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I greatly appreciate your response!

I have a few reactions. You said: "Are there bad teachers? Yes, you know it and I know it. Empower you administration to fire them, stop protecting the bad teachers. The bad news is we can't protect the "good" teachers, either. De-regulate licensing for teachers, empower administrators, give school vouchers, and hold parents and kids responsible for their own education."

I completely agree with those suggestions. Fire the bad teachers. That's ultimately what I want. But the unions are not allowing systems to be put in play that will allow for this firing. In order to fire them, you need a criteria upon which to base this decision. You need to have established criteria, and I believe that part of that criteria should be how they perform on standardized tests. If a teacher has students who can't add and subtract, and all of their students fail, then of course the administrator better have a brain and realize that this is not a criteria for firing them.

Ultimately, my question is this: all of the proposals you mention (stop protecting the bad teachers, de-regulate licensing for teachers, empower administrators, give school vouchers, and hold parents and kids responsible for their own education): are the teacher unions actually supporting any of these initiatives? Not just by what they say, but by what they DO?