What is wrong with WIRED?

Last week Apple CEO Steve Jobs made some comments about the state of the public schools at a conference in Texas on school reform. Jobs' most quoted statement in the speech was "the unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off the charts crazy." Leander Kahney wrote a response to Jobs' observations that made me cringe. Kahney claims that the most pressing problems facing California schools are that the schools are "too big, too bureaucratic and chronically underfunded. Teachers are criminally low paid and under trained. Education--- and school funding--- has become solely about test scores."

Kahney then goes on to compare Jobs to Mussolini. He disses Jobs for his support of vouchers and ridicules the idea that choice will help improve schools. He argues, absurdly, that choice will only apply to rich parents and will ignore poor children.

Kahney should look a bit more at the markets his magazine supposedly covers rather than preaching leftist BS. There are so many flaws in Kahney's arguments (besides the personal attacks) that one wonders where to begin. Here are a couple of issues I would have looked at -

* Has he looked at the inflation adjusted funding for K-12 schools over the last decade or two or three? He would find that funding has increased while output has declined? Indeed, we rely too much on tests but that came about because the public school advocates (including the teacher unions) wanted more money and could not demonstrate results - in this political era that is what you can expect. Keeping the schools in the political arena may produce unreasonable results.
* Has he ever wondered whether the model of collective bargaining, which makes it almost impossible to fire an incompetent teacher or make changes in the schedules of teachers, is the right model for assuring that teachers have a voice in their schools? A number of thoughtful observers have commented on the increased rigidity that teacher unions have added to schools.
* Has he bothered to look at what a teacher gets paid? Starting teachers get paid a lot more when they start out with people of similar training and education. They do not top out in six figures but can make a reasonable salary for the amount of time that they work in a year. Most teachers get a two months off in the summer, two weeks at Christmas and one week in the spring. Thus, they get paid a salary for working a bit more than 9 months of the year. If you normalized that to a person working in the private sector, it might increase the net value of compensation by a quarter. That is coupled with a very generous retirement system. Net compensation is not comparable to the CEO of a Fortune 500 but it is also not penurious.

Kahney wants to ignore the rigidities that collective bargaining has brought into the classroom. Indeed, there are other problems but a good deal of the bureaucracy comes from the organizing principles that are in part created by collective bargaining. The teacher unions want to limit parental involvement in schools. They want to make rules for hiring and evaluating teachers as rigid as possible. While they are not the only problem - they are a big source of it.

I am not sure how Kahney would react to the benefits of competition in the magazine industry. People get a broad range of choices to meet their information needs at various prices and qualities. If that works in his industry why would it not in education? Why shouldn't parents have a lot more choices than they do now?

WIRED at one point was at the cutting edge - until recently it was a place to become informed about how technology was evolving and how it might affect our lives. It was once a must read for anyone interested in this part of the economy. But in the last few years, it has lost its focus and treads between spouting off in non-technology areas and presenting the mundane and the expensive as if they were trendy. Luckily, unlike the world that Kahney yearns for in the public schools, when my subscription comes up again, I will have the opportunity to drop my subscription and find something which meets my information needs. Too bad, Kahney does not want the same thing for children attending school.