Who cares about Steve Jobs's opinion? Not me particularly, but this article brings up an interesting point. How much blame should the teacher's unions get for the sad state of public education?
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72754-...ml?tw=rss.index
In California, where the author is, the average teacher salary in 2003-4 was 57K/year, which isn't bad for a job that gets summers off and a million holidays and with many breaks during the workday. As far as the training, I'm not sure how things are in CA, but there are so many GD training sessions available here in PA that it's dazzling. The issue isn't a lack of available training--the issue is that most teachers don't take advantage of the available resources.
The quoted article is hard to follow but the point is something like this: Unions aren't really much to blame for school woes. Seems to me that with good salaries and benefits in place, plenty of bad and lazy teachers who bloat the salary statistics because they are hard to fire, and students who aren't doing well, the Unions are certainly a large part of the problem.