ehmorgan3:

I have no problem with unions; they certainly should be allowed. But let's not mince words. Unions exist to advance the agenda of teachers, not students. Wherever unions are the most powerful, education is of the lowest quality and highest cost. Legislators and mayors need to understand this fact and start treating teacher's unions as the adversaries, not partners, that they are.

I have one slight disagreement.

I don't think some Unions even exist to advance the cause of teachers; I think they exist to keep power and influance on the political level.

I.E. they're not using their political power to help teachers, they're using their teachers to help with their political power.

One of the reasons Thatcher was successful at challenging the miner unions in the U.K. is that the Unions didn't represent the miners; they were more interested in leftish politics and power-mongering than actually helping their workers, using union rules to keep people who agreed with their agenda in authority.

I think a lot of teachers don't like their unions or what their unions do; how they seem more interested in getting Democrats elected ather than making the lives of their teachers better by fighting the democrat-created buerocracy that makes their lives so miserable and their jobs so hard.