More on teachers and their union

A friend of mine, a big city school principal for decades, responded to my last email (in which I shared an email from a former principal) by commenting:

The problem is that between one-third and one-fourth of the teachers shouldn't be there, but you can't get rid of them because the teacher union protects them.  Even worse, the union discourages any teacher from going the extra mile for students by saying, "If you do that, then we might all have to do that."

This type of behavior is a crime -- though as I noted in two earlier emails, not unexpected: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-thoughts-on-randi-and-teachers.html and http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-thoughts-on-randi-weingarten-and.html