Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task

A remarkable finding of studies of teacher competency

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JSD/is_5_52/ai_77196...

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_32_17/ai_7781...

is that incompetent teachers are the least likely to resign from their teaching jobs over time. They may or may not know they are incompetent teachers, but they can sense that they wouldn't be able to find any better job at their level of ability elsewhere in the job market. So schools tend to accumulate a larger percentage of incompetent teachers over time, as competent teachers seek work in other occupations while incompetent teachers hang on for dear life. I was fortunate to have some very experienced and very competent veteran teachers when I was young (in an era when women had fewer employment opportunities outside schoolteaching, which seems to be an important issue)

http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/~aleigh/pdf/Teacher%20Quality.pdf

but these days it seems harder than ever to find a teacher who has both high competence and long experience.

Something I find simply disgusting is when I see teacher's unions claiming they represent the needs of students. I believe this lie is part of what gives them so much unfounded clout. They represent the desires of teachers: the needs of students are secondary and subordinate to that, if even a consideration. The worse the teachers, the more corrupted the union becomes to defend them.

What I hope people come to realize, especially with articles such as this one in the news, is this: not only do the desires of teachers rarely align with the needs of students, they quite often stand in direct opposition. Teacher's unions are self-seeking entities that are to always be examined with a cautious eye.