Obviously we disagree on how broken teacher's unions are. It seems you think they are so broken that they need to be torn down (perhaps to be rebuilt), and I think they need some corrective measures.

Seeing what happened with the UAW in response to the auto company troubles here in the US, I am hopeful that meaningful reforms can be achieved.

I am for the right to collective bargaining. We let capital form aggregate power in the form of corporations, and Government in the jobs sector isn't dissimilar to the power that corporations wield in the labor market. Letting labor bargain collectively with the owners of capital seems necessary to me, unless you don't care about labor getting a chance at a free shake.

It's also obvious that government has done a poor job of structuring labor agreements to get rid of bad teachers. I don't think that if you took away the collective bargaining power of one of the lower paid professional jobs that you can get with a higher education would necessarily lead to better outcomes. You would get rid of some bad teachers at the same time you made the profession less desirable for prospective candidates. Improvements would probably at best be meager in the long term, but you might even see significantly lower quality teachers as more qualified workers sought jobs that paid better.

You don't like summer vacation? I think that it's great that kids get 3 months to be kids. Maybe you can have those spoiled teachers break rocks over the summer as moral penance for their cushy jobs. So you knew some bad teachers. Tell me a profession that is only represented by excellence that is conducted on the scale of educating all the children in a tremendously large nation. There are bad employees bobbing along in every profession, is the tax dollars that stick in your craw? I find that there is nothing like a public servant performing poorly to really get the drums beating.

Labor agreements that allow schools to fire bad teachers sound like a good solution to this problem. I have known many teachers and have realized that it's actuality a challenging job if you do it well. I think that education is a disaster in this country, and hope that we are on the cusp of a technological revolution where each child's abilities are tracked statistically, when they have mastered a concept they then move on to the next. Much better than trying to push 30 square pegs through the one round hole of a classroom, but even this method will demand that we have teachers.

Because I see that you do not understand. The teachers union supplies Labor to the process of education, without which there would be no such commodity as education. Labor is an intrinsic part of production, without which we would have no goods at all. there would be no benefit to provide in anyway without Labor. Labor does what it does for money, and in a liberal free society where government and considerations wield aggregate capital to their great advantage, it has been commonly accepted that workers will have the right to organize. Maybe you desire, as so many of our fellow Americans, to disenfranchise labor by removing it's right to collectively borrow. I find the idea of an America like that, one that rejects rights that have gradually become an accepted part of the worlds conception of human rights, distasteful and frightening.

I do find labor contracts that don't allow the firing of bad actors similarly distasteful and frightening. While I'm not really all that worked up by teachers unions, I am frightened by how often police in my city kill unarmed citizens and keep their jobs. I don't point my finger at the union or the cops when thinking about this situation, it's wholly the fault of governments inability to bargain effectively with public unions.