I'm a university professor, not a HS teacher, but from what I have seen so far of teacher's unions in general on this issue, I am disgusted. Unions need to get on the right side of this issue and demand excellence, not adequacy. It seems like everytime the union is invoked to deal with someone not doing their job, they're there with an armada of lawyers and bluster to make sure justice is never done. It's like the mafia. I respect the work that unions do legislatively to argue for benefits and salary increases (assuming it works, which is questionable), but I am fed up with "MY" union, as they like me to call it, consistently protecting the guilty. All you have to do is walk through a school system to find teachers who are utterly, tragically incompetant. They need to be given the boot: no delays, no apologies, no severance pay. Just the boot. If this takes a tyrant, then so be it. It's not like there's such an overabundance of teachers that administrators would go around firing every good-for-nothing teacher they could even if they wanted to, so in any case, it's only going to be the truly horrible that are fired.