---and indeed yours and mine---is, I think, a notion deeply rooted in American political culture. Considering the possibility of Jobs showing deference certainly raises my hackles. At the same time, it's natural to be overawed by a man like Obama, with so much political authority (and however much remains of the tremendous moral authority he had when elected).
Jobs was one of the captains of US industry - who else should the head of government turn to for specialist advice on business? If your head of government isn't talking to the captains of industry, then there's something wrong - it's not just a US thing.
It wouldn't surprise me if Obama was more in awe of Jobs than the other way around. After all, Steve's been in the spotlight for 30+ years now, and Obama was an unknown until 2004.
Which always seemed odd to me. Is he your king? Or was his ascendency based on merit? There's politeness, and I get being star-struck, but beyond that...
Jobs exhibited his notorious attention to detail, telling venture capitalist John Doerr that the menu of shrimp, cod and lentil salad was "far too fancy".
Attention to detail and a certain bluntness has been attributed as part of Steve Jobs' immense success, but this come across as plain rude. It doesn't matter if Jobs is right or not, it's bad etiquette to criticise another's work in this context.
Of course, I am assuming that his opinion wasn't asked, and I know nothing of the relationship that Jobs and Doerr shared.
Jobs proposed … that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.
"He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity."
Wow, what Jobs really loved was getting in charge, a control freak. It became the face in the 1984 wall telling everybody what to do.
If you want to send your children to boarding school so you don't have to educate them, more power to you.
But if you want the state to become your nanny and top-down micromanaging how children gets results I beg to differ, specially when the person that want to control it is a dropout and risk taker but wants anybody else to get into conformity.
What goes unstated is that Jobs' put his social beliefs above business. Obama is far from the ideal candidate to support if you'd like unions abandoned. And yet that is who Jobs' seemed to be rooting for.
Re: what it would look like? I am guessing just like a typical Apple ad?
* white or blurred background, putting the focus on product or user
* clean graphics and visuals
* montage of products in use, in real situations
* subtlely snarky towards the competition
(getting a little sick of the down votes without comment)