I don’t often find myself agreeing with the political sensibilities of Steve Jobs, but if there’s one thing the man knows, it’s how to build a successful organization. So when the founder both Apple and Pixar started talking about teachers’ unions, I was pleasantly surprised:

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

“Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win.’”

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“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said.

“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Public education is effectively a monopoly for the portion of the country that can’t afford private schools. And the problem with public education is the same as any other monopoly: the organization functions as though its customers are merely an annoyance only tangentially related to the organization’s survival.

That’s why you hear teachers’ unions oppose school choice on the grounds that it would hurt failing schools. But the point of public education is not to ensure the survival of schools, it’s to ensure the education of students. So what if failing schools are closed? They should close. And the only way that’ll ever happen is if less-advantaged families have an opportunity to vote with their feet and abandon the schools that are failing their children.