Steve Jobs Should Blog, Part II

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on February 22

I initially missed Steve’s comments on public schools, which he made earlier this week at an event where he appeared alongside Michael Dell. But, wow. If Steve were to write the occasional blog entry about his views on this or that public policy issue, it would certainly make for entertaining chatter.

Jay Greene, writing in The New York Sun has it right: It takes guts to say that teachers unions are the root of the problem in public education.

To say it in Texas, a state whose textbook purchases are so large that they usually set the standard for the rest of the nation, takes even more guts, mainly because its not likely to help Apple’s computer sales to public schools in the immediate future.

But say it he did: Schools he said, have become unionized in the “worst possible way.” I was once an education reporter, and having seen close-up how the union system protects lousy teachers and doesn’t properly encourage good ones, I have to agree.

One thing that strikes me as odd, is the politics of the people involved. Jobs is about as a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat as ever there was. In 2000, he gave $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee, for instance; His Wife Laurene Powell Jobs has been recently contributing to Barack Obama and to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pre-candidacy organization known as HillPac. Here’s a link to a search form from the Center for Responsive Politics (sorry it doesn’t allow deep-linking to search results, so you’ll have to search for yourself). If you search for contributions from people with the last name of Jobs who live in California, you’ll that Steve and Laureen gave a sizable chunk of change to Who’s Who of prominent Democrats over the course of the last decade.

Michael Dell, for his part is a solid Republican, at least based on who he gives his money to, as shown in the CRP’s records: He’s made contributions to Tom DeLay and the “Every Republican Is Crucial” PAC (ERICPAC) among others in recent years. You’d think that so stalwart a Republican would have less-friendly things to say about unions, especially teachers unions. Republicans aren’t exactly popular with teachers unions. But he took the easy way out, and defended the unions, saying “the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good. … So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed.” Dell opted to be less controversial on the subject, perhaps for fear of hurting his sales to schools, while his company is is experiencing a bit of a rough patch.

Jobs at least was honest, conceding that his opinions would likely cost Apple some business in Texas, and likely elsewhere. But he’s not exactly an uninformed person on the subject of education policy and what works and doesn’t in America’s public schools. In fact he’s probably better informed on the issue than most Americans. Wife Laurene is the president of the board of College Track, a Bay Area non-profit organization that helps underprivileged kids get into college; She also sits on the board of EdVoice an education lobbying and activist organization that focuses on changing California schools; And she sits on the board of the non-partisan New America Foundation (I’ve linked to its page on Education policy.)

So presuming that they talk often about her work with these non-profits, he’s not exactly new to the issues plaguing the public school system, and deserves a huge “atta boy” for daring to say something that’s politically incorrect in certain circules, and not likely to help line his personal pockets. Even Rush Limbaugh, whose opinions I can generally take or leave, chimed in with support for Jobs’ comments. And by the way, Rush, if my memory is correct, also happens to be a Mac user.

So all this serves, I think, to bolster my argument that Steve Jobs should blog. He has a lot of interesting things to say on topics more far-reaching than just what’s cool about the next version of the Mac OS or the iPod. How about it Steve?

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