Your statement is absolutely a bunch of hooey. The point I was making had NOTHING to do with UNIONS. It had to do with the greed and duplicity of principals going behind teachers' backs to change grades. You were just attempting to use ANY mention of "teacher" as a ready pulpit from which to spew your knee-jerk union hatred. I am not supporting unions wholesale, they certainly have their corruption problems, but this specific grade-changing situation has NOTHING to do with "unions protecting bad teachers". No matter what kind of teacher the kids have--and there are very few "bad apples" among teachers, from what I've ever seen (the perception being warped by newspapers who LOVE to prominently place any story catching a teacher doing something unsavory--never plumbers, never accountants, mind you)--I contend it is disgusting that NYC administrators routinely change grades behind teachers' backs, rewarding poor or no work with passing grades and further bringing down a system already on its last ethical or quality gasp. Your suggestion that "the improvement of learning performance of children" should be the "yardstick by which a teacher is measured" is a typical outside-the-profession statement. When you have students coming into your classroom with reading levels of 1 or 2 out of 4, with poor computational skills, with poor writing skills, with little motivation to work hard because they know the teacher "has" to pass them, you will not see great academic success no matter what kind of teacher you are. If you give the students the grade they actually deserve, you open yourself up to the road I described above. And if you give them passing grades they don't deserve, you contribute to the fraud. No wonder education classes' enrollment is way down at colleges, and teachers are retiring at record rates.
Actually, this conclusion is incorrect. Trained as a teacher, and having taught, as well as having been a part of an organization providing consultation to a legislative Task Force on Excellence in Education, my suggestion comes from both research and experience, and it has been the opinion of many who have worked to penetrate and change the vast bureaucracies which control and impact on the sad state of K-12 education in the States.
That aside, decades of control by the combination of Liberal/Progressive political and union power on the bureaucracies and schools of the nation have had their consequences--not many of which have made the improvement of the learning performance of children become better.