Members of teachers unions do not dictate curriculum anywhere I have been. Curriculum decisions come from the accreditation bodies and state legislatures as interpreted by administrators. There are good administrators and lame administrators, the lame ones being those who wish to "dumb down" the curriculum in order to pass more incompetent students through the system.
I recall one Dept. Head I had briefly that told me, "Your problem is that you are trying to teach them Spanish."
I said, "Of course, that is my job: I am being paid to teach them Spanish: what do you think I am supposed to do?"
He thought for a while and told me, "Your job is to get them ready to learn Spanish."
I said, "well, if you think that is my job, get the VP for Academic Affairs to tell me that in writing,and I will do just that."
Which of course, he could not do, and did not do. The VP was very supportive of those of us who tried to raise standards, and was far too smart to put something like that in writing.
There may be some incompetent teachers in teachers' unions. My experience in the high schools where there were unions was that the best teachers belonged to the unions, and the poorest ones (who were always making sure they used up all their 'sick days' by the end of the year) did not bother to pay their union dues, mostly because they did nothing that was not absolutely required.
I suggest that education in the US will never be accomplished by declaring war on teachers or their organizations. Nor will the right wingers spring for the cost of educating better teachers that agree with them.
We have all the resources in this country to have a first class educational system. But the culture is opposed to it, and a lot of people won't support it with the money or encouragement needed.
The last president of my university, a Jamaican-American with a Jamaican/Panamanian wife wanted desperately to improve the academic reputation of the university. His last plan was to import students from China to add more of an international character to the
student body. He made a trip to various cities in the interior of China that were holding education fairs to recruit students with a good friend of mine, a Taiwanese education professor who spoke Mandarin. They distributed a thousand pamphlets and got maybe 70 replies from interested Chinese students. When he returned, he presented a rather elaborate plan to the Board of Trustees, who thought that he had wasted too much money, and they fired him. No Chinese students were enrolled as a result: the entire plan was abandoned. The same Board also hired some 'image consultants' to 'rebrand' the university. They charged a bunch of money, and presented their gung-ho preliminary plans to the assembled faculty once. But none of what they proposed was implemented, because the Board decided that it wouldn't work. That seemed pretty obvious from the start to me and many of the faculty, but we were willing to cooperate and go along with whatever was required.
The thing is that a university gets a good reputation because it has a lot of really good students, who inspire the rest of the student body as much as or more than a good faculty. This attracts more studious students, and that attracts more money in grants and such. The thing is that the money is needed to attract the good students FIRST, and they won't give it to you until you have already attained the reputation sought. It is a vicious circle.
