My community newspaper published a guest column bashing teachers' unions

[alp227]

An excerpt from "Standing for Something" (reprinted on the Evergreen Times) in which the author claims that teachers' unions value members' own jobs over the education of children and that tenure protects the incompetent:

The cause that inspires me to rise up off my haunches, and risk being called a hypocrite for naming my website “Sunnyside Communications,” is teacher tenure.

The frustration started rising within me when I was a public school teacher myself in the 90s. It irked me that I was expected to join the teacher’s union when I saw that so much of its energy went to protecting 10% of the teachers—those who fought for the right to retain their jobs even though they were either unable or unwilling to do the work.

All the rationalization that tenure was in place to protect groundbreaking, controversial research and lesson planning sounded perfectly logical for college professors, but I only saw it used as a shield to protect the lazy or unqualified at the high school level.

Even then, before having children of my own, I couldn’t understand why those teachers’ right to work was somehow held to a higher value than their 150 students’ right to a proper education.

The wrongness became personal once our girls hit middle school. While they have had some teachers who ought to receive medals of honor from the President himself for teaching not just math, language arts, theater and dance, but also curiosity, passion and compassion; my girls have also experienced the exact opposite.

Several of their teachers have utterly wasted their time. And given the cumulative nature of most areas of study, they have prevented our daughters and the rest of their students from progressing to more advanced levels of study due to the lack of preparation.

Does this anger me and every other parent involved in their children’s education? Heck yes. Can we do a single thing about it? Heck no. By the time our children get to this grade, we know to suck it up due to the sheer impossibility that anything will ever happen because of tenure.

The author also shared an anecdote of one teacher whom she saw punch a student in the stomach and as she claimed "was actively bullying" her daughter.

The comments after this article are uniformly in agreement. Keep this in mind: this is a former teacher herself, not Bill Gates/Arne Duncan/etc., putting forward that unions are pigs and that tenure protects even the incompetent.

But if they're so bad, then why oh why do those education powerhouse countries like Finland and South Korea have strong unions and that the top-performing US states are more likely to be unionized? And I just found this article, "The Myth of the "Powerful" Teachers' Union", which describes the situation in California:

In Georgia, where 92.5% of the teachers are non-union, only 0.5% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired. In South Carolina, where 100% of the teachers are non-union, it’s 0.32%. And in North Carolina, where 97.7% are non-union, a miniscule .03% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired—the exact same percentage as California.

An even more startling comparison: In California, with its “powerful” teachers’ union, school administrators fire, on average, 6.91% of its probationary teachers. In non-union North Carolina, that figure is only 1.38%. California is actually tougher on prospective candidates.

Whose interest is being served in making people believe that teachers' unions are selfish and greedy and anti-student?

[snot]

1. Why can't the problem be fixed without destroying unions entirely?

[roody]

2. What problem? That some administrators refuse to do their jobs

and fire incompetent teahers? What does that have to do with unions?

[Hannah Bell]

3. wtf?