karel wrote:best thing they could do is get rid of the teachers union, they no longer needed, same with all unions....
I would love to really blame the unions for this one but I don't think I can. There are a lot of problems with the teacher's unions but education wise the problem lies int the government pencil pushers who make mindless regulations and various interests that force things into the curriculum. Yes there are occasions where the bad teacher problem who can't be removed exists (but from an educational standpoint that is not a problem; the teacher can be assigned into a null position, sometimes called the rubber room and only becomes a burden for the property owners, not the students) but that's a rare situation overall.
Having said that, I think that the entire teacher's union should be scrapped and replaced with a teacher's guild system. A guild system is more focused on advancing the members, while a union tends to advance the group in general and sometimes at the expense of a subset of the members. This is definitely the case with the teacher's union where some types of teachers (like the arts) are constantly faced with a gun next to their heads as being the first in line to get cut if the masses doesn't approve the administration's budget.
On the other hand, civil unions (which the teacher's union is) are problematic because it becomes one sided. In the private sector, businesses just can't throw a ton of money at their workers because they have to watch their bottom line. Governments just raise taxes so legislators don't really care about expenses. As a result these unions are more for giving "candy" to their members in order to keep them from complaining about the real issues (like how the bosses never listen to them in the first place).